Reviews

Morvern Callar (2002)

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It’s a goddamn shame that in her two decades of directing features, Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay has only been able to secure financing for four directorial efforts. What’s more of a personal shame for me is that I haven’t yet made a point to watch all of her available works. I’m in love with the darkly amusing, surrealist nightmare of 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and her upcoming thriller You Were Never Really Here is my most anticipated film of 2018, but I’ve been slow to pull the trigger on her two earlier features until now, a grotesque oversight on my part. Speaking of grotesque, Ramsay’s precursor to We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the grimier, more sickly features I can remember seeing in a long while. Morvern Callar feels less like an original screenplay than it does like a feature film adaptation of a crumpled-up Polaroid Ramsay found in a sewer. Along with a fearless performance from indie movie mainstay Samantha Morton, Ramsay’s direction & scum-coated visual language capture a very specific phase of soul-crushing grief: the stage where you stumble in total shock, only emerging from drunken stupors long enough to pray for the release of death. The film is nowhere near as satisfying as We Need to Talk About Kevin on a technical or narrative level, but stylistically speaking it’s just as powerful & willing to lunge directly at the audience’s throat, a visual ferociousness I can’t help but appreciate.

Morton stars as the titular Morvern Callar, a twenty-something party animal who awakes from a blackout to discover her boyfriend dead from suicide. As Morvern ponders her plight in the sad glow of their shared apartment’s blinking Christmas lights, the movie threatens to sink into the slow, grainy quiet of a Kelly Reichardt film. That quiet, reflective gloom does not last long. Morvern’s response to her boyfriend’s death is much more akin to the behavior of a raccoon or an opossum than it is to a human being. She allows his body to rot on the floor for days before deciding to chop it up & bury it, keeping the funeral money he left behind for herself & selling his novel manuscript to a publisher under her own name. She uses the resulting cash flow to fill her days with hedonistic distractions: drugs, parties, vacations with her bestie, bad sex. The whole movie dwells in a kind of desperate attempt at fun! meant to hold her grief at bay, as she keeps the opening tragedy to herself as a secret. I’m not sure this nightmare vision of grief & desperate distraction is ever as strong as it is in the first party she attends almost immediately after discovering her boyfriend’s body. A disorienting mosaic of dancing, fire, broken glass, and drug-rotted sex, the earliest party sequence dunks the audience’s head in ice cold water as an open, honest threat about the meaningless debauchery to come. Morton barrels through it all with a nasty, heartbroken fervor and Ramsay matches her feral energy with an appropriately devastating sense of grime.

I can’t honestly say that Morvern Callar sustains the brutal intensity of that initial party sequence for its entire runtime, but it’s never dull or dispirited. The film plays like an pus-infected inversion of Eat, Pray, Love, with Morvern attempting to transform into a different person through self-indulgence & travel. Instead of “finding herself,” however, she’s more attempting to lose herself. For her part, Ramsay never loses track of the grief or desperation at the center of this quest, but she does often threaten to make it look cool. An incredible soundtrack stacked with some of the greatest pop acts of all time (Broadcast, Stereolab, Velvet Underground, Ween, etc.) combines with intensely colored lights & grimy punk energy to almost estimate the dressed-down chic of a fashion shoot or a music video. Ramsay’s sensibilities are too stomach-turning & sorrowful for Morvern Callar to fully tip in that that direction, though, and the movie ultimately comes across as incredibly sad. It’s the same odd balance she struck in We Need to Talk About Kevin, a tone she collaboratively establishes through heartbreaking performances from Samantha Morton & Tilda Swinton, respectively. I’m excited to see how that tonal tightrope is managed in the rest of her work, but saddened to know it won’t take much effort for me to fully find out.

-Brandon Ledet

Lust in the Dust (1985)

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Now that Criterion has given Multiple Maniacs a restorative spit shine for a recent BluRay release, there aren’t many unsung movies left featuring a performance from Divine, the greatest drag queen who ever lived. Starring roles from Divine are especially scarce, particularly ones outside the John Waters oeuvre. That’s what makes Lust in the Dust so tempting as a potential off-road gem. Divine stars in a comedy directed by the ever-charming Paul Bartel (Eating Raul, Death Race 2000, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) and no one ever talks about it? How could that be? The answer, obviously, is that the movie is a bit of a stinker and would likely have been forgotten by time completely if it weren’t for Divine’s name on the poster. Worse yet, it feels like a dilution & cheapening of the John Waters brand, which already suffers from being treated like ironic kitsch instead of what it truly is: a collection of the greatest films ever made. Waters was asked to direct Lust in the Dust, but declined because he did not pen the script. Frequent Waters collaborator Edith Massey was cast as a sleazy bartender (not a stretch for her) but died before filming began. Divine stars opposite Tab Hunter, her onscreen rival/lover in Waters’s Polyester. The film also arrived in the seven-year gap between Polyester & Hairspray, which makes me wonder if Divine’s departure from the Dreamlanders crew to pursue projects like Lust in the Dust & her disco career means there were other John Waters projects in the works that were derailed in the meantime. Lust in the Dust isn’t without its occasional charms, but it feels like a huge roadblock that likely prevented better art from seeing the light of day.

