Reviews

True Stories (1986)

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The RedLetterMedia boys launched a new series on their youtube channel last year called Re:View, in which they discuss films that hold a special significance for them. One of the episodes I had overlooked on its original upload was their discussion of True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 film that he wrote, produced, and directed (unlike Adulterers, this turned out to be a good thing) as well as starred in. It’s a forgotten gem, even among Talking Heads and David Byrne fans, despite being the origin of one of their hits, “Wild Wild Life,” as well as being the first major role for John Goodman and also featuring Spalding Gray and Swoosie Kurtz. I was instantly taken with the idea and searched for the movie online in the hopes of finding a cheap copy of the out of print DVD, only to discover that the Alamo Drafthouse was going to be screening it only a couple of weeks later, as part of its Essential Texas Film series. I bought tickets faster than you can say “this is not my beautiful wife.”

Byrne plays a nameless cowboy who visits the fictional town of Virgil, Texas, an eccentric place full of quirky people, like a woman who is an outrageous liar, another woman who is so rich she never gets out of bed, a conspiracy theorist preacher, and a benevolent tech tycoon who hasn’t spoken to his wife in years. The town is preparing a celebration of specialness (the final syllable is stressed by all those who speak the word) in honor of their sesquicentennial, with such features as a mall fashion show, an unusual parade, a lip-sync competition, and the final, strange performance that one could call a talent show, but probably shouldn’t. If there is a main character other than the drifting cowboy, it’s Lewis (Goodman), a clean room technician at Varicorp, the local tech company that employs most of the people of Virgil. Lewis is a man looking for “matrimony with a capital ‘M’” who loves life, country music, and women, although what he wants more than anything is a wife who will appreciate his “consistent panda bear shape” and odd fashion sense.

The lifeblood of Virgil is its motley assortment of citizens, but the town’s economy is supported by Varicorp, manufacturer of microchips and other gadgets. Earl Culver (Gray) is the CEO and a local civic leader who loves the little town, and supports its growth philosophically as well as financially, and delivers some of the more socially intriguing dialogue in the film. Throughout, various characters provide their different viewpoints on (then) modern life, all of it charmingly endearing and prescient, although some monologues (like Culver’s dinnertime speech about the changing economy as the result of technological development, including the announcement that “there’s no concept of ‘weekends’ anymore!”) have aged better than others (like the Cowboy’s musings on the way that shopping malls have replaced downtowns as the cultural and social center of modern life). Many characters lack proper names, like the Nice Lady, who interrupts the parade of newborn babies to coo and fawn over every one of them but cannot tolerate even the mildest shadow of sadness, rejecting Lewis because of the formless melancholy of the country ballad he’s composing for the Celebration. There’s also the Lying Woman, a notable town figure who claims to have been at the center of the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, that she rejected Burt Reynolds despite his obsessive devotion to her, and that she has psychic powers born from having spent so much of her time as a child staring at the her own surgically removed vestigial tail (her mother later sold the oddity to LBJ, who in turn sold it to the Smithsonian for a pretty penny, so she claims).

Many would read this description and feel like the film is predicated upon mocking small towns and the people who live there, but the movie is actually utterly sympathetic to every character that appears on screen, even those who are in conflict with others. Byrne has admitted that the film’s inspiration came from reading tabloids while on the road and imagining a place where all the weirdos from these pages lived in a kind of harmony, which would also lead one to think that there would be a maliciousness in the voyeuristic peeks that we get into the lives of the citizens of this town. But no; life in Virgil has a melody and a magic, and no character is ever made out to be a fool or is treated with anything other than genuine respect by other characters as well as Byrne’s lens. Even ugly and featureless housing developments are gifted with an air of mystery and treated with a gentle tenderness. As the Cowboy drives through one and the camera pans slowly past discarded newspaper billowing in the wind like a tumbleweed across several balding lawns in front of featurelessly utilitarian brown brick homes, he asks “Who’s to say it’s not beautiful?”, and the every member of the audience must admit that, when viewed this way, none of them can make such a claim.

Uproariously funny, effortlessly poignant, and endlessly quotable, True Stories is the true celebration of specialness, a time capsule of unapologetic warmth and unconditional fondness for an oft-disparaged way of life. If you can track down a copy, sink your talons into it and never let it go. Watch the trailer here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Black Panther (2018)

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Oh man oh man oh man, the magic duo of people’s sexiest man alive Michael B. Jordan (not to be confused with People‘s Sexiest[?] Man Alive[?] Blake Shelton[?]) and Ryan Coogler has done it again. Black Panther is as fantastic as we were all hoping, and I’m super excited that Marvel Studios finally started using the privilege of being this generation’s premiere film franchise (for better or worse) to finally push forward with an explicit intersectional, anti-colonialism, and afro-positive message. I’m here for this, and you should be too.

It’s been a little less than two years since I wrote out my thoughts on Marvel’s race problem, which I drafted up in response to the whitewashing of the character of the Ancient One in the then-upcoming Doctor Strange film. That film was a disappointment on more levels than that (there’s a reason our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. coverage hasn’t resumed, as every time I think about rewatching Strange I get depressed) Since then, superhero broadcast and cinematic media has gotten better about addressing the ongoing issues that are shaking the foundations of our society, and even our democracy. For instance: Supergirl continuing to knock it out of the park as far as political commentary goes, from Cat Grant’s speech in the season two finale (appropriately entitled “Nevertheless She Persisted”) to the show’s episodic intro for this season (“My name is Kara Zor-El. I’m from Krypton. I’m a refugee on this planet.”). The CW also premiered Black Lightning at the beginning of this year, which I’m also finding both to be both moving and entertaining in addition to drawing more attention to issues that middle America tends to ignore. In the first episode alone, our hero Jefferson Pierce faced disproportionate police violence against communities of color, the preponderance of racial profiling in America, the bias of media when reporting on black citizens in comparison to treatment of white citizens. Our media should and must address these vitally important issues that demand attention and discussion in our culture right now, when the Attorney General is using (barely) coded language to signal to white supremacists that they have tacit approval from and are welcome to be part of law enforcement amidst dozens of other horrors.

I’m speaking out of my lane a bit here, as neither a woman or a person of color, and I’ll be the first person to admit to that. I’m not the final word on this, and I have no authority to speak to these matters. What I do have is a responsibility to do so. As Bell Hooks tells us in Homegrown: “Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege” (emphasis mine), and as such I want to take a second to talk about Star Trek: Discovery (I know, I know, but hear me out). The Star Trek franchise flirted with queer themes a number of times before this most recent series with episodes like TNG‘s “The Outcast” and DS9‘s “Rejoined,” but those episodes, when they discussed queer identities and presences in society, did so with a reliance on metaphor to distance the characters from the “taint” of homosexuality in the getting-better-but-still-not-great nineties. In Discovery, when we finally see Dr. Culber and Lieutenant Stamets standing at their sink and brushing their teeth together, then stealing a quick kiss, I cried. It’s hardly important, not plot-relevant (at least at the time), and part of me wants to decry that this is barely good enough, and yet… seeing, for the very first time, a reflection of myself in the fictional universe that had meant so much to me elicited an emotional reaction for which I was not prepared. Culber and Stamets—Hugh and Paul—were not victims. They weren’t dying of AIDS or as the result of violence, neither was the butt of a joke or a sassy best friend, they weren’t having to face systemic oppression or deny their birthrights to be together; they simply were.

