Reviews

Oblivion (2013)

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One of my greatest personal shames is my unwatched physical media pile. I’m especially embarrassed by the DVDs I have left over from Blockbuster Video’s going-out-of-business sales and, even further back, the video rental chain’s regular 4 for $20 liquidation deals. 2013’s Oblivion is a perfect, distilled example of how a movie can collect dust for so long in these locked-away stashes. I’ve always had a suspicion that Oblivion would appeal to my voracious love of pulpy, highly-stylized sci-fi. Its general reputation is muted-to-negative, though, so I was never inspired to urgently pop it in the DVD player until a recent, especially idle night. Luckily, it turns out I was smart to hold onto that used copy of Oblivion for the last five years, as its reputation is a total injustice. Directed by Joseph Kosinski, whose only previous feature was Tron: Legacy (speaking of trashy sci-fi I seem to love more than the general public), Oblivion is a visually stunning slice of modern pulp that alternates between introspective sci-fi mystery & video game-style action violence. It’s a deeply nerdy graphic novel adaptation masquerading as a mainstream blockbuster, the exact kind of hidden gem that only improves as you get further away from its initial critical reception. As much as I would have loved seeing this film’s technical achievements projected as large & loud as possible in 2013, allowing it to quietly simmer in a stack of fellow forgotten titles instead was probably my best possible chance for falling for its geeky, trashy charms.

Tom Cruise stars as the last man on Earth, a government drone assigned to stay behind on a dying planet to repair & maintain more literal government drones. He shares an Apple Store-esque sky apartment with his coworker/wife as they fill their days completing routine tasks for a menacing, off-planet government/corporation. An untrustworthy history of Earth’s demise is plainly spelled out in an up-front information dump, the preferred exposition delivery system of all trashy sci-fi. Several major twists throughout the story (some also delivered via clunky information dumps) disrupt this early narrative wholesale, to the point where the story bends in on itself for a genuinely surprising development or three. The answers aren’t always as satisfying as the mysteries, but I do appreciate its most substantial gearshift more than most audiences seemed to five years ago. Even if the story were a turn-off, though, I don’t understand how audiences couldn’t help but be impressed by Oblivion’s visual achievements. The special effects have held up incredibly well and are backed up by a slick, modernist production design that proposes what might have happened if Steve Jobs collaborated with Spielberg on the set of A.I. The weaponized drones that serve as the film’s major physical threat are genuinely opposing & unnerving, resembling a flying antithesis to the wholesome cuteness of BB-8. The tension between the sleek, introspective mystery that builds off the machine-like coldness of the film’s design and the PG-13 violence of its sci-fi themed video game action sequences makes for a thoroughly engaging, deeply nerdy blockbuster experience, one I should have pulled the trigger on much sooner.

It’s not all that surprising that The Edge of Tomorrow was the 2010s Tom Cruise sci-fi action blockbuster that broke through critically instead of Oblivion. Oblivion isn’t nearly as cool, clever, or self-aware as that fellow graphic novel adaptation, but that uncoolness is a distinct factor in its charms. One of my favorite pieces of film writing all last year was Emily Yoshida’s article “Why Didn’t Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Find its Audience?” In it, Yoshida bucks against the idea that nerds have won the culture war and that geeky media is now officially cool on its own merit. She writes, “When it comes down to it, most people are so, so scared of seeing something uncool. Audiences are conditioned to dismiss unfamiliar, nerdy shit […] If geek culture truly ruled, it would be possible to launch a big budget genre film without an A-lister and a bucket of glib, self-aware jokes, because people would want to see a bunch of weird aliens on principle. We’d have an Ex Machina-grade middle budget sleeper hit every month and nerd-ass shit like Jupiter Ascending would have three squeals lined up.” While it’s true that Tom Cruise is the epitome of an A-lister and has been for a very long time, I think Oblivion easily qualifies as what Yoshida calls “nerd-ass shit.” The film’s endless mythology of its mandatory “memory wipes,” Saturnal moon colonies, and half-buried NYC monuments are almost embarrassingly geeky. That effect is only amplified by its PG-13 rating, which undercuts its brief indulgences in sex & violence to the level of a preteens-marketed comic book. With more self-aware, glib jokes and a hard-R approach to sex & violence, Oblivion might have snuck by the mainstream’s nerd defenses and become a modest hit. As is, it’s an underappreciated gem of slickly-produced, admirably uncool nerd-ass shit I wish I would have seen big & loud when I had the chance, contemporary reviews be damned.