Speaking of daylight, Lust in the Dust is a textbook demonstration of the horrors of day drag. Shot in the sun-drenched California desert, the film is a bawdy comedy masquerading as a cheapie Western. Divine is tasked to flop sweat her way through dust-coated comedy routines as stale as the cowboy backdrop that flavors them. A thin story about buried treasure, bandits, and bar fights drags its corpse across the desert sand as playful music continually elbows the audience as a reminder that “This is fun! So funny!” A few of the gags do work, but they’re the rare exception to the rule. I was particularly tickled by Divine’s tendency to crush the head of any man that goes down on her. Her costar Lannie Kazan (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame) also gets in a few great one-liners like, “Freeze, hombre, or I’ll be wearing your asshole like a garter,” that remind you that Bartel is usually a super sharp, crass wit. Most of the bits fall dead flat, though. Divine drunkenly falling off a donkey, the small town they raise hell in being called Chile Verde, Divine bashfully pretending she doesn’t want to be gang raped: Lust in the Dust’s major failure is that it isn’t nearly funny enough to justify its own indulgences as an irreverent comedy. Waters was smart to decline the opportunity to direct the picture himself and I’d never want to see my favorite filmmaker tackle something as tired & pedestrian as a Western, but you could bet that if he did the result would be far more energetic & genuinely humorous. Here, the zaniness feels forced and Divine feels weighed down by being tied to an unfunny script instead of being let loose to cause havoc as the no-holds-barred filth monster she truly was.

Lust in the Dust is only a must-see for Divine completists & the morbidly curious. It’s difficult to imagine Western-friendly audiences getting anything more out of it than I did, coming from the perspective of a Waters devotee. Unless you desperately need to see Divine & Tab Hunter share the screen one last time and your copy of Polyester is damaged or missing, I’d advise you to stay as far away as you can manage. It’s best to keep the better memories of Divine alive in our minds than to dilute them with this labored, unfunny dreck. The same goes with the typically wonderful Paul Bartel, really, but it hurts much less to see a dilution of his divinity.

And just so this isn’t a total waste of time, let’s all smile in wonder at the only good thing that came out of this picture: this picture.

-Brandon Ledet

The Greatest Showman (2017)

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“Does it bother you that everything you’re selling is fake?”
“Do these smiles look fake?”

One of my favorite recurring SNL characters in recent years was Andy Samberg’s portrayal of Hugh Jackman: The Man with Two Sides. The joke was essentially that Jackman’s public persona was bizarrely bifurcated between his gruff performances as a muscled-out action star and his more delicate, fanciful performances as a man of the stage. 2017 might have been the year when the Two Sides of Hugh Jackman both reached their most absurd extremes. Early in the year, Jackman’s long-running lone wolf/tough guy act as Wolverine in the X-Men franchise got so somber & manly in Logan that the film could easily pass as an adaptation of a late-career Johnny Cash ballad. Jackman then followed that grizzled performance up in December with the silliest, most frothy performance in his entire musical theatre career. Jackman stars in the movie musical biopic The Greatest Showman as an eternally chipper P.T. Barnum, whom the movie posits as the inventor of modern showbusiness. The Greatest Showman is less remarkable for contrasting Logan as an exercise in pure, unembarrassed musical theatre than it is for contrasting it as a disingenuous, 100-minute-long commercial where the product being sold is joy. Just as I cried a solitary, manly tear as Logan toyed with political exploitation & deep-seated daddy issues, I also totally bought into the joyful, bullshit product Jackman peddles in The Greatest Showman. He’s a very talented salesman, no matter which one of his Two Sides is doing the talking.

Calling The Greatest Showman a biopic is a little misleading. I’m not sure Jackman’s portrayal of P.T. Barnum shares much in common with the real-life showman outside a name and an affiliation with the popularization of the traveling circus. The revisionist narrative the film peddles is just as surreally artificial as its nonstop barrage of green-screened backdrops. Barnum begins the film as a working-class upstart whose belief in the American dream (and skills at lying to bank lenders) catapults his family from rags to riches as he unknowingly “invents” modern show business (think Vegas variety show). His “aha!” moment that transforms a failing wax museum packed with dusty curios to a lucrative enterprise of populist entertainment is a decision to exploit the local outcasts & physically disabled as tourist attractions, essentially inventing the profession of “circus freak.” The Greatest Showman often attempts to posit Barnum’s relationship with his disenfranchised employees as tenderly familial, but it’s much more convincing in the stretches where he profits off their labor, yet locks them out of the visibility of the high-society circles they afford him access to. The film’s moral lies somewhere in celebrating your inner (and outer) weirdness instead of desperately wanting to be accepted by the snobbish hegemony, a lesson Barnum supposedly learns several times throughout (by way of gaudy, pop-minded showtunes, of course).

There are dual romance storylines that distract from The Greatest Showman’s Let Your Freak Flag Fly messaging and overall value as a crassly populist spectacle. One involves Barnum repeatedly ignoring his wife (Michelle Williams) and children in his blind pursuit of high society respectability, something that falls a little flat if not only because his wife’s inner desires are left vague & unclear. Early on, Barnum sings passionately about his dream of creating the ultimate form of entertainment, while his wife’s only expressed desire is that he share that dream with her and allow her to tag along. A second, interracial romance among Barnum’s employees (Disney Channel vets Zack Effron & Zendaya) is a little clearer in its place in the story, though it’s ultimately just as inconsequential. Neither romance is nearly as satisfying as the time spent with Barnum’s stable of “freaks,” whose determination to be visible & respected while being themselves is the most convincing thread in the film’s overall sentimentality. I’ll admit that even as crass & silly as this movie is in every single frame, I got a little teary-eyed at the circus performers (especially the bearded lady) singing about how they’re “Not scared to be seen” in the Oscar-nominated tune “This is Me.” The characterizations of the circus performers can be just as insultingly artificial as the romances and the revision of Barnum’s exploitative history and everything else in the film (the bizarre vocal dubbing of the cast’s sole little person is especially egregious), but that’s all part of The Greatest Showman’s tacky sense of proto-Vegas fun. It also does little to distract from the endearing, all-accepting, freaks-are-people-too messaging.