People of black African descent watching Black Panther will have some of the same feelings I had watching Discovery and other feelings as well. There are better and clearer thinkers out there from whom you should be getting this information, but just in case Swampflix is the only website you read and are under a cultural embargo in every other way, listen up: there’s no one-to-one correlation between the experiences of one marginalized group and another, and the history of colonialism is baked into every single facet of contemporary life. The current progressive discourse is about intersectionality and rising higher by lifting each other and standing shoulder to shoulder, but white people like myself are still the beneficiaries of a social order built virtually entirely to ensure our supremacy and maintain a status quo that keeps the reigns of power in white (or, given the current political situation, orange) hands. If you’re capable of empathy and the most basic building blocks of open-mindedness, you either already know this or are not surprised, but down here on the ground in flyover country, even in a progressive urban enclave like Austin, we’re still trying to get the White Gays™ understand intersectionality even just a little bit. Their claims of having have an “inner black woman” are misogynoir in the first degree, their vocal disgust at people of size is fascism of the body, the sexual fetishization of black men is racism, and the claim that sexual attraction to only one (or all but one) ethnicity is “just a preference” is, at its core, a statement of “I treat people differently based on the color of their skin.” Institutionalized homophobia and racism are both legacies of colonialism that (just in case the people in the back didn’t hear me the first time) is a factor in every level of Western society; we’re struggling to slough off like so much dead skin, but some people will take any small advantage that they have without a moment’s hesitation or a second thought to those whom they may be stepping over. That’s something that the alt-right is happy to take advantage of.

I’m sure that, among readers with a moral philosophy that differs from the values I hold, this will be interpreted as some bleeding heart liberal cuck virtue signaling. Maybe a review of Black Panther isn’t the place for me to air my grievances with the White Gays™ and the fact that even my beloved Supergirl anchors itself pretty solidly in the garden of white feminism; I’ve gone a bit off track, but I just wanted to point out to you, dear reader, that even if you are not a person of color, Black Panther is still a movie you ought to see, and basic empathy means that you should be able to grasp some small part of the immeasurable importance of this film, even if its message of empowerment isn’t aimed at you directly. Despite the issues within my own community, I as an individual recognize the awesome power that representation has, and moreso the power of representation that forsakes the trappings of the meager pittances of visibility that came before. Not every movie about The Gays has to be Philadelphia, not every trans* movie has to be Boys Don’t Cry, and not every movie about the black experience has to be 12 Years a Slave. Representation can and must transcend dramatization and metaphor-making of real world trauma; the past and the framework it created for contemporary existence cannot be denied, but looking to the future is important too. This movie may not be for you, but you will be better for having seen it, and the huge numbers of white Americans who would never pay to see a movie with an (almost) all black cast were it not a Marvel property will also be better for it. This is a film company that has become an indomitable box office powerhouse using that power for good, and that’s worth celebrating.

Away we go! Black Panther picks up shortly after Civil War, showing T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), prince of the technologically advanced isolationist African nation of Wakanda, preparing to take on the mantle of king after the death of his father T’Chaka (John Kani) in that film. He retrieves his ex-girlfriend Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) from the mission she is on as a “war dog,” a term for Wakandan spies living in other nations, and returns home to be greeted by his mother, Queen Ramonda (actual goddess Angela Bassett), and tech wiz younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright). His coronation is preceded by ceremonial combat, in which he engages M’Baku (Winston Duke), the leader of a different tribe, for control of the throne. Filling out his coterie are: General Okoye (Danai Gurira, who steals the show), leader of the Dora Milaje, elite female warriors who serve as kingsguard; spiritual leader, tender of the garden of heart-shaped herbs that give the Black Panther his power, and overseer of the transition of power Zuri (Forest Whitaker), who also hides a shameful secret; and W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), T’Challa’s confidante and Okoye’s lover. Meanwhile, a literal and figurative world away, American black operative Erik Stephens (Jordan), aka Killmonger, has teamed with Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, reprising his role from Age of Ultron) to raid Wakanda in order to steal vibranium, the precious metal that fell to earth long ago and accelerated the technological advancements of Wakanda far beyond its neighbors. Stephens, however, has a greater purpose than Klaue has dreamed, and their machinations lead T’Challa to reunite with American CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman). Unexpected revelations occur, the long-term reverberations of a shameful act that happened in 1992 echo through the present, and fierce debates about the potential for colonialist interventionism to arise from pure and honest intentions, the de facto violence of isolationism in a world teetering on the precipice, and the wisdom of building bridges versus the foolishness of building walls arise.

That’s a lot of discourse to wrap up in a 134 minute superhero film that has to introduce nearly a dozen heretofore unseen characters, establish vital information about the history of a fictional nation that is unlike any society in the real world, and create a stunning afro-futurism aesthetic that looks cooler than anything else we’ve seen before in this franchise (only the colorful world of Ragnarok really comes close). On top of that, the film also has to give the audience the action thrills that they’ve come to expect: a (badass) car chase, two slugfests on a waterfall outcropping, a (kind of forgettable) opening sequence under the cover of darkness, a casino shootout, and the final climactic battle. But Coogler manages to compress all of those things into that runtime, and churns out an early contender for one of the best movies of the year. Just like Get Out last year, this is a February release that I predict will continue to be part of the conversation for quite some time to come. Granted, Disney is essentially a national economy unto itself, and this is a “product” for them in the strictest sense, but Marvel Studios seems to have learned the lesson that getting out of the way and letting their directors have extensive creative control makes for better art (who could have guessed?). The only bad thing about creating a movie with so many rich layers and elements is that it’s almost impossible to decide where to begin discussion.

First things first: I can see why this movie is making racists angry, especially those who hate being called out on being the recipients of the benefits of being the descendants of colonizers. Ross is explicitly called a colonizer, and much hay is made of the fact that Wakanda has only managed to reach their staggering technological achievements because of the nation’s isolationism, made explicit in the text by showing other African states being devastated by the slave trade in the film’s opening moments. I come from a rural white family and have family members on Facebook, so I know what its like, as I assume you do, to see the same people who want to “Never Forget” incidents like 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, and whatever else you can put a name on that involved Americans being heroic in the face of tragedy (although what defines “heroism” and “tragedy” varies from ideology to ideology, especially when talking about something like the Alamo) but are also vocally resistant to movies like the aforementioned 12 Years a Slave, saying things like “why can’t the past be the past?” I’d wager that no matter what walk of life you come from, you’ve got at least one of these people in your social network because of family or work connections; they’re probably going to hate this movie, because this ideology so often goes hand-in-hand with disliking any art made by people of color, regardless of quality (funny that), although they usually couch it in the rhetoric of “it’s not for me” or “I just don’t understand because it’s not something I know.”

And that is not to say that the film is without flaw. Of all the conspiracy nonsense out there, one that I hate the most is the “ancient astronauts” theory. Ever since Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods? in 1968, the idea that various architectural wonders of the ancient world were inspired by extraterrestrial contact has gained wide acceptance among the irrational, a problem that has only been exacerbated by the History Channel’s passive approval of the idea with the launch of TV shows like Ancient Aliens. But the truth of the matter is that the “paleo contact” and “ancient astronauts” hypotheses are also part of a colonial narrative. Europeans in Africa and the New World saw the ziggurats and pyramids that had been built using rope, stone, wood, and gumption and said to themselves “Well, sure Monte d’Accoddi and the Hulbjerg Jættestue and Newgrange were ancient structures that our ancestors built with primitive tools, but how on earth did these non-white pagans do it? [Snaps] That’s it! There’s no way that they could have expressed such ingenuity… on earth. They must have had help from spacemen!” I’ll admit that I’m a huge nerd and, frankly, very little would make me happier than any sort of evidence of extraterrestrial contact, but this “theory” and all the “evidence” for it starts from the presupposition that non-whites outside of Europe were inherently savage and incapable of the same architectural feats as their European contemporaries. This concept was manufactured out of nothing based on the core idea of denying African and South American ingenuity. Again, this is a long aside, but the reason that I bring this up is that there is a smidgen of this in Black Panther, as Wakanda’s futuristic nature is only possible because of the presence of vibranium. One could argue that Black Panther devalues and undermines African inventiveness in much the same way as von Däniken and his followers by showing a nation that is only exceptional because of an external event; on the other hand, real world history often demonstrates that nations can rise and fall based upon the presence or absence of certain natural resources, and that the film treats the abundance of vibranium beneath Wakanda’s surface as such. As a potential problematic issue in the text, it’s minor, but something I expect to generate an inevitable argument about how “Black Panther isn’t as progressive as you think” in the coming weeks. There’ll probably be some complaints about the monarchic nature of Wakanda as well, despite that the potentiality of abuse of power within that method of governance is addressed pretty explicitly in the text.