I should also note that this film predicts that the 2017 Superbowl will be the last before Earth falls into chaos. So, if you’re looking to clear those physical media queues before we all bite the dust, now would be a great time to get started.

-Brandon Ledet

Phantom Thread (2017)

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Because of his reputation as a formalist & a high-brow intellect, people often overlook a very important aspect of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, even when heaping on praise: he’s damn funny. This may be because the humor in PTA’s movies is usually coated with a thick grime of terrifying, soul-destroying bitterness. For instance, it’s difficult to describe the humor of Daniel Day-Lewis threatening to slit a stranger’s throat in There Will be Blood or Phillip Seymour Hoffman shouting “pig-Fuck!” in The Master, but those moments are indeed amusingly intense. Anderson’s latest, Phantom Thread, is a wonderful feature-length continuation of this tradition. It may take audiences a few minutes to defrost from the expectation of watching an Important, Oscar-Worthy Drama to realize it, but Phantom Thread really is a wickedly funny movie, the perfect encapsulation of PTA’s bitter, hubristic humor. Detailing the power dynamics of a dangerously tense long-term relationship between a 1950s Londoner dressmaker and his waitress-turned-muse, you might be tempted to assume the film is a tragically dour period piece with little patience for silliness. Instead, Daniel Day-Lewis & relative newcomer Vicky Krieps verbally spar in a nonstop comedic assault for the full two-hour runtime. The film still excels as a gorgeous, meticulously crafted period piece with dead serious things to say about power dynamic struggles in artist-muse romantic relationships; it just does so while making you laugh in wholly unexpected ways at every twisted turn in its intimate, absurdly well-mannered narrative. Paul Thomas Anderson has certainly been funny before, but never at this duration or consistency.

Reynolds Woodcock is sure to be remembered as one of the greater, more intense characters ever performed onscreen, a name as iconic as Norman Bates or Rupert Pupkin or, appropriately enough, Daniel Plainview. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the renowned dressmaker with the delicate, careful darkness of Werner Herzog’s speaking voice. Having let the praise for his (admittedly gorgeous) dress designs go to his head, Woodcock has devolved into an insufferable twerp who demands that the army of women who actually put in the labor to make his business functional (including a rotating cast of muses-du-jour) bend to his every whim at a moment’s notice. Phantom Thread flirts with the thematic possibilities of championing the unnoticed work of the women whom Woodcock steamrolls or parsing out exactly what he means when he describes himself as an “incurable confirmed bachelor.” Mostly, though, it just has a quiet laugh at the tension his function as a tyrannical drama queen generates in a house of women who do not have the power to tell him “No.” This dynamic shifts when his latest muse, Alma (Krieps), refuses to be steamrolled along with the rest and defiantly intends to treat Woodcock like the “spoiled little baby” he truly is. From then on, the movie details a three-way power struggle within the Woodcock household (Lesley Manville holds down the third corner as Reynold’s deliciously icy sister, Cyril), with everyone involved seemingly getting perverted pleasure out of the clash, regardless of their overly dramatic complaints. Despite his delicate, mannered exterior, Woodcock drives, eats, and structures his romances like a thrill-seeking maniac. It turns out he enjoys having his hubristic displays of power challenged, though, something no woman in his life had ever dared to do before Alma (besides his cutthroat, no-bullshit sister). Through that challenge they build a curiously violent, deceptively well-balanced life together.