The debut film from director Michael Gracey, The Greatest Showman was likely a movie-by-committee proposition, very much in the tradition of blatantly commercial movie musicals like Moulin Rouge & Xanadu. It proudly wears that populism on its ruffled sleeve, though, directly calling out potential critics as “prigs & snobs” before they even have a chance to file a negative review. Barnum goes even further by calling the entire profession of entertainment criticism inherently hypocritical, as he becomes morbidly fixated on a “critic who can’t find joy in the theatre.” That insult stuck with me, not because it was especially insightful as a look into the practice of art criticism, but because it made clear exactly what product this obnoxious, crass, overlong, deeply silly advertisement was trying to sell me: joy. I greatly respect The Greatest Showman for the honesty of its populist spectacle & out-in-the-open commitment to artifice. I also believe that, besides maybe Barnum himself, there are few hucksters who could have sold its joy-product more convincingly than Jackman, even if he was outshined by the circus performers’ storyline and could only employ one of his distinct Two Sides in the task.

-Brandon Ledet

Tap (1989)

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It’s tempting to say that the 1989 tap dancing revival Tap has been forgotten by time, but it might be more accurate to say it’s been consistently ignored since its release. Tap was meant to Make Tap Dancing Cool Again for a 1980s audience, but just barely broke the top ten box office grossers in its opening week before promptly disappearing forever. Even with time, as the film’s 80s Attitude™ has aged like wine, its campy pleasures as a commercial misfire are only a mild delight. Too serious in tone to be an over the top laugh riot and too silly in concept to be taken at all seriously, Tap floats in a kind of pop culture limbo that fades its already greyed-out reputation, even if a rightly forgotten one. Tap may overall be a tonal wet blanket in terms of satisfying anyone looking to its tap dancing hipness for ironic humor, but on a moment to moment basis it can be amusingly bizarre.

Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis Jr., and Savion Glover star as three generations of tap dancing legacy. Sammy Davis Jr., in his final film role, is a rusty old-timer who represents tap’s past as an experimental, badboy offshoot of jazz. Savion Glover, Hines’s real life student, is the future of tap: a young, basketball-dribbling Cool Kid with a snotty attitude that will put any of his peers in place at the suggestion that “dancing is for girls.” Hines is the ghost of tap-dancing present, a recently released ex-convict who must choose between two professional paths as a newly freed man: tap or burglary. There’s also an insane sub plot about finding ways to modernize tap by incorporating the sounds of city streets, (including construction noises, in a ludicrous Stomp-style number) or electric pickups & synths applied to the shoes so they can be amplified in a rock band. It’s all very silly, especially when it tries to make tap sexy, but never quite over the top enough to inspire fits of laughter.

Tap opens with echoing the angry, solitary dancing of the infamous warehouse scene in Footloose, then is interrupted by wailing 80s sax pop as Hines’s tap dancing badass protagonist emerges from prison to NYC streets. That’s the level of over the top cheese Tap traffics in, which can be pleasantly amusing in a self-serious, feature length drama about the art of dance. I’d be a liar if I said it were the kind of so-bad-it’s-good, unintentional comedy that deserves revival on the midnight circuit, however. It’s more of the kind of oddity you happen to watch on a middle of the afternoon TV broadcast that catches you way off guard with its lowkey absurdity. Tap failed in its mission to Make Tap Dancing Cool Again in 1989. Decades later, it also fails as ironic kitsch. There’s a kind of charm in those failures, slight as it may be, an endearing novelty that pairs well with day drinking and afternoon naps.

-Brandon Ledet

Belly (1998)

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If the main metric of cinematic excellence is in the art of the moving image, it’s a grotesque injustice that legendary music video director Hype Williams was locked out of feature filmmaking after just one attempt, Belly. Just before venturing into the sleek futurism of his iconic music videos for TLC’s “No Scrubs” & the Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes collaboration “What’s It Gonna Be?,” Williams sets this over-stylized action thriller just one year ahead of its release date, in the far-off distant future of 1999. Belly‘s intense monochromatic neon lighting vaguely recalls the sci-fi standard set by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner, even though the story it serves is more like a late 90s hip-hop version of GoodFellas. As you might expect from a music video auteur, Williams subscribes to the term “style over substance” as a personal mantra rather than a potential criticism. Belly’s visuals are as gorgeous as its dialogue is disposable. Its performances (mostly from musicians like Nas, DMX, T-Boz, and Method Man) and its overall narrative are so oddly constructed that the film practically qualifies as outsider art. However, 20 years later, there’s no one film that can be directly compared to its merits as a visual achievement. Long after the emptiness of the narrative & dialogue fade in your memory, the film still lingers as a sensory spectacle, a gold standard in the art of the moving image. If Williams had been paired with a stronger screenwriter for a second feature, I have no doubt he’d be hailed as one of the great auteurs of our time. His debut’s lousy 13% approval rating on the Tomatometer is entirely undeserved, though, as its ambition far outweighs its means. Belly’s vision of an MTV-minded, near-future crime dystopia is a powerful narcotic; getting hung up on whether it has something meaningful to say is almost beside the point.