Everything else is amazing. It’s beautiful. As excited as I was to see this movie, I’m glad that I waited until it was in its second weekend, and that we’re going to be pushing back the publication of this review. As I was reading Shoshana Kessock’s essay “The Feminism of Black Panther vs. Wonder Woman” this morning while waiting for the bus, she perfectly encapsulated my feelings about this: “[T]here are other voices than mine which should take precedent [sic] in a conversation about a film so strongly impacting people of color right now. There are so many writers of color putting out thoughtful, insightful articles about Black Panther that I felt it was important for me […] to sit back and listen without stepping in and having my say.” I have so much more that I want to say about the movie, but it’s important now for me to stop taking up your time with this writing and send you forth into the world to see the movie, read the brilliant discourse that the film has created (here, here, here, and here are good places to start, and this is a counterpoint that raises interesting issues), and be excellent to each other.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Annihilation (2018)

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More than once in the past week, my roommate has asked me what I was going to be doing this past weekend, and I said I was going to see Annihilation, and each time he asked “What’s that?”, to which I replied “The adaptation of the book that your sister gave me for Christmas in 2016.” Which she did! And I loved it! So much so that I couldn’t stop talking about it, and another friend got me the follow up novel Authority for my birthday a few months later, and I bought my own copy of Acceptance almost immediately after and finished that too. I was so excited when I heard that Alex Garland of Ex Machina fame would be directing the film of the book, and that the person I cast in my head as the biologist, Natalie Portman, would be playing the lead. Of course, there are valid concerns about the whitewashing of her character given that she’s part Asian (no specific nation of origin is given), but it’s also a piece of information that the reader doesn’t get until the second book, which had not been published at the time that Garland read Annihilation and started working on his script. If you’re curious, I imagined Angela Bassett as the psychologist, Michelle Rodriguez as the surveyor (a character who’s aggression and distrust was put on the paramedic character in the film but had a role on the team that was more like Novotny’s character’s) and Battlestar Galactica‘s Grace Park as the anthropologist (a character that is, for all intents and purposes, absent from the film). Those absences, changes, and additions should give you some indication of how far this film strays from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, but does that matter?

What makes a good adaptation? Is it a strict, lockstep adherence to the source material, ignoring the differences between the languages of film and prose? Can an adaptation’s value be measured as a quantifiable variable of pragmatism in the choices of what to include and exclude when translating to the screen? Is it the ability of the film to evoke the same emotional resonance or invoke the same themes as the original text, even if it has to take a different route to bring the viewer to the same place as the reader? Films that try to maintain a one-to-one textual match often don’t work; for all its other faults, David Lynch’s Dune adaptation, for instance, attempted to translate the internal monologues of multiple characters to film, which creates a muddled mess in the movie despite this being a common element of prose fiction. With regards to pragmatism, something like Watchmen (at least the director’s cut, although I know not everyone agrees) makes good choices with what it chooses to include while excising some subplots from the text that would interfere with the pacing of the film (like the extended pirate comic storyline) and updating other plot elements to remove the need for plot lines that can be easily removed without changing the overall tone (such as changing the psychic squid monster in the finale to something more grounded and closely related to the characters). And with regards to adaptations that are more loose but occupy the same rhetorical space, something like Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story would be a strong example, at least for me personally. I read the book no fewer than 30 times in my childhood and a dozen more since then, and I’ve seen the film innumerable times. Author Michael Ende hated the film version; it essentially adapts only the first half of the book, removes one of the challenges that Atreyu must face in order to get to the Southern Oracle, reuses the first “gate” as the Southern Oracle itself, and makes other changes. But they are both ultimately perfect fantasy stories for little bullied bookworms, creating a place for them to expand the horizons of their imaginations, regardless of the differences between the two texts.

Let’s get this out of the way as quickly as possible: if you’re looking for a close adaptation of the novel, you’re not going to find that here. This is A+ science fiction that also happens to be a D+ translation of the source material, if your qualifications for a good adaptation revolve solely around how closely the film version adheres to the novel. Garland has admitted that he thumbed through the novel and took only the most noteworthy elements and concepts—a government-backed all-woman expedition makes its way beyond an incomprehensible barrier into Area X, a place of strange mutations of both flora and fauna stemming back to an unknown catastrophic event—and made a standalone film without the intention of revisitation in future films. In a way, this is noteworthy in that it acts as the antithesis of current studio mandates, which prioritize franchise building over creating complete and whole narratives within a single film, even going so far as to split individual books (like The Deathly Hallows and Mockingjay) into multiple films. It’s for the viewer to decide if this is to the detriment of the film and its source material or not, but those of you hoping for an adaptation of the entire Southern Reach trilogy should manage your expectations now. And hey—that’s okay. The narrative conceit in the novel that all of the characters are nameless and identified only by their occupations, which works so well on the page both as a method for giving the reader the space to imagine each character in the way they see fit and as part of a larger theme about the absence not only of knowledge but perhaps even the possibility of comprehension, simply wouldn’t work on film. That’s not a fault of the film so much as a fact that must be accepted about the difference between different forms of media, and as such I can’t detract from the film because of it.

In the interest of full disclosure (and as a point of solidarity with my fellow book readers), I’ll attempt to describe the biggest changes. Spoilers for the film and the book series through the end of this paragraph. In addition to surface changes, like making the biologist (herein named Lena) ex-military and her husband (who is given the name Kaine) an active duty sergeant while removing this characteristic from the surveyor or increasing the number of explorers (there is a fifth member of the expedition in the novel, but she chickens out before they breach the barrier’s perimeter and never makes it into Area X), there are some pretty major changes. The nature of Area X is made much more explicit; throughout the trilogy, there is much discussion about whether or not Area X is mystical, extradimensional, or extraterrestrial in origin, and Acceptance strongly implies that the catalyst was at least somewhat supernatural in nature, given the role played by the two members of the Seance and Science Brigade and their experiments in the lighthouse. Again, the need for a more explicit explanation for the events is a consequence of the nature of film language, and isn’t a de facto negative. When a filmmaker sets out to make a single narrative out of the first book in a series with no intention to adapt the sequels, this is the more sensible tack, even if it runs the risk of alienating readers. But it is quite a shock to see the lighthouse consumed in flame at the end of the film if you’ve read Authority or Acceptance, in which the lighthouse and the revelations therein are pretty vital to understanding the overall mystery (insofar as it can be understood). By its very nature, this removes the significance of the fact that the psychologist grew up around the lighthouse and knew the keeper (who was mutated/duplicated into the Crawler, an important figure in the Annihilation novel) as a child, as well as her personal connection to Area X. The Crawler and its writing, which could rightly be called the most important part of the novel, is completely excised, removing the religiosity of the novel through the erasure of his sermon-like screeds. The fact that the biologist’s husband (‘s duplicate) lives through the end of the narrative, and that Area X is “defeated” instead of continuing to expand (so much so that the point of view characters in Acceptance end the novel attempting to find their way back out without knowing if there even is an “out” anymore, or if Area X has consumed the whole world) are also major changes. These omissions will likely be the most contentious issues with the film for readers of the books, but this still works for me as a “broad strokes” approach. Also gone are the hypnotic suggestion elements from the novel (in which all the expedition members submitted to psychological preparation for their journey, including post-hypnotic triggers to ensure that they make it through the barrier without being driven to madness, but which also makes the presence of the psychologist more sinister, as she exercises other psychic controls over the expedition, to which the biologist’s mutations make her immune). For me, the strangest change was making the biologist more likable and personable, but this is again a concession for the medium, as the original character and her motivations would be harder to communicate in a visual form.