You may be able to find a better version of this kind of tragically classy romance in an Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk picture. The Love Witch may be a flashier attempt at a playfully fashionable period pastiche with strong feminist themes. mother! may offer a more convincingly absurdist critique of artist-muse relationship dynamics. The Duke of Burgundy may be a more immersively gorgeous, cheekily fun examination of power struggles in a kinkily-mannered long-term romance. What Phantom Thread offers that resists comparison to other works is a very particular sense of humor distinct to Anderson’s collaborative energy with Day-Lewis. It’s difficult to describe why Woodcock peering menacingly over his glasses or the way PTA substitutes food for sex in this picture are so wickedly amusing; I actually suspect a lot of people won’t see it that way at all, given the subjective nature of humor. If you enter Phantom Thread looking for a modernist critique of the tyrannical Troubled Artist type set against a visually interesting backdrop & a sweeping, classy score (from fellow frequent PTA collaborator & Radiohead vet Jonny Greenwood), the movie is more than happy to oblige you. If you’re not laughing through the tension of the weaponized “polite” exchanges between Reynolds, Alma, and Cyril Woodcock, though, I’m not sure you’re fully appreciating what the movie is offering. This really is one of the finest comedies I’ve seen in a while. It has a wickedly peculiar, distinct sense of humor to it that you won’t find in many other features, a comedic tone Reynolds himself would likely describe as “a little naughty.” Just pray you don’t find yourself in a dead silent audience of intellectuals hellbent on taking every detail of that naughtiness seriously.

-Branodn Ledet

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

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It’s not exactly a fresh, revolutionary impulse to point out that women’s accomplishments have been historically swept under the rug to make room for the acknowledgment of men’s, but I can think of few better examples of that injustice in cinema than the case of Lotte Reiniger. Even as someone who regularly seeks out traditional animation, I’m just hearing of Reiniger for the first time in my 30s, when she should be just as much of a household name as Walt Disney or Hayao Miyazaki. Only preceded by a couple lost Romanian films, Reniger’s magnum opus The Adventures of Prince Achmed is considered to be the oldest surviving animated feature film. Produced over three physically taxing years on the floor of a German garage with a full crew, it’s a work not only impressive for it value as a historical landmark, but for its passionately intricate artistry. Inspired by live action shadow puppetry, Reniger invented her own style of animation involving cardboard cutout silhouettes, thin sheets of lead for shading, and a rudimentary multiplane camera. It was a method that was reasonably suited for her many experiments in short films, but proved painstakingly complex for a feature. It wouldn’t be until Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves over a decade later that another animated feature would even attempt to follow in its footsteps, as the early processes for traditional animation required phenomenal feats of labor at that length. It’s amazing that Reiniger took on that process as a D.I.Y. art project instead of a commercial enterprise, an accomplishment that isn’t as loudly or as frequently lauded as it obviously should be.

Truth be told, the narrative explored in The Adventures of Prince Achmed is not nearly as interesting as its visual form. As the title suggests, the film works as a kind of anthology of tangential adventure short stories, an attractive structure for a filmmaker looking to graduate from shorts to features. Mining Middle Eastern folktales pulled from Arabian Nights, these strung-together adventures follow the handsome, titular Prince Achmed as he confronts witches, demons, magicians, and sorcerers in an effort to rescue two damsels in distress: his sister & his beloved. There’s a fair amount of outdated politics to be expected in this silent era German film that extend far beyond sidelined women waiting to be rescued. Middle Eastern culture-gazing & offensive Jewish stereotypes also sour some of the film’s magic at the border of the frame. The anthologized approached to feature-length storytelling also becomes disruptive at a critical point in the film when a side plot involving Aladdin (yes, that Aladdin) overpowers Achmed’s foreground narrative. Still, even for all its outdated politics & structural faults as an exercise in feature-length storytelling, the film is downright intoxicating as a visual piece. Tinted color frames, intricate lacework-style cutouts, and mythical creatures like a flying horse & a gaggle of gorgeous peacock women conjure a magic far more powerful than any modern, nitpicky concerns about the story they serve. In more ways than one, this film is a testament to the transformative powers of animation. Backlit slivers of cardboard & a thin, anthologized story shouldn’t amount to anything nearly this substantial.