Nas & DMX lead the cast as two tough-as-nails gangsters who’ve become incredibly wealthy though incrementally more dangerous crimes, but dream of leaving the game before it’s too late. There’s a nihilism to their wealth-hoarding that they both recognize as unhealthy (though Nas is by far the first to get there), as indicated by the line, “We’re born to motherfuckin’ die, man. In the meantime, get money.” The dialogue & acting are, to be honest, conspicuously amateur, with near-constant voice-over pulling most of the narrative weight. Thematically, the film can also be downright nasty in its function as a macho power fantasy, with gorgeous women dressed in lacy lingerie patiently waiting in sterile McMansions while their men shoot up nightclubs and coerce teen girls into acts of fellatio. The line between what’s supposed to be glamorous and what’s supposed to be grotesque is a grey area in the film, as everything is framed with a loving, stylized cinematic eye. We do know that theft & murder are A-okay in this world, but selling heroin is a bridge too far (a common theme in these kinds of crime narratives). The casual misogyny & homophobia are on much shakier moral ground, as they’re not directly dealt with in the text. Ultimately, the movie does attempt to pull most of its loose, frayed ends together in a few climactic monologues about the black experience in modern America. Reflections on the prison system, the ravages of addiction & gun violence, kids who’ll never make it past the borders of a housing project, and the spiritual promise of returning to Africa recontextualize the violent excess of the preceding 90min in a near-convincing last-minute turnaround. It’s difficult to know what to do with the information, though, since it’s philosophically at odds with the strange music video glamour of the film’s constant violence & macho posturing, but that moral tension is partly what makes Belly such a fascinating work.

It’s there’s any one clear way that Belly was ahead of its time, it’s in how it fulfills a recent push to pay attention to how we light & film black skin. Titles like Girlhood & Moonlight have earned much-deserved praise for acting as a corrective to a standard way of shooting that favored white complexions on the screen, but even they pale in comparison to the way Belly looks. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who more recently shot the “Formation” video for Beyoncé’s Lemonade project, creates otherworldly, monochromatic spaces lit in impossibly rich blues, reds, pinks, and browns. The way these hues compliment black complexions is never more evident than when the few white characters (i.e. cops conducting drug raids) invade these spaces to interrupt the reverie. Hype Williams pairs this lighting-intense vision with fashion photography-minded production design and a distinct sense of music video cool to establish an insular world that is only ever disrupted by the arrival of the aforementioned white cops. The way gun violence & misogyny also look cool in this in this otherworldly space is troublesome, especially in the opening, strobe-lit sequence where Nas & DMX shoot up a strip club & return to a gaudy McMansion homestead to “lay low.” That sense of danger & moral unease is distinctly build into the film’s charm, though. It’s also somewhat thematically undone in a climactic series of speeches about the plight of modern black America. There’s something oddly off-balanced about the image Belly is presenting and the (unclear) message it ultimately tries to convey, but the way it consistently carves out a thoroughly black, American space ties the whole thing together as a cohesive piece. It’s one of the many ways the film’s visual achievements outweigh its narrative shortcomings.

After the opening strobe-lit club raid, DMX entertains his guests at his gaudy McMansion by projecting Harmony Korine’s Gummo on the living room wall. Puzzled, Nas repeatedly asks variations on the question “What the fuck is that?” It’s an irreverently funny exchange that doesn’t hold much narrative significance, but does establish context of what’s to follow. Like Korine, Hype Williams is a highly skilled outsider artist whose approach to cinema is much more concerned with visual, stylistic provocation than it is with having something cohesive to say. His music video work alone should establish him as one of the great directors of our time, but I still find it shameful that he hasn’t made a second feature film in the 20 years since Belly. Where Korine has been afforded the space to develop his voice as a feature filmmaker in the public eye, Williams came out near fully-formed with a powerful debut, then returned to directing short-form videos. The critical disappointment with Belly may have been a result of the movie being framed as an MTV-era commercial product instead of a werido art piece like Gummo. Don’t be fooled by the inclusion of Kurt Loder & the stacked cast of big name, late 90s rappers. This is the exact kind of shaggy, off-balance visual piece that should be projected on the living room wall after a long night of partying so that your friends can ask in wonder & disgust, “What the fuck is that?”

-Brandon Ledet

 

The Commuter (2018)

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The sole kernel of fun in last year’s over-hated natural disaster thriller Geostorm was its function as a conservative fantasy in which one white, middle aged tough guy fights off a massive conspiracy all on his lonesome. The latest action vehicle for Liam Neeson, who knows a thing or two about middle aged white guy power fantasies at this point in his career, pushes that same dynamic to a much more satisfying, deliriously inane extreme. Director Jaume Collet-Serra already reframed Neeson’s defining late-career gimmick in Non-Stop, which was essentially Taken on a Plane. His latest collaboration with the forever-slumming-it actor, The Commuter, flips the script again with the paradigm-shifting concept of, wait for it, Taken on a Train. Neeson stars as the titular commuter, a hardworking family man struggling to maintain an upper middle-class lifestyle without a proper safety net. Just when his job, his family, and his sense of security are taken away from him, he’s offered a quick, sleazy way to make a cool $100k on his commute home. He must make a choice: blindly go along with the flow or stand up for the little guy and take down a massive conspiracy network one bare-knuckled punch at a time. The Commuter isn’t exactly capital “R” Republican in its politics; at the very least it musters a lot of residual anger from the 2008 market crisis, even including the line, “Hey, Goldman Sachs! On behalf of the American middle class, fuck you!” The film’s pro-cop philosophy, “Millennials, huh?” patronizing, Info Wars-style paranoia, and general macho swagger are all informed by a conservative tinge, though, and it’s perversely fun to watch that sensibility stretch to such absurd lengths in this kind of disposable, low-rent/high-concept thriller.