But enough digital ink spent on those who are already familiar with the source material. Annihilation tells the story of Lena (Portman), an ex-military biologist now working for Johns Hopkins, whose active military husband Kaine (Oscar Isaac) disappeared one year prior on a classified mission. When he suddenly reappears one afternoon with no explanation of his whereabouts or even how he made his way home, their reunion is cut short when his organs fail. En route to the hospital, both Lena and her husband are taken by black ops military personnel; she wakes up in the headquarters of the Southern Reach, a clandestine government organization set up to investigate the nature of Area X, a location bounded by a shimmering barrier that is expanding and consuming more of the surrounding climes bit by bit, and within which bizarre mutations occur at an accelerated pace and from which no survivor other than Kaine has ever returned (at least according to the Reach itself; the post-expedition lives of survivors and “survivors” is an integral part of the later novels). The next expedition is set to breach the boundary soon, led by psychologist Gloria Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and staffed by physicist Josie Radik (Tessa Thompson), paramedic Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), and geologist Cass Shepherd (Tuva Novotny). Lena joins the expedition in order to find out the truth about what happened to her husband. Inside Area X, all five women are confronted by threats that are existential to them as individuals and members of a species that will not survive if Area X continues to expand.

The book’s unnamed protagonist, identified only as “the biologist,” has different motivations in the novel. Herein we learn that she cheated on her husband and she sets out to make things right by investigating the nature of Area X, but in the novel she is a withdrawn scientist whose oddities make it impossible for her to maintain employment that requires frequent interaction with other people; her fascination with Area X is piqued by her husband’s bizarre return and the apparent changes to his personality (which unfold over several months before he dies, as do all the other members of his expedition, all of which occur before the events of the novel), but which grow because of her fixation on ecosystems in miniature. This change makes her more relatable (with allowance for your mileage to vary) but also less interesting; her motivations are, for lack of a better term, pretty basic.

Since seeing the movie, I’ve had discussions with a few friends who also read the books and saw the movie. One agrees with me, that the film is less interesting than the books on a couple of levels, but allowances made for the language of film mean that it would have to be different, and the differences work for him as they do for me; another friend is annoyed that what he considers to be more “weird fiction” has been reduced to a pretty standard sci-fi story. I think that this is where the difference lies for me: although I wouldn’t call this movie “brave” like many reviewers have, especially given the above-mentioned reduction-to-baseness of both themes and character motivations, I would also never call it “standard” anything, despite the simplifications and changes to the plot. I’m not put out that we’re given an explanation of what Area X is or how life is changed within it, despite the fact that I’m usually annoyed or upset when existential Lovecraftian horror is reduced to something so banal that it is essentially devoid of everything that made it distinct (ahem). I guess why Annihilation still works for me while other works were diminished by being brought closer to earth is that this allows for greater characterization and a different kind of emotional investment.

I mentioned before that the lack of identifying names or characteristics in the source material thematically mirrored Area X itself: Area X and its interior are described in detail, but we’re never told anything about what the women in the expedition look like. Above and beyond the lack of names being enforced by the agency coordinating the breaches into the “shimmer,” this also puts us more firmly in the mind of the biologist, as she is completely disinterested in her compatriots and is invested only in the science of the region. As a reader, the currency of your imagination is to be spent on giving life to Area X and its beautifully deadly terrain and inhabitants, and using any iota of that brainspace on the members of Expedition 12 is wasted; in this way, the reader becomes the biologist, with a professional detachment that grows more clinical and distant as the plot unfolds (or unravels). Again, that’s something that simply wouldn’t work on screen, and by giving the biologist and her fellow explorers more depth (this one’s a recovering alcoholic, that one lost her daughter to leukemia, this one’s a cutter, that one’s dying of cancer), Garland changes the theme from that of emotional distance and disconnection, and perhaps the innateness to humanity of that feeling, into a focus on the (perhaps innate) tendency toward self destruction. That compulsion may, and sometimes does, overtake us while in the guise of something more clinically defined, but rebirth requires the complete destruction, the annihilation, of the self that existed before, down to the cellular level. It’s a change, but one that works to create a great piece of media in spite of its distance from VanderMeer’s novel(s).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Faces Places (2017)

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Faces Places is simultaneously the best and the worst introduction to Agnès Varda’s sensibilities as a filmmaker that I can imagine. At nearly 90 years old, Varda is decades past her youthful heyday as an undervalued innovator in the shadows of the male-dominated French New Wave movement. Faces Places is also her collaboration with a younger artist, diluting Varda’s voice with outsider input. At the same time, though, the film functions as a thorough introduction to Varda’s history as an auteur. It’s a project that combines her multimedia interests in instillation art, photography, and both documentary & narrative filmmaking. It touches on her past personal relationships with artists like Jacques Demy & Jean-Luc Godard and continues her mentorship of those familiar names with her young co-director, a photographer named JR. I was unfamiliar with Varda’s creative voice at the start of Faces Places, but left feeling as if I had known her my entire life. The film is built on the back of her continued legacy, but invites you to dig deeper into her catalog instead of locking out the uninitiated. I’m simultaneously embarrassed that Varda’s 25th feature film was the first I had ever seen and delighted to meet her in such an all-encompassing, immediately lovable crash course.

Faces Places is nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards, but that category selection is something of cheat. The main subject documented in the film is the blossoming friendship & artistic collaboration between Varda & JR, but it’s a narrative expressed mostly through staged comedic routines. They discuss meeting as admirers of each other’s art (especially as connoisseurs of photography & mural work), poke fun at the cartoonish differences between their bodies (JR is youthful & lanky, while Varda is a tiny, exhausted thing), trade bad puns, pontificate musings on the nature of cats, etc. These exchanges are consistently adorable, but artificially (and intentionally) performative. Where the film’s true documentary streak emerges is in the pop art instillation project the pair collaborate on. Varda & JR travel through small villages in the French countryside (in a magical truck that doubles as a large-format Polariod camera), looking to meet & document the “real people” who live there. It’s a project that’s entirely dependent on collaboration & spontaneity. The genuine, unplanned conversations missing in Varda’s interactions with JR are abundant among the various subjects they meet on the road.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Faces Places is the way it uses its adorable surface of kittens, friendship, and shameless puns to hide its deep well of radical politics. Varda & JR are very particular about the small-village subjects they select to interview, painting a portrait of a Europe composed almost entirely of farmers, factory workers, coal miners, waitresses, shipping dock unions, and other working-class archetypes. They pay homage to these subjects by blowing their portraits up to towering proportions, then pasting them to the exteriors of spaces they’ve historically occupied. More importantly, they involve these impromptu collaborators directly in the creative process, so they can feel just as much pride as artists as they feel as subjects. The project often feels like a playful, wholesome version of graffiti, which is always a political act (even if rarely this well-considered). Watching Varda & JR politely negotiate their lack of permits with cops or reconcile with the impermanence of the paper & paste art instillations they erect in these communities doesn’t exactly feel like burn-the-system-to-the-ground radicalism in the moment. However, the types of voices they choose to amplify with the project and the grand public displays they make out of undervalued people’s basic existence has a subversive nature to it all the same.

It would be easy to pigeonhole Faces Places as a more wholesome Exit Through the Gift Shop or an aggressively quirky travel diary, but Varda & JR deliver something much more unique than those descriptors imply. Touches of Buñuel surrealism, “wonderfully disgusting” gross-outs, art history lectures, working-class politics, and vaudevillian irreverence subvert & distort what you might typically expect from a well-behaved, crowd-pleasing documentary from a director near the end of her career. Faces Places is a loving self-portrait of a beautiful friendship, as well as a crash course history in the multimedia achievements Varda has tirelessly striven towards over the decades. I’m excited to dive into the more youthful, combative films of her distant past now that I’ve tested the waters, but also grateful to have been introduced to her through such a complexly endearing work. It’s an achievement that feels like it’s been a long time coming, even though Varda’s voice & I have just met.

-Brandon Ledet

The Breadwinner (2017)

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The (goofily named) Irish animation studio Carton Saloon has already established a solid reputation for delivering smartly-considered children’s films in recent years. Even as someone who bristles at the flat, personality-free sameness of most CG animation, I found their 2010 feature The Secret of Kells to be a low-key charmer. Cartoon Saloon’s house style seems to be an echo of hand-drawn animation tradition filtered through modern CG aesthetic, making something that usually turns me off at first sight surprisingly palatable. Nora Twomey, one of the co-directors of Kells, continues this mixture of styles in her latest work, an Afghanistan-set war drama titled The Breadwinner. Much like how The Secret of Kells details the ritualistic religious practices & handing down of tradition of an Irish community, The Breadwinner does the same for a very insular Afghani community (although one that suffers horrifically under religious extremism). Also like Kells, The Breadwinner can be somewhat frustrating in the way it restricts its most intricate, expressive animation flourishes to the margins.