I’d just as much recommend reading up on Lotte Reiniger as a historical figure as I’d urge you to watch her landmark magnum opus. My public domain DVD of The Adventures of Prince Achmed included a biographical feature titled Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film that was an especially good primer for discovering a life well-lived, if not well-enough known. Even if you’re just browsing her Wikipedia page, though, you’ll be taken aback by how such a significant artist is so blatantly absent from The Most Accomplished Auteurs of All Time conversations. Much like with stop-motion animation, her silhouette technique has a handmade quality to it where you can see the humanity behind the artistry onscreen. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a must-see for film nerds & history buffs, but what’s even more pressing is that we start including Reiniger among the names of directors who pioneered cinema as a medium. The shadow puppetry element of her work suggests a kind of old-fashioned artistry, but her advancement of traditional animation & early adoption of a multiplane camera setup position as her as a trailblazer, one whose name should be on everyone’s tongue.

-Brandon Ledet

Paddington 2 (2018)

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“If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.”

I stubbornly ignored all recommendations for the first Paddington film for a solid two years, mostly out of disgust & disinterest inspired by its advertising. The CGI design of the titular bear was especially a huge turn-off, giving off the feeling of a computer-animated Charmin commercial flavored with a pinch of British whimsy. When the unanimous praise for Paddington 2 started rolling in recently, I finally decided to give the first one a shot (it was lurking on Netflix, after all). The experience turned out much better than other recent experiments where I allowed critical praise to bully me into watching children’s films I had zero interest in (Moana and Coco both come to mind), but I still couldn’t quite match the consensus enthusiasm. Paddington is a decent, occasionally clever children’s film about an undeniably lovable bear. Paddington 2, it turns out, is a massive improvement on that initial outing: a total, absurdly wholesome joy. Where the first film only got past my heartless cynic defenses enough to elicit a few chuckles & “awwwww”s, the sequel made me cry for the last five minutes solid, both out of grief & out of elation. Paddington 2 reminds me of the trajectory of the Babe series, where the first film is a simple, adorable portrait of a wholesome talking animal and the second, Pig in the City, is a feverishly ambitious work of fine art that contrasts that lovable animal against a harshly cruel world that does not deserve them. Like Babe, Paddington makes everything he touches better through pure, unashamed kindness, so it only makes sense that his own film franchise would only get better the more time it spends with him.

I suspect this is a holdover from the Paddington storybooks, but the real crux of this series is its function as an allegory about modern immigration. An orphaned bear “from deepest, darkest Peru,” Paddington is a sweetly polite, courteous cub who is shunned on sight by most strangers he greets in London. Peter Capadli is the most flagrant racist in Paddington’s life, referring to the bear as “an undesirable” and forming a “community defense force” to keep an eye on his potentially criminal behavior. The first Paddington film profiles a white, affluent London family (featuring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville & The Shape of Water’s Sally Hawkins) as they grow to love the bear for the kindness inside him, despite their initial prejudices. Paddington 2 finds their neighborhood transformed into a harmonious cultural tapestry where people of widely varied backgrounds coexist in functional peace, thanks largely to Paddington’ s bottomless aptitude for kindness & politeness. We then see how grim the world becomes without the impossibly wholesome influence of this Peruvian bear. While merely attempting to purchase a birthday present for his aunt, Paddington is framed for a white man’s crime and leveled with a ten-year prison sentence, thanks largely to old-fashioned racial profiling. Of course, he makes the best of this situation as he can, transforming his Dickensian hellhole of a prison into something resembling a Wes Anderson confectionary or a live-action adaptation of Animal Crossing. It’s still a difficult-to-stomach injustice, though, one that leads to a speeding train conclusion more befitting of an action thriller than a children’s movie. I don’t want to spoil any of the weird, emotionally traumatic places the movie goes as its story flies off the rails in a delightfully excessive climax, but I will say this: when Paddington does finally get his aunt a birthday present, I cried like an idiot baby. I’m having a difficult time just writing about it without crying; it’s that goddamn wholesome.