Freshly let go from his unglamorous job as an insurance salesman by a heartless Corporation, our ex-cop Hero Dad has little to lose as he sullenly rides home on a packed commuter train. He’s a hardworking man who plays by the rules in a mind-numbing routine, but he gets screwed anyway because the system is rigged. In this moment of desperation & financial despair, he’s approached by a mysterious organization and offered $100k to do something he is uniquely qualified for: pointing out a fellow passenger “who does not belong” on the train he rides every day. This setup does not entirely make sense, as he’s both tasked to single out an out-of-place stranger and told that there are other strangers on the train watching his every move, which you would think just muddles the assignment. It doesn’t take long or the focus to shift away from this original moral quandary (which feels somewhat like an exhausted, late 90s John Woo adapting The Box). Neeson’s middle-aged toughie quickly realizes he’s being blackmailed into committing unwitting acts of Evil and the rest of the film details his David vs. Goliath heroics in taking down the mysterious, all-powerful Organization responsible for his predicament from within the speeding train. His triumph as the hero hinges both on his ability to see through the Fake News & truthiness of the world and on the brunt force of his traditional masculinity, something that’s been eroded by the daily Corporate grind of commuting by train in a cheap suit to provide for his family. I’m not sure how much longer Neeson will be able to coast along in these ludicrous Tough Dad action thrillers, but The Commuter hits a nice sweet spot where he’s still virile enough for the violence to be passably convincing and the premises must reach far beyond rational thought to keep the formula novel. It’s fun trash.

Much like Collet-Serra’s fun-trash shark pic The Shallows, The Commuter feels a little unnecessarily labored & delayed in its setup. Once his aggressively idiotic plots get cooking, however, they capture a distinct 90s thriller spirit that used to light up summertime marquees, but have since been ghettoized on a straight-to-VOD release path. Even The Commuter’s gloriously cheesy tagline, “Lives are on the line,” feels like a relic from an ancient mode of blockbuster filmmaking. Where that 90s thriller throwback vibe might disappoint is in this film’s general deficiency of action. Besides an inevitable special effects climax involving the train itself, there are only a few moments of genuine action that make appropriate use of the train setting’s close quarters combat tension. The most memorable of these involves Neeson fighting off a guitar-wielding conspirator with a fire hatchet, in what’s effectively an axe-on-axe fight. Mostly, though, The Commuter is less entertaining for its Loud, Dumb Action than it is for its Loud, Dumb Ideas. The film recalls high-concept thrillers like the David Fincher joint The Game or the M. Night Shyamalan-penned Devil in its paranoia-driven sociology experiments where every character is an anonymous archetype and no one is to be trusted. I probably shouldn’t take so much delight in how films like Geostorm & The Commuter adapt that conspiracy theorist hero worship to the Fake News, Alex Jones era, but I just find it so damn silly. There’s a whole legion of dangerous white, American men out there who believe they’re living in some kind of rigged, The Matrix-type system where they’re the only dude in the world smart enough to crack the code of What’s Really Going On, when they’re actually just, for instance, some boring ex-cop who got laid off from selling insurance. Watching that kind of outsized power fantasy play out onscreen to its most illogical extreme should probably be frightening, but instead it tickles me immensely.

-Brandon Ledet

Winchester (2018)

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The writer-director duo The Spierig Brothers tend to hit the same genre film sweet spot for me that Mike Flanagan’s work seems to for other people. They’re churning out formulaic genre pictures that do little to innovate in terms of visual craft or structural narrative, but still endear themselves to me despite my better judgement. Their vampire picture Daybreakers and (even more so) their time travel mystery thriller Predestination are clearly their most accomplished works to date, but I’m always at least intrigued by whatever latest project they have cooking, no matter how generic. I even allowed their involvement in the latest Saw sequel to trick me into revisiting that franchise for the first time in over a decade, God help me. The genre du jour for The Spierig Brothers is a haunted house horror with unearned pretensions of being a historical drama. You’d think that a period film starring Helen Mirren and “inspired by actual events” could elevate itself above the usual Spierig Brothers mold, but Winchester instead glides by as yet another by-the-books genre exercise from the duo, for better or for worse. Anyone looking for a show-stopping performance from Mirren or some historical insight into the troubled times of the real-life Mrs. Winchester are likely to leave the film frustrated. Instead, the Spierig boys bend those potentially extraordinary elements to their genre faithful will, delivering pretty much what you’d expect based on their past efforts: a well-behaved haunted house picture that somehow entertains despite its instant familiarity.

Mirren stars as Sarah Winchester, a wealthy 1900’s widow & heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune. Mirroring rumors of her mental instability in real life, her mental health is being questioned in the film by the board of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to drive her out of her business & her fortune. The lynchpin in their argument against her sanity is a bizarre mansion she keeps under constant, ever-shifting construction, another real life detail. In the film, the Winchester house is described as “a gargantuan, seven-story structure with no apparent rhyme or reason” to its design, an M.C. Escher-esque 3D jigsaw puzzle that requires construction crews to work 24/7 to keep up with Sarah Winchester’s instructions. Mudbound’s Jason Clarke co-stars as a laudanum-addicted doctor/alcoholic hired by the Winchester company to legally assess the widow’s mental health as a guest in her bizarre home. Since this is a PG-13 horror film instead of an Oscar-minded biopic, however, that investigation shifts to instead determining whether the unexpected spooky beings the doctor encounters there are laudanum-induced hallucinations or a collective of malicious ghosts. Spoiler: it’s ghosts. Once “the difference between illusion & reality” is broken down, the doctor and the widow team up to calm the house’s ghosts, for whom the widow builds an ever-expanding labyrinth of rooms for them to haunt & feel at home in. The usual balance struck in “the house that spirits built” is violently disturbed by a slowly-approaching supernatural event, something much more potentially catastrophic than a lost fortune or a laudanum addiction, two conflicts that fall by the wayside. It all wraps up pretty much how you would expect it to, with very few surprises along the way.