A small Afghanistani family struggles to stay afloat under the tightening grip to the Taliban. The only man in the family is permanently disabled from a past war and the women are unable to venture outside the house because of extremist social constrictions. When the injured father is unfairly jailed, there is no one left to bring food into the home, so the youngest, least-consciously feminine daughter must disguise herself as a boy to provide for her family. It’s a narrative we’ve seen before in wartime & religious persecution contexts in works like Mulan & Yentl, but The Breadwinner pushes its commentary on gendered oppression to a rare prolonged extreme. Women are constantly harassed & physically beaten for not covering themselves ”properly” or for drawing “too much” attention to themselves. “Stay inside where you belong!” is a violent refrain in the film. The Breadwinner initially contrasts that oppression with the ease of performing previously impossible tasks (like buying groceries) when presenting masculine in a way that feels familiar, but the brutal repercussions of being discovered while falsely navigating public spaces feel more rawly truthful here than in anything I’ve seen before. It’s also remarkable in the way its narrative is broken up by a piecemealed fantasy story about a fabled Elephant King that eventually reveals an unspoken past familial trauma as the two worlds converge at a war-torn climax. Unfortunately, these storytelling tangents are where most of the film’s more detailed, expressive animation style is ghettoized. The backlit, layered cutouts of these segments resemble the Lotte Reiniger style established in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (animation doesn’t get much more traditional than that) in an impressive way, but are too rarely applied to overpower the film’s less visually interesting A-plot. Overall, The Breadwinner is an emotionally engaging story told with its most intricate visual artistry frustratingly restrained & diminished.

Besides being frustrated by its restraint in fully displaying its most expressive animation impulses, my inability to fully fall in love with The Breadwinner is perhaps a matter of genre. An Oscar-hopeful wartime drama produced by Angelina Jolie is rarely going to be the kind of thing that wins my heart, animated or not. Even the more punk-minded, traditionally-animated Persepolis had a wide cultural appeal that mostly escaped me. There’s also something a little suspect about a group of white women telling this very much Afghanistani story (adapted from an eponymous novel from a white author). It’s not like there isn’t enough violence & verbal harassment in Western culture (although typically less extreme) meant to kept public spaces comfortable only for men that could have been addressed on the screen. The story is respectfully told, though, with implications that reach beyond feminist & religious concerns to address the value of mythmaking & intergenerational storytelling. My stray concerns are petty gripes (though none as petty as my annoyance with the central family’s crying baby) when compared to my frustration with the animation style, though. Twomey & the other folks at Cartoon Saloon animate films like people used to illustrate children’s books, with the most intricate, expressive details of the work restrained to the borders of the frame. I greatly appreciate the feminist, anti-religious extremist, myth-minded story told in The Breadwinner even though Oscar-nominated war dramas are rarely my first choice in genre. The movie would have been vastly improved if its most striking animation style wasn’t restrained to the piecemealed story-within-a-story fantasy sequences in favor of the more flat, typical CG look that guides most of the runtime. It’s more or less on par with Loving Vincent for the strongest contenders in this year’s anemic Best Animated Feature race, though. Even with my nagging frustrations, that nomination was well-deserved and I’m glad that it boosted its profile enough for the film to see a recent pre-Oscars theatrical run in New Orleans (even though it simultaneously premiered on Netflix). By contrast, it took six years of strong word-of-mouth for me to catch up with The Secret of Kells.

-Brandon Ledet

El Bar (2017)

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Netflix categorizes 2017’s El Bar (The Bar, although The Cafe would be a more accurate title) as an “International Comedy.” From Spain, the first word in that descriptor is accurate, but boy is the second part debatable. Not that this means the movie is bad, nor is it without its comedic moments, but I’m hesitant to say that a film that uses the set-up of a public shooting, and directly references the Paris shooting in dialogue when characters are trying to figure out what’s happening, could ever really be considered a “comedy.”

10 people from various walks of life find themselves in a Madrid cafe on a normal day. Amparo (the late Terele Pávez) owns the cafe, where she has employed Sátur (Secun de la Rosa) for over 10 years. Elena (Blanca Suárez, from La piel que habito) ducks in to see if she can charge her phone before meeting for a first date with a man she met on an app. Trini (Carmen Machi) is a neighborhood woman who comes in daily to try her luck at the cafe’s slot machine. Andrés (Joaquín Climent) was a police officer who let his drinking problem get the better of him, while Sergio (Alejandro Awada) is a salesman of fancy women’s underwear; both are regular customers of Amparo’s. Nacho (Mario Casas) is a designer who works on ad campaigns and, like Elena, has never been to the cafe before. And Israel (Jaime Ordóñez) is a local vagrant that Amparo provides with booze and, occasionally, a place to warm himself.

This vignette is rudely interrupted when a large man, seemingly drugged out but possibly very ill, enters the establishment and goes straight to the bathroom. When a local maintenance man leaves through the front door, he is shot dead; terrified citizens run screaming in every direction, evacuating the square. When another patron steps out to check on the dead man, he too is shot, and the remaining eight patrons (and one ill man) realize that they are trapped inside.

It’s a solid premise, a kind of modern day Spanish mashup of the Twilight Zone episodes “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (which features several people from different social circles trapped in a remote diner) and “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” (which demonstrates just how quickly the trappings of civility and community can degenerate into rampant, violent paranoia with the introduction of the smallest sliver of doubt). This is a thriller, there’s no doubt about it, and a pretty decent one at that. Perhaps the folks over at Netflix who slot films into genre groupings were confused by the fact that there are a few moments of slapstick (like when the captives attempt to force a greased-up Israel through a very small drain hole in the floor as part of an escape plan) and some other broad physical comedy (Nacho grabs Elena’s ass when helping her down from a chair—oh-ho-ho!). On the sliding scale of films that fall into the category of “people trapped in an everyday location by unknowable forces,” this one falls closer to The Mist‘s end than Shaun of the Dead‘s.

First, there are the questions about who is at fault, and the accusations that those who are trapped inside are somehow in collusion with the shooter. Why does this person have a gun? What’s the unusual piece of hardware in that person’s bag? Why is he, who was so gung-ho about searching her bag, now unwilling to let his own briefcase be inspected? Why did you stop into this cafe if you’ve never been here before and you’re not from this part of town? Next come the bigger concerns: is it a terrorist? You have a big bushy beard–are you a terrorist? (This one in particular has some particularly non-comedic underpinnings, given that one character says that even some Spaniards are them now–that is, Muslims.) This question is aimed at Mario Casas’s character, which amuses me; he’s dressed in a tightly tailored hipster outfit that does nothing to disguise his supermodel body, even though he does have one of those really gross beards that your buddy thinks makes him look super manly but just makes you wonder how much decomposing food is actually trapped in that rat’s nest. Even once every living character has been reduced to wearing their undergarments, they still keep him in his clothes because you can’t have a character who looks like this wandering around and still keep his allegiance in question for dramatic purposes, since the audience is going to side with him regardless. Thirdly, we move on to the particulars of the situation as a result of the realization that the man in the bathroom is dead, and was perhaps infected with some kind of virus. Did you touch him? Did you? Who didn’t touch him. Well, she touched the body, and you touched her, so that means you’re infected too! Is there an antidote? Is the government involved? You, infected, you go over there, and we’ll stay over here. And, finally: there’s one more survivor than there is a cure. What do we do now?