Besides its heartwarming empathy for immigration narratives and general, genuine sweetness, the Paddington franchise also impress as a visual achievement. The dollhouse miniatures of the first film were an excellent start for an aesthetic perfected in the second. Paddington 2 is a multimedia sensory experience, mixing in 2-D pencil-sketch animation, pop-up book landscapes, and even more complex miniatures to convincingly capture a sense of childlike wonder. There has always been dissent against the wholesome tweeness of visual artists like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson (whose Grand Budapest Hotel feels like an especially strong influence here), but those naysayers typically don’t give full credit to the deeply devastating sadness that lurks just under their works’ meticulously manicured surfaces. Paddington 2 nails both sides of that divide – the visually precious and the emotionally fragile – while teaching kids an important lesson about applying simple concepts like politeness & manners to their interactions with social & cultural outsiders. It also backs up its precious visual indulgences with an informed, classic sense of physical comedy, directly influenced by silent era legends like Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton. I could see an outsider being turned off by the promised whimsy of the film’s steampunk circus backdrop, treasure map side plot, and cutesy pop-up book illustration asides, but director Paul King carefully arranges all these visual influences & aesthetic touches with such a careful sense of craft that it’s near impossible not to be won over by them in the moment. We always say we wish more children’s films were ambitious in their craft & purposeful in their thematic messaging; Paddington 2 wholly satisfies both demands.

I don’t want to suggest that watching the first Paddington movie was a waste of time or a total letdown. If nothing else, it functions as a kind of superhero origin story (if kindness & politeness can be understood as superpowers), laying a lot of the visual & metaphorical groundwork for what’s accomplished in its magnificent sequel. It’s worth watching just to get accustomed to Paddington’s world, as everyone from the director to single-scene side characters returned for the second go. Everything about Paddington 2 is an improvement on its predecessor, though. The physical comedy is funnier. The visual craft is more inspired. The villain is more entertaining & complex (I swear Hugh Grant is channeling Theatre of Blood-era Vincent Price here). Even Paddington’s impossibly sweet selflessness in the face of prejudice – as he sacrifices his freedom to improve someone else’s birthday – comes across more clearly. Paddington 2 is the perfect, heartwarmingly empathetic children’s film confectionary everyone’s been trying to sell me with the first movie for the last two years. Now it’s my turn to be an annoyance and hyperbolically promote this picture to people who have zero interest in watching it.

-Brandon Ledet

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2018)

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Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the exact kind of movie that’s destined to be undervalued & taken for granted on sight. The first picture from the Studio Ghibli spinoff production company Studio Ponoc, it’s automatically going to suffer many unflattering comparisons to classic Hayao Miyazaki works like Kiki’s Delivery Service & Spirited Away. Adapted from the 1971 fantasy novel The Little Broomstick, which heavily features a school for witches & wizards, the film is also likely to be compared unfavorably to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (which likely borrowed just as much from its source material as it did elsewhere; Rowling’s work is practically a pastiche). Instant familiarity is destined to temper a lot of enthusiasm for Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but that kind of dismissive ungratefulness doesn’t consider just how rare of a treat this kind of thoughtful, traditionally animated work actually is on the modern children’s film cinema landscape. Given how much of a sucker I was for the goofy magic of The Worst Witch (speaking of works that likely heavily inspired Harry Potter) and the anime-lite tones of Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland at the time, I’m convinced this would have been my favorite movie as a kid, were it released in the early 1990s. Anime has gradually become the last refuge for thematically thoughtful, intricately crafted traditional 2D animation. It’s worth celebrating a new studio’s arrival as a contributor to keeping that tradition alive instead of brushing them off for feeling like they’ve always been around. Besides, as a subject, witchcraft is just inherently badass.