Judging by the weirdly unenthused response to Guillermo del Toro’s similar, but far more masterful Crimson Peak, I doubt many audiences will fall head over heels for this simplistic gothic horror throwback. You’d have to be really stoked about watching Helen Mirren glide down spooky hallways in Helena Bonham Carter drag to enthusiastically love this movie; any personal affinity for haunted house horror or real-life insight into the bizarre case of the Winchester house is not going to cut it on its own. This is a very talky, muted haunted house movie where two too-good-for-this-shit actors discuss at length the value of gun control and the practice of locking ghosts in boxes. Even for all its exploitation of a real-life tragedy & total waste of an Oscar-winning actor, however, Winchester at least has the decency to search for a moral center & a thematic point of view. The ghosts in the film are described to be “spirits killed by the rifle,” and Sarah Winchester’s agitated mental state is framed as guilt from profiting from gun violence, a theme that obviously holds modern significance (and, again, mirrors legends & rumors surrounding the real-life heiress). The way that theme expresses itself through machine-like jump scares, creepy possessed children, and endless exterior shots of a spooky house may not be the most morally delicate approach to adapting the Winchester story, but fans of mainstream horror should be well-accustomed to that kind of exploitative tackiness by now.

The Spierig Brothers did little to pay attention to how the genre tropes of a haunted house picture might distort or trivialize the story of a real-life widow with a tragic history of mental health struggles. Instead, they filtered the Sarah Winchester curio through a one-size-fits-all ghost story lens, with all the minor thrills, chills, and PG-13 kills that accompany it. It’s not likely to win over new fans to their genre-faithful, utilitarian brand, but it’s still a continuation of their pattern of making well-behaved, but surprisingly entertaining pictures out of formulas we’ve already seen repeated hundreds of times before.

-Brandon Ledet

Somewhere (2010)

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It took watching Sofia Coppola’s worst movie to help me recognize that she’s one of my favorite working directors. Somewhere is a lot like Lost in Translation in the way it allows Coppola to indulge at length in her worst narrative tendencies, mainly her obsession with the ennui of the have-it-all elite. Also like Lost in Translation, Somewhere often overcomes that narrative hurdle in the pure pleasure of its value as a sensory experience, demonstrating the same intoxicating visual & tonal meticulousness that helps distinguish her more thematically rich works (Marie Antoinette, The Virgin Suicides, and The Beguiled are my holy trinity). This is a deliberately simple, quiet work that scales back Coppola’s ambitions after the go-for-broke excess of Marie Antoinette, one that mirrors the listless emptiness of its the-price-of-fame protagonist. As a result, it would be easy to dismiss the film as a lazy act of pretension, but Coppola’s too tonally & visually skilled as an artist to let it sit that way. This may be the most underwhelming film in her catalog to date, but it’s also quietly sweet & charming in a way too few movies are, which is why she’s one of the best.

Stephen Dorff stars as a movie star far above Stephen Dorff’s pay grade. His Tom Cruise-level fame as an action star isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though, as he finds his life spent lazing about L.A.’s infamous Chateau Marmont hotel to be an unfulfilling drag. Pushing the disheveled t-shirt & jeans look of a nothing-to-lose movie star to the point of appearing homeless, he still finds beautiful women throwing themselves at his feet while performing simple tasks like picking up the morning paper or taking a phone call on the balcony. The already blatant emptiness of his lazy, hotel room party lifestyle is further put into perspective by the unexpected arrival for his young daughter, played by Elle Fanning. The simple act of sharing time with her (even time wasted playing Guitar Hero or watching her figure skating lessons) changes him for the better, recontextualizing his lazing-about hedonism. Sofia Coppola is no stranger to depicting boredom & ennui; they’re among her favorite pet subjects. Somewhere (again, not unlike Lost in Translation) offers a glimpse at how these emotional experiences (or lack thereof) can mean more and transform into something sweetly beautiful when you share them with someone you care about. It’s not a grand, paradigm-shifting statement, but it is a rewarding, intimate one.

Since boredom & ennui aren’t exactly the most kinetic of cinematic topics, most of Somewhere’s strengths are in the power of individual moments & images. Coppola reportedly strung together the film’s narrative based on her own childhood spent exploring fringe, transient Hollywood spaces like Chateau Marmont (along with the real-life experiences of young Hollywood children she knows in the 2010s) and you can feel that authenticity in the specificity of her imagery & the film’s many intimate exchanges, often between strangers. Mimed underwater tea parties, Foo Fighters-scored strip teases, ungodly piles of gelato, the world’s laziest gesture of unenthused cunnilingus: many might argue that Somewhere doesn’t amount to much, but there’s no denying that meticulous care went into its visual craft & small moments of human interaction. Coppola posits the Marmont as a realm outside of space & time, one only made more bizarre by the mix of celebrities, fashion models, and sex works that drift through its halls. And since the film is very light on dialogue for long, quiet stretches, the way those images shape the story being told can be surprisingly, delicately deft. For instance, the way a slow zoom-in on a claustrophobic plaster cast session matches Dorff’s suffocating loneliness early in the film contrasts wonderfully with the long, revitalizing inhale of a slow zoom-out of him sunbathing poolside with his daughter late in the runtime. Whether that exact contrast was Coppola’s intent or not, she is at least smart enough to allow enough distance for her audience to be able to draw those kinds of connections among her potent, intimate images.

Somewhere might only rank among my least favorite Coppola’s because it’s light on the aspects of her work I personally adore the most. I find her quiet fixation on the emptiness of wealth & excess works best in harsh contrast with an eccentrically loud backdrop, which draws me more to works like Marie Antoinette & The Bling Ring. I also highly value her power as a voice with mainstream notoriety & wide distribution who makes immersively feminine works the likes of which we usually only see in no budget festival releases. As Stephen Dorff’s existential crisis commands most of the runtime (as Bill Murray does in Lost in Translation), I’m not able to see as much of that distinctive voice here as I am in works like The Beguiled & The Virgin Suicides. Still, there’s enough sweetness in the onscreen relationship between Dorff & Fanning (who has become one of my favorite young actors thanks to her turns in The Neon Demon & 20th Century Women) and enough contemplative beauty in the film’s vestiges of excess imagery that I find the experience worthwhile when considered as a whole. Sofia Coppola at her worst is still better than most slow-drift ennui directors at their best. If Somewhere is a low point in her catalog, she deserves credit for having one of the best active resumes around.