It’s a pretty standard plot structure. You’ve probably seen this movie before in a different form, either in one of the aforementioned movies or an episode of an anthology television show. What sets it apart from other Western media is the character’s immediate acceptance of the concept that the government is involved in some kind of cover-up (whether that ends up being true or not; I’m not here to spoil this for you); no one ever even argues that the government “wouldn’t do that to its citizens” the way that there always is in U.S.-produced films, where there is always nominal resistance to the idea of governmental corruption. There’s also insight into different modern Spanish social classes that provides a different kind of hook. The only real failure of the film is that, plot-wise, it doesn’t offer much in the way of something novel. The reason that this group has been trapped is a complete MacGuffin; they could be dealing with a zombie apocalypse, or a government coup, or a quarantine protocol, and the end result would be the same. Again, this isn’t a detriment per se, but it’s also not a ringing endorsement. All in all, this was one of three movies that I watched while lying around because it was just too damn cold to go outside, and it was far and away the best of the three. If it’s cold where you are, and you want to watch a movie that’s of a genre that’s usually dark and gray but filtered through a colorful, sunny lens, this movie will make you a little bit warmer.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wonderstruck (2017)

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I seem to be at odds with most audiences on how we as a culture enjoy our Todd Haynes. Most people seem to prefer Haynes when he’s well-behaved, heaping ecstatic praise on his most straight-forward works like Far from Heaven & Carol. I’m much more into Haynes when he gets messy & experimental, like in the multimedia freakouts Poison & Velvet Goldmine. Considering that dissonance, I should have known better than to let the muted critical response to Haynes’s latest release deter me from seeing it big & loud when I had the chance, instead of sheepishly catching up with it months later upon its quiet streaming-platform release. Adapted from a children’s book by Brian Selznick (who also penned the source material for Scorsese’s Hugo, speaking of undervalued experiments from established auteurs), Wonderstruck is a deceptively well-mannered film that appeals to a younger audience in its tone, but formally sprawls into countless, ambitious directions. This film is just as fractured & mischievous as any of Haynes’s most out-there works, yet is thematically eager-to-please enough that its total lack of Academy Awards nominations feels like a deliberate injustice more than a harmless oversight (at the very least, it’s tied with mother! for being most over-looked in the Best Sound Editing category). I’d even argue it’s Haynes’s most impressive, satisfying work since Velvet Goldmine, which would make it his second-best film to date. If there’s one title I’m embarrassed to have not seen before filing my Best of 2017 list, it’s Wonderstruck, which only makes it all the more baffling why it was met with a series of yawns & shrugs instead of the rapturous adoration that was showered on the much more subdued Carol.

Two children, separated by 50 years and hundreds of miles, appear to be mysteriously linked in a shared destiny. They are both deaf, but do not speak sign language. Their parents are absent, but for wildly different reasons. They run away from home and are both drawn to the NYC Museum of Natural History for refuge. Their lives are temporally & geographically disparate, but supernaturally in sync, a mystery that untangles itself in intricate, multi-faceted ways as their stories converge in an unexpected (for them) shared space & time. In the stretch leading up to that convergence, the film busies itself contrasting the two adult worlds these out-on-their-own children perilously navigate. 1920s New York is framed with a traditionalist, black & white silent film palette, poisoning touchstones of Old Hollywood glamour with a distinct sense of NYC meanness. 1970s New York is a warm, sprawling mix of vibrant sounds & colors, even directly challenging the white hegemony of the earlier timeline by flooding the screen with PoC. Perhaps the reason I’m personally drawn to Wonderstruck is because the types of spaces that remain constant in both timelines & unite the two stories are the exact building blocks I’d use to construct an ideal universe: theaters, museums, libraries, bookstores, miniatures, etc. By the time the two deaf children’s parallel narratives converge in a whimsical, minutes-long stop motion sequence staged inside a meticulous miniature model of New York City, I was just completely broken down into pieces by the gorgeous, used book store universe Haynes (and Selznick) had constructed. It was only a kindness on his part to build me back up with the awe-inspiring tenderness of the film’s impossibly satisfying climax, a sweeping, meticulously calculated convergence of worlds that tied so many ethereal narrative threads together so concisely that it left me . . . well, you know the title.

Wonderstruck is far from the first film to attempt to revise & modernize “silent” filmmaking on an epic scale. Where it departs from past works like The Artist & Singin’ in the Rain, however, is in Haynes’s deliberately messy style as a collage artist. The sound design in this film is incredible, weaving effortlessly from immersion in the deaf children’s aural POV’s to the glam rock tapestries of Velvet Goldmine to the piano-accompanied silent era when the deaf & people with functional hearing had much more in common in their shared experiences at the movies. Haynes gleefully indulges in the most obviously attractive aspects of constructing a silent-era throwback, especially in scenes where he films & photographs his long-favorite collaborator Julianne Moore as a classic Old Hollywood starlet. The “silence” in the film’s choices of medium is much more than a question of aesthetic, however, as it’s distinctly, inextricably a part of its narrative DNA. For obvious reasons, Wonderstruck details at length the array of communication breakdowns that can cause havoc in a variety of interpersonal relationships once sound is removed from the communicators’ toolbox. The modes of communication the children and their friends & family must employ to get around their sound/language barrier are almost as varied as the visual media Haynes employs to communicate with his own audience: stop-motion, 3D models, silence, monologue, intensely colored lighting, black & white filmmaking, rapid fire montage, calm children’s film hangouts, etc. He even cast a deaf actress for the film’s lead to aid in the accuracy & immersion in the fractured narrative (Millicent Simmonds, who is also scheduled to appear in the upcoming horror film A Quiet Place). The movie’s silent era throwback vibe is far from empty nostalgia feel-goodery, even if it’s just as openly celebratory of the medium as simpler, more joyful works.

My favorite review of Wonderstruck I’ve seen so far was a blurb from John Waters’s Best of 2017 list, where he recommends parents show it to their kids as a kind of intelligence test, explaining “If your small-fry like the film, they’re smart. If they don’t, they’re stupid.” It’s a glib review that flippantly disregards questions of preference & taste, but it’s one I can’t help but agree with. In fact, I’d expand that uncalled-for insult to the adults who are bored or unmoved by the film as well. Complains that Wonderstruck is emotionless or “gets lost” in the Museum of Natural History baffle me. I can’t imagine a scenario where this many people don’t fall under the spell of Hayne’s kaleidoscopic mix of New York City models made entirely out of 1920s glamour magazines, Guy Maddin-style nightmare imagery of layered wolves, glam rock daydreams about stargazing, and so on. It’s unfair to fault anyone for not emotionally connecting with Wonderstruck’s children’s film tone or its narrative about deaf, fearless children who refuse to be treated like inconveniences by their reluctant adult guardians. That kind of subjective response is obviously personal, but people understanding the film as anything less than a technical marvel in fractured, multi-media storytelling makes me question what planet I’m living on.

To be fair, though no response to Wonderstruck could possibly be as idiotic as the one it’s getting from its own distributors. Amazon Studios is making no plans to release Wonderstruck on physical media, which is tragically ironic, considering the film’s obsession with the archival & preservation of physical objects. Todd Haynes’s latest work of ambitiously sprawling genius may be obsessed with libraries & museums, but Amazon’s going out of its way to make sure it never arrives in any such collections. Given the muted critical response to the film over the last few months, I’m afraid it might be lost in time to digital rot, which makes me want to cry over its delicate, misunderstood beauty all over again.

-Brandon Ledet

Toni Erdmann (2016)

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The highly lauded German comedy Toni Erdmann has many hurdles to clear in winning over latecomers who didn’t catch it in its early festival & foreign market runs. First, selling anyone on a three hour-long foreign language comedy is a difficult task, which is largely the reason it personally took me over a year to see the film once it was available to stream at home. More importantly, though, the initial hype for Toni Erdmann’s greatness was feverishly enthusiastic. Before it was ever available for American audiences, the film already earned a spot on the BBC’s poll for the hundred greatest comedies of all time, an indication of just how in love the larger critical community is with the film. Still, despite the daunting nature of its massive runtime and the unfair expectation level set by its early critical hype, Toni Erdmann succeeds as a hilarious examination of loneliness & emotional fragility. Building its entire dramatic conflict around a single father-daughter relationship, its emotional beats are intimate in their specificity, but near-universal in their scope, especially relatable to anyone who has ever been driven mad by a barrage of dad jokes. I can’t quite match the depth of love many critics have already flooded the film’s reputation with, but it’s still very much an enjoyable, rewarding watch for anyone with enough free time to give it a chance.