The titular Mary is a bored preteen wasting away the final scraps of her summer in her great-aunt’s gorgeous country home. This idleness inspires her to follow a couple mischievous kittens into the woods in a down-the-rabbit-hole experience that lands her in a magical realm of witchy universities, mad scientists, and wild hybrid beasts that resemble psychedelic Pokémon. She accidentally stumbles into a Chosen One plot arc in this new world thanks to a magical flower & a sassy broomstick that temporarily grant her extraordinary witch powers. From there, it’s a race against the clock for Mary to save a damsel in distress Anime Boy from the clutches of the evil schoolmarm & her side kick scientist and to put a stop to put their cruel animal experiments before she’s found out to not be the Chosen One at all, but rather an intruder & a fraud. The story Mary and the Witch’s Flower tells isn’t nearly as complex thematically as it is impressive visually. The lessons learned here are, again, familiar to classic children’s media narratives: learning to be confident in your own abilities and accepting the things you cannot change about yourself (especially your physical attributes). The movie is much more interesting in the way it wakes its young audience up the magic of the mundane. Simple, everyday activity like the pleasure of gardening and the science of electricity is framed as a kind of real-world witchcraft, enticing children to find interest in both magic & science and the grey area between them. It may not be a mind-blowing feat in intricate storytelling, but it is adorably animated and easy to love. This is the exact kind of immersive comfort food I would have ground into dust, were it released in the days of obsessively repeated VHS viewings.

Instead of focusing on how Mary and the Witch’s Flower isn’t quite as intricately animated as Ghibli classics or as immersive in its books-long world-building as the Harry Potter series, I was swept away by its warm, familiar charm. It’s an increasingly rare treat to see traditional animation on the big screen in recent years, anime or otherwise, and I greatly appreciate the arrival of Studio Ponoc (and the surprisingly trustworthy distribution company GKIDS) for keeping the experience alive. The onscreen witchcraft was dazzling. The glockenspiel-heavy score occasionally felt like a G-rated Suspiria. The world it created was a fantasy space I’d love to mentally dwell in for a magical eternity. The only real bummer for me was that the theater was sparsely attended by appreciative cinema & anime nerds instead of being packed with wide-eyed, witchy children. I would have loved for Mary and the Witch’s Flower’s easy familiarity to have been a result of it always being in my life the way titles like Little Nemo & The Worst Witch have; I hope it finds the right kids at the right time so they can have that experience in my place.

-Brandon Ledet

Saving Face (2004)

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There’s a distinct style of comedy cinema that’s rooted more in the humor of recognition than it is in the intricate construction of a punchline or bit. It’s a mode of humor that’s more likely to make you say, “That’s so true!” than it is to double you over with laughter. That humorous recognition of truth is usually tied to a highly specific cultural or economic backdrop so that it can hinge its observations on minute details & personal experiences. Sometimes these hyper-specific cultural narratives can break through to a larger audience by tapping into universally relatable truths, as was the case with last year’s Pakistani-American medical dramedy The Big Sick. Sometimes they’re unfairly forgotten or buried by the larger public on the face value of their surface details, as seemed to be the case with black, lesbian political meta-comedy The Watermelon Woman. 2004’s Saving Face appears to fall halfway between those two points. It experienced neither the breakout success of The Big Sick, nor the hellish distribution limbo of The Watermelon Woman. It’s just as culturally & personally specific as either work, though, detailing the sexual & romantic follies of two generations of Chinese-American women living in New York City. Saving Face builds its narrative tension around a mother-daughter relationship as the two women struggle to reconcile their private sexuality with their public personas & the cultural norms within their conservative Chinese-American community. Constantly referencing soap operas for context, it’s a movie that is not at all afraid of grand gestures of drama & sentimentality. Mostly, though, it’s mostly a personal, culturally specific comedy of recognition, where humor is mined more from observations of miniscule, real-life details than it is from over-the-top scenarios or dialogue.