-Brandon Ledet

The Haunted Mansion (2003)

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Much like the NFL, WWE, and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Disney has always had a knack for obsessively promoting & examining its own legacy. It wasn’t until the past few years that the insanely massive media conglomerate owned every single major player intellectual property imaginable, but judging by the way the company has publicly patted itself on the back since its inception, you’d think that was the case for decades. One of the more amusingly tacky ways this self-celebration has manifested itself is in Disney pop culture media’s synergy with the brand’s amusement parks – Disneyland, Disney World, and beyond. I totally understand the appeal, both for creator & consumer, of turning Disney’s most popular properties into theme park rides fans can physically visit & interact with. By the late 90s, though, that wasn’t enough for Disney’s insatiable need to publicly glorify itself. In the last two decades the company has begun to make movies based on its theme park rides in an an absurd act of reverse engineering. This started small enough with a Disney Channel made-for-TV original starring a late-in-his-career Steve Guttenberg, but eventually ballooned into a five feature film series starring one of the world’s most famous (and most despicable) movie stars, Johnny Depp. The Pirates of the Caribbean series has been the biggest financial payoff in Disney’s gamble to market its theme park attractions on the big screen (recent diminished returns notwithstanding) and there have been a couple great Disney Ride films accidentally made along the way (Tower of Terror & Tomorrowland, namely), but for the most part people (mainly critics) have not been buying what Disney had been selling in those films: itself.

The first few attempts to adapt a Disney park theme ride for the big screen were meek acts of testing the waters. The 1997 Tower of Terror film was made for broadcast television. The 2000 space adventure Mission to Mars somehow nabbed a big name director (Brian De Palma, of all people) and went into wide theatrical release, but was based on a long-forgotten ride that had closed almost a decade before the film’s release. The ill-conceived (but oddly fascinating) 2002 Country Bears movie was marketed only for the smallest of children, to whom we shovel irredeemable garbage on an annual basis (i.e. Minions, The Emoji Movie, etc.). It wasn’t until the 2003 Eddie Murphy horror comedy The Haunted Mansion that Disney released a major motion picture meant to appeal to the entire family that was based on one of its currently visitable theme park attractions. The Haunted Mansion was an interesting experiment in the way it asked loyal fans of the Disney brand to fall in love with a feature-length advertisement for its own product: a haunted house “dark ride” you could visit at any one of its major theme parks. The experiment succeeded commercially, (rightfully) failed critically, and openly participated in the dual nature of Art & Commerce that always plagues the movie industry, although typically in a more hushed tone. Directed by nobody workman Rob Minkoff, who also helmed The Lion King & Stuart Little with an equal absence of passion, The Haunted Mansion is no more vibrantly alive than any of the CG spectres that torment Murphy’s family in its haunted house plot. The movie plays like a series of boardroom decisions that spiraled out of control into a family-friendly horror comedy that is neither funny nor scary and feels about as genuine in its genre nerdery as The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Just about the only interesting thing about The Haunted Mansion is its pioneering nature as a feature-length advertisement of a currently-operational Disney Park ride, the lowest of artistic ambitions.

Eddie Murphy stars as a money-obsessed Business Dad who spends too much time trying to grow his real estate business and too little effort connecting with his wife & kids. This stock Kids’ Movie Conflict is complicated when he interrupts his family’s vacation to check out a potential property purchase, the titular haunted mansion. The plot doesn’t develop much from there, besides the gradual reveals of every inhabitant of the home being a ghost with unfinished business who failed to cross over to the other side. The ghostly lord of the home mistakes Murphy’s wife for a long-lost love of his own, who can be seen in various oil paintings throughout the mansion, another Stock Movie Conflict employed by countless vampire & ghost pictures. Given that the ghostly home owner & his various ghost servants are white people from a bygone century, this interracial romance angle raises a few interesting questions about the racial dynamics of the house’s past, questions the movie isn’t interested in exploring. Instead, Murphy has to hurry to both prevent the most handsome, wealthy ghost from “getting jiggy with” his wife (kill me) and to save his kids from the other supernatural threats crawling all over the home: spiders, skeletons, a surprisingly effective Terrence Stamp. The rest of the ghostly cast is rounded out by the comic relief of the always-welcome Wallace Shawn & a Jambi-type performance from Jennifer Tilly. Will Eddie Murphy have time to save both of his children’s lives and prevent his wife from getting sexually assaulted by a handsome ghost? My guess is that you already know the answer, but are coming up short with a reason to care, which is more than fair.

Plot is not nearly as significant here as recreating the holographic ghosts & ghouls of the Disney theme park ride source material, which the movie actually does fairly well. The introductory title cards feel like a haunted house initiation, warning “Welcome, foolish mortals . . .” before recreating the ballroom of dancing ghosts that constitute the theme park ride’s centerpiece. Besides the CG ghosts that recall the live action Casper movie in tone, The Haunted Mansion also employs special effects master Rick Baker to provide some tangible atmosphere. A Harryhausen skeleton army & swarms of threatening spiders look especially great, with other haunted house effects like Videodrome-esque breathing walls, a Billy Bones-style zombie, and visual references to suicide by hanging tilting the story towards genuine horror. Singing barber shop quartet statue busts (an integral part of the ride) and a musical instrument seance straight out of an Ed Wood film (Night of the Ghouls, to be specific) are much more in line with a cutesy, safe-feeling horror comedy vibe, which is totally fine given the film’s nature as a cynically commercial Disney property. Terrence Stamp’s presence as an evil, ghostly butler cuts to the core of what’s wrong with the film at large. He’s genuinely creepy on a scene to scene basis, but often has to pause his schtick to deal with Eddie Murphy, who aims to annoy at every possible turn. At one point, Stamp even bellows, “If I have to listen to another word from that insufferable fool, I believe I’m going to burst,” which was the one line that got a legitimate laugh out of me. Listening to Murphy run lame bits about whacking spiders with magazines & ghosts “getting jiggy with” his wife into the ground for minutes at a time completely poisons any atmospheric mood or comedic ambition built by Baker, Shawn, Tilly, or Stamp. Murphy simply isn’t funny, which is a major problem considering how much screen time he’s allowed to devour.