The titular Toni Erdmann is a fictional persona created by a German father to prank his emotionally distant adult daughter. An aging music teacher mourning the recent loss of a pet, the father shows up unannounced for a vacation at the daughter’s work-abroad apartment in Bucharest, Romania. Stressed about an upcoming business proposal she’s preparing for her company’s contractor, she could not be less happy about the intrusion. In turn, he’s disappointed in her success as a business woman seemingly zapping the joy & adventure out of her life. Armed with hideous false dentures & a cheap wig, he creates the persona of Toni Erdmann to prank her out of her uptight doldrums, bringing his weaponized arsenal of lame dad jokes into her place of business, jeopardizing her reputation. They begin the film as opposing forces, the daughter asking her father, “Do you have ambitions in life that aren’t slipping fart cushions under people?” and the father asking her, “Are you really a human?” His pranks and the mounting pressure of her career trigger a mild nervous breakdown, releasing all the tension her emotional fragility builds throughout in a couple cathartic scenes that walk a thin border between hilarious & cruel. By the end of the film, both father & daughter are on the same page, but it’s not necessarily a happy place to be or an easy space to occupy.

As with a lot of classic comedies, the joy of Toni Erdmann is in watching traditional societal barriers break down to make room for chaos. The prankster father’s jokes aren’t especially amusing in and of themselves, but in the context of an uptight business world where any out-of-place gesture can mean loss of money or status they land with full comedic impact. The business world he’s subverting is worthy of the offense too; decisions made in fancy office buildings just outside Romanian slums are determining the future of untold families who have no power or input. The movie doesn’t dwell too much on the practical, devastating effects of unethical, exploitative business world that contrasts its titular buffoon, but that context is always lurking at the edge of the frame, informing the tension his actions disrupt. The most cathartic societal breakdowns are in more intimate social environments: a pair of climactic house parties that devolve into emotionally intense karaoke & sexual chaos. The politeness that builds the tension in those moments is superhuman, which makes its inevitable release more satisfying. The difference between Toni Erdmann & most comedies, though, is its dramatic honesty in detailing the emotional aftermath of those societal breakdowns, which helps explain why it’s so critically lauded.

There’s supposedly a planned remake of Toni Erdmann in the works starring Kristen Wiig & Jack Nicholson; this sounds like a phenomenally bad idea. Not only is the film such a critical darling that any slight changes to its formula will inevitably inspire umbrage, but its overall vibe is so inextricably European that an American context will dilute what makes it special. I’m not only talking about its international corporate culture either. The film’s casual approach to sexual transgression is likely to either be played for Farrelly Brothers-style gross-out humor or to be excised entirely, given the difference in American attitudes toward the subject. Toni Erdmann isn’t exactly Wetlands in terms of shock value sexuality, but it does treat casual nudity & out-of-context sperm-eating with a delicate comedic touch I doubt could be replicated in an American remake. I don’t exactly believe the film to be the infallible Holy Ground its critical reputation suggests; it’s too drawn out & ultimately too well-behaved to earn that distinction. However, I do think that trying to restage its very distinctive charms in another cultural context is a huge mistake, no matter how universal its father-daughter relationship themes might seem from the outside looking in. It really is a special, particular work, even if not the masterpiece suggested by its reputation.

-Brandon Ledet

Adulterers (2016)

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For a time before I moved to Austin three years ago, I flirted with the idea of moving to L.A. and working as a script reader, as a dear friend had for a few years. She gave me a few different scripts to work on doing standard format reader reviews for, and while some of them were quite good (Melisa Wallack’s Manuscript, which ended up on The Black List, was my favorite of these), there were also quite a few that weren’t very good at all. The one that sticks in my mind the most was one entitled Your Bridesmaid is a Bitch, which has an IMDb page that lists it as “in development,” but doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2009 or 2010. I read enough short stories and personal essays in creative writing classes and discussion groups in both my undergrad and grad school that I developed a kind of sixth sense for when something was what could charitably called “revenge writing.” It’s basically when someone (invariably a man, almost always straight) writes out his one-sided feelings about the dissolution of a relationship, recently or distantly, painting himself as the put-upon everyman whose life is disrupted by the she-demon who broke his heart. That Guy in Your MFA didn’t emerge from a vacuum, is what I’m saying, and there’s a universality to the personality that those tweets are mocking which speaks volumes about society, literature culture, the writing world, and college campuses. Even without the laughable “Based on a True Story” caption that opens the film, or the credit that shows that the film was written, directed, and produced by one person (me, out loud, when I saw that on screen: “Oh boy”), I can smell that same malodorous desperation and entitlement all over Adulterers, and boy is it not in service of the film as a whole.

Spoilers to follow for a film you should just skip.

Samuel (Sean Faris) is an assistant manager at a hardware store in New Orleans, preparing to celebrate his one year anniversary with his wife Ashley (Danielle Savre), at the pinnacle of a record-breaking heat wave. He tells her that he won’t be able to come home as early as expected, as he’s picking up a double shift to help pay for the house and his new truck, but in fact intends to go home early and surprise her. After fending off the flirtations of his co-worker Lola (Stephanie Charles), he picks up a box “of dem dark chocklits” along with a bouquet of flowers and makes his way home to the exterior of what appears to be a shotgun house but has the interior of a two-story. While waiting for his wife to arrive from her waitressing shift, he realizes that her purse is sitting on the table, and that there are the telltale grunts of some mischief going on upstairs; he finds his wife in flagrante delicto with another man (Mehcad Brooks). Distraught, he goes downstairs to grab a couple of handguns, then goes back up and shoots them both guns akimbo. Credits!

Or not; in fact, it appears he just imagined this. He again climbs the stairs, and this time confronts Ashley and her lover at gunpoint, forcing them to answer questions about how long they’ve been seeing each other, how they met, and the frequency and content of their sexual encounters (yes: they have done it in the butt). This continues for some time, as all parties are emotionally and physically degraded. Brooks’s character’s name is given as Damien, and he admits that he, too, is married, and that his wife Jasmine (Steffinnie Phrommany) is pregnant with their second child. This is not the first time he’s cheated on her, nor is Ashley, whom he only knows as “Peaches,” the only woman with whom he is committing adultery.

We also learn that Ashley was already married when she met Samuel, but he rescued her from her abusive husband and even adopted her young daughter (whom we never see). Ashley gives a monologue about how she can’t help herself because she’s “broken,” and tells about how this brokenness emerged from being sexually assaulted several times by her father’s employer. Meanwhile, Lola continues reaching out to try and get Samuel to return to work before he loses his job, and when Jasmine calls, Samuel tells her about her husband’s infidelity, she decides to take her own revenge by coming to the house and having sex with Samuel in front of Damien, then telling Sam to dispose of the other man as he sees fit. This descends further into much absurd nonsense, with a lot of “Do you read the Bible?” and “I am God’s judgment” and “I won’t pretend to be a Christian, but my mama took me to church every Sunday” dialogue that I’m sure means you can imagine every moment of this excruciating standoff. Ultimately, it’s left up to God (in the form of Russian Roulette) to decide Damien and Ashley’s fate, and the afternoon’s events come to a conclusion with Ashley smoking a long-deserved cigarette while watching Sam bury her lover.

Except psych! Because of course it is. Samuel really did kill both Ashley and her lover at the beginning of the film, and the entire rest of the film has been his imagining of what would have happened had he not done so. Interestingly, this twist appears to have been so confusing (it really isn’t, though) that even the person who edited the film’s Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have understood what happened, as it states (as of 02/16/18) that “Sam later finds himself back in reality, just after burying Ashley beneath the rose bed in the back yard. He realizes that he killed his wife and made up a story of her cheating in his mind.” That’s pretty clearly not what happened, as he clearly shoots them both, but you can hardly blame anyone for giving up and just making up their own ending. Unsurprisingly, this kind of “the whole thing was imagined!” plot twist was also common in a lot of the bad scripts I read, not to mention the work of fellow students. In the latter that’s almost forgivable, but in the former it’s a telltale sign that you’re an amateur. That doesn’t matter, I suppose, when you’re the writer, director, and producer, but if you’re thinking of submitting something like this to a legitimate agency or production house, take a tip from your old friend Boomer and just don’t.