Guillermo del Toro has stated publicly that he’d love to remake this film without the Eddie Murphy angle and, after Crimson Peak, it feels as if he already did. It’s easy to see what the director may have connected with on its basic level of being a haunted house dark ride attraction adapted into a feature. The Haunted Mansion is one of my favorite Disney World rides, but I have no real problems or reservations with the way it’s been adapted to the screen, personally. How could I? The idea of believing your own hype so completely that you think your theme park attractions deserve a The Movie! version is so absurd that it’s kind of a miracle every single one of these Disney Ride movies isn’t as much of an artistic failure as The Haunted Mansion turned out to be. If it weren’t for the success of the Pirates debut just a few months later this could’ve been the end of the Disney Ride movie as we know it today, a fate that would’ve been very much deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Tower of Terror (1997)

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Expectations can make or break a movie-watching experience if you allow them too much headspace. I try to approach every film with an entirely blank slate, but it can be difficult to achieve that intellectual distance. For instance, watching a mid-90s Steve Guttenberg helm a made-for-TV kids’ movie based on a Disney World theme park attraction comes with its own expectation baggage that’s difficult to leave at the door. To be crassly honest, I expected a pile of shit. 1997’s Tower of Terror movie is a thoroughly pleasant surprise, then, shirking the stench of its compromised pedigree in nearly every scene. Even as a cheaply made VHS era kids’ horror starring The Gutte, the film is a massive improvement over Disney’s other haunted house amusement park ride adaptation, the miserable Eddie Murphy comedy The Haunted Mansion. It’s a charmingly silly, mildly spooky comedy that delivers just as much genuine entertainment as it does unintentional camp. I can’t parse out how much of my enjoyment was a surprise result of setting my expectations low, but that ultimately does not matter. What matters is that, against all odds, Tower of Terror is a good movie.

Steve Guttenberg stars as a sleazy photojournalist for a National Enquirer type publication, where he publishes hoax stories of alien autopsies & ghostly apparitions. Child actor (turned indie darling) Kirsten Dunst co-leads as his accomplice & niece, helping The Gutte fulfill his obvious destiny as a Goofy Uncle archetype. The pair get in over their heads when a mysterious old woman rope them into investigating a real life paranormal mystery, a 1939 incident at the infamous Hollywood Hotel that occurred on Halloween night. That evening, during a glamorous Halloween party (complete with big band swing music) a Shirley Temple/Baby Jane Hudson archetype mysteriously disappeared along with her drunk parents, her nanny, and a bellhop when the elevator car was struck by magic lightning. The answer to the mystery of what caused this supernatural event is explained upfront with the old lady’s tales of evil witchcraft and a Book of Souls MacGuffin. As Dunst & The Gutte search for this all-powerful talisman in the haunted hotel, however, the source of that witchcraft is called into question and the ghosts of the missing weigh in on what really happened that Halloween night. It all has very little to do with the actual Tower of Terror ride, but as a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by way of Hocus Pocus or Jumanji plot, it all works out as a perfectly entertaining children’s creepshow.

The actual Tower of Terror at the Disney amusement park is also shaped like a 1930s hotel and was actually utilized for the film’s frequent exterior shots to establish setting & mood. The ride is Twilight Zone-themed, however, which is a licensing choice this made-for-TV venture couldn’t afford to make. Instead, the hotel is utilized as a kind of standard issue haunted house contraption where headless figures brandishing meat cleavers, singing child ghosts dressed like the twins from The Shining, and elevators full of hellfire pop up from around corners to startle the audience. Instead of treating the film like a single trip through this haunted space like an amusement park ride, however, its ghostly mystery & fascination with witchcraft is spread over several days. This allows for long, bizarre speeches about “banishing children to the underworld” and how the lightning “half-zapped” everyone in the elevator, trapping them in limbo. Director D.J. MacHale doesn’t have many credits to his name, except that he helmed twenty episodes of the Nickelodeon horror anthology Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which almost makes him overqualified for the task. For better or for worse, the movie plays like a feature length episode of that show that just happens to star two recognizable faces (along with exciting bit players like Melora Hardin & John Franklin) and is based off an amusement park ride (complete with mimicking the ride’s elevator drops at its climax, naturally). Expectations aside, it’s a form of entertainment I’ve been trained to appreciate for nearly my entire life.

Somewhere around 2015, as with all Disney properties (including The Haunted Mansion, somehow), there were talks of remaking Tower of Terror as a new, presumably better-funded feature. You can easily see how the studio would find easy potential in that idea, even if they nuke this original version out of existence & return to the property’s Twilight Zone roots. If that idea is dying along with the theme park attraction (which is gradually being replaced with some kind of Guardians of the Galaxy ride), however, the original will still persist as a perfectly entertaining, family-friendly haunted house tour starring Dunst & The Gutte. Even that kind of a modest success exceeds expectation, which is as good of a litmus test for a movie’s worth as anything, I suppose.

-Brandon Ledet