There’s so much else going on here that demands to be discussed. I was actually able to track down an interview with director (writer, and producer) H.M. Coakley with the Urban Movie Channel, and it is one of the fluffiest fluff pieces I’ve ever read, and that’s coming from someone who used to do just these kinds of interviews with small name, big ego local personalities when writing for Dig in Baton Rouge. In it, when asked about the origin of the story, Coakley states “The actual idea for Adulterers was based on something that happened to a family member. I remember saying to myself, ‘Wow— what would I have done, if that was me?’” That’s not really what “based on a true story” means, I’m afraid. Just because a friend or family member caught their significant other in the act with someone else, and you imagined what you would do, and what you imagined is a character imagining an interaction with their cheating wife and her lover, that doesn’t make it “based” on anything. That barely makes it “inspired” by something that happened; by that logic, Home Alone is “based on a true story” about that time you imagined what it would be like to be a kid left alone in a mansion at Christmas, and Starship Troopers is “based on a true story” of fascist propaganda.

The worst thing about the interview, however, is this statement from the interviewer: “The story location was steamy & hot New Orleans, Louisiana and the accents, especially Sean’s, seemed quite authentic.” It’s not. It’s really, really, really not. The only authentic thing about this movie is the fact that, if someone were going to cheat on sex-on-a-stick uberbabe Sean Faris (who, in case you didn’t know, looks like this), the only other human being on earth who could possibly make your eye wander would be megahunk Mehcad Brooks (who looks like this). To be honest, either one of them would be worth getting shot. Cinematographer Ben Kufrin‘s pre-2005 C.V. consists almost entirely of titles with the word “Playboy” thrown in there, and while I’m hesitant to say that he shoots these male bodies as lovingly as (presumably) he did the women in his earlier films, this “erotic” “thriller” may at least send you off with visions of chiseled abs dancing in your head. The interview mentions that Brooks expressed interest as early as 2010, which makes sense given that this was after he stopped getting regular paychecks for The Game and True Blood and before he started being able to get paid regularly for Supergirl, where he’s been unfortunately underutilized of late. Full disclosure: Sean Faris’s presence was the only reason I watched this movie, and I’ve long felt that his turn on Life As We Know It should have led to greater market penetration and made him more of a star, but he’s never had the mainstream success that his sister has.

The long and short of it is this: even if you’re trying to find a film that’s set in a hot place to try and make up for the cold, cold winter we’ve had this year, you’re better off watching a documentary about volcanoes. If you just want the visual feast of watching hot people sweating in a stuffy room, there are other, better places to get your jollies.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Baby Face (1933)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I’ve been casually flipping through & taking notes on Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon for a few months now (even though it’s essentially a lengthy gossip rag & could easily be read in an afternoon), which really is one of the better trashy reads on cinema history out there. If even a tenth of Anger’s ancient gossip is to be believed, the early days of Hollywoodland were a reckless, anything-goes bacchanal of drugs, sex, murder, and glamor, a just-born industry living out its youthful transgressions with unfathomable lust & fervor. There’s an obvious allure to these tawdry movie industry legends that just about anyone should be able to latch onto, but for film nerds early Hollywood gossip & myths are especially intoxicating. Among its more prurient interests, Anger’s book offers a glimpse of American cinema before it was defanged by the browbeating morality of the Hays Code, a time when Major Studio filmmaking was just as wild & transgressive as any art in production. I could have easily devoured Hollywood Babylon in a single sitting, but I find myself slowing way down to take notes on as may films Anger mentions as possible, hoping to find a movie-shaped doorway into the freewheeling times when the Studio System’s tawdriest works were being produced. That’s why it was beautifully serendipitous to recently find a used copy of a Warner Archives release titled Forbidden Hollywood at a second-hand media store. Featuring pre-Code pictures from Old Hollywood’s wildest era, the modest collection found its way into my personal stash at the exact right moment of my life, not only because of the surprising modern relevance of its crown jewel: 1933’s Baby Face.

A Barbara Stanwyck vehicle released just one year before the Hays Code was first strictly enforced, Baby Face is one of the most notorious examples of pre-Code Hollywood boundary-testing. It’s a grimy, cynical work about weaponized female sexuality and corporate culture exploitation, a true wonder as a Studio System relic. What’s most incredible, though, is the way its basic premise of lifelong sexual harassment corrupting & limiting women’s professional opportunities as autonomous adults continues to be vividly relevant to the current Cultural Discourse. The solution for combating that patriarchal oppression (essentially a Fuck Your Way to the Top ethos) has drastically changed, but the circumstances have not. The Forbidden Hollywood DVD features a recently discovered “pre-release” cut of Baby Face that includes extended sequences & alternate takes that are even racier than the version of the film that ruffled feathers in 1930s theaters. The official theatrical cut is plenty shocking for its time as is, though, not only in its casual approach to aggressive female sexuality, but also in its strides towards equality for onscreen black representation. The film is by no means a prophetic reflection of 2010s political ideology, but it is an incredibly honest screed about social & institutional oppression of women in the 1930s. It’s a kind of honesty we’re not used to associating with Old Hollywood pictures, thanks to the blanket moralizing of the Hays Code that would soon neuter American Cinema until the New Hollywood movement took over decades later. Its world of casual sex, suicide, interracial friendship, untold hundreds of cigarettes, and swanky Dixieland jazz paints a picture of what Old Hollywood could’ve been, if it were only allowed to fully blossom into its flagrantly amoral ideal.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as a put-upon barmaid who’s been harassed, cat-called, and groped every day of her life since she was a teen. Her father is her employer and, without consent, her pimp, charging men by the hour to be alone in the bar with her. A grim factory smoke tableau fills the window to the world outside their lowly speakeasy. A tragic accident suddenly frees her from this imprisonment and she flees to the city with her best friend (a black servant played by Theresa Harris) to establish her own place in the world. Resourceless and encouraged by the only speakeasy customer who’s ever been nice to her to stop being a pushover for horny men’s whims, she consciously decides to use her sexuality to earn money & status. Early in the film, Stanwyck’s antihero walks up to an impossibly tall skyscraper bank with no contacts or experience necessary for employment. To put it crassly, she systematically fucks her way to the top floor over the course of the movie, leaving behind a trail of heartbroken men in her path to financial success. Stanwyck is incredible in the role, confidently delivering lines like, “I don’t owe you a thing. Whatever I do is my business,” with a nonchalance that borders on viciousness, but never enough to turn the audience against her. The tragedy of the film is not the bosses, managers, and banking associates she seduces & leaves ruined, but in a climactic decision that jeopardizes the money she’s earned though the transgression. Using her intimacy as leverage and often waiting a beat to decide how to act before claiming another “victim” (would-be-harasser), she flips the power dynamic of a corporate world stacked against women by weaponizing the one asset that’s been afforded her: sex appeal. By the time she’s holding a major bank’s entire board of directors hostage with that one minor resource, Baby Face becomes a perverted David vs Goliath story and the movie is clearly rooting for her succeed by any means necessary.

Obviously, the theatrical edits made to soften Baby Face’s sexual transgressions also weaken its modern appeal. A moralistic coda about changing her casual sexin’ ways is tacked onto the story and stands out as just as much of a sore thumb as the similar false ending to The Bad Seed. Her amoral life coach is more of a Christian finger-wagger in the theatrical cut, scolding her for doing what he encourages her to do in the original, unreleased version of the story: fucking for power. Small moments of sex & violence are more explicitly depicted in the “pre-release” cut, hammering home what’s only implied in the version that’s been publicly available for decades. No matter which cut of Baby Face you’re privileged to see, however, the movie still shines as a grimy, transgressive wonder of Old School Hollywood boundary-pushing. Pre-Code Hollywood really was an amoral Babylon of hedonistic indulgences in sex & violence, as evidenced by the fact that even Baby Face’s censored, theatrical cut is more thematically & morally risky than most modern Major Studio releases dare to be. The fact that it accomplishes this while tackling an issue that’s currently commanding our cultural zeitgeist (the exploitation & sexual degradation of women in a male-dominated workplaces) only makes it all the more astounding.

-Brandon Ledet