A middle-aged mother strives to improve her adult children’s lives even though her son is a successful businessman and her daughter is a skilled, in-demand surgeon. She intends on making her daughter’s social status more respectable by essentially arranging her marriage to a series of ill-fitting men who frequent their community’s regular soirees. Two crises within these women’s lives flip this power dynamic in time: the daughter is a closeted lesbian who has zero romantic interest in her mother’s proposed beaus and the mother becomes pregnant outside of wedlock, which excommunicates her from their traditionalist, conservative community. Both women struggle with maintaining privacy & social decorum in the tension between their private relationships & their public personas. The daughter falls in love with a dancer who pressures her to find the courage to come out. The mother keeps the identity of her unborn child’s father a secret as she struggles to adjust to a more independent NYC lifestyle. The daughter even reverses their original dynamic by setting her mother up on dates with men whom she has no interest in. The whole thing blows up in soap opera-worthy displays of sentimentality at both a wedding & an airport before sweetly settling on a position of “Fuck ‘em,” with the two women resolving to live as their true selves with confidence instead of fretting over public condemnation. Their self-confidence and their familiar relationship are stronger for the crisis. Their community is also given more of an impetus to catch up with the evolving morals of modern life. The dramatic struggles of Saving Face are mostly intimate & insular before their climactic soap opera blow-ups and the whole move is guided by a subtle, empathetic hand as two-well-defined female characters learn how to become their best possible selves. It’s endearing.

It’s no surprise to learn that writer-director Alice Wu based much of Saving Face off her own personal experiences with coming out as lesbian in her Chinese-American community. This is the kind of delicately comedic, occasionally sentimental work that requires highly specific personal & cultural details at the margins to resonate with an audience. I don’t intend to suggest that it’s entirely stylistically muted either. An occasional eccentric reaction shot or the mother telling her daughter things like, “Had I known you would be so ungrateful, I would have held you in” punches up the comedy beats. Grand romantic gestures at the climax and touches like a tender sex scene set to a Cat Power ballad anchor the dramatic end as well. A scene where the daughter finally verbalizes her hidden sexual orientation to her mother, who was already reluctantly aware of it as a kind of open secret, is especially complex in its dramatic tones (as well as being an incredibly well-handled exchange between actors Joan Chen & Michelle Krusiec). For the most part, though, Saving Face’s dramatic and comedic beats impress in the way they ring true to real life detail & lived experience. It’s a type of comedy that sometimes breaks through to find mass appeal, but is much more significant in the way it offers representation to communities that aren’t used to seeing themselves visible onscreen. I’m sure there’s a Chinese-American lesbian out there in a major US city with an early 00s coming out story very similar to Wu’s, for whom this is the greatest, most relatable film ever made. It’s a kind of personal touch we could stand to champion more prominently as audiences, even if it isn’t nearly as flashy as more traditional, over-the-top comedies.

-Brandon Ledet

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

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Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Call Me by Your Name (based on the André Aciman novel of the same name), has earned loads of critical acclaim since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last January and subsequent Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. After watching the film for the first time last night, I can truly say that it lives up to the hype. Here I am, an entire day later, still thinking about all the beautiful scenes shot on 35mm film. In addition to the movie’s vibrant beauty, its ability to pull the audience in emotionally is incredible. The entire theater was silent (minus a few sniffles for those heartbreaking moments) as everyone was wide-eyed and open-mouthed.  It felt like we were part of a virtual reality experiment.

The film is set in northern Italy during the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) are spending time at their Italian villa. Elio’s father is a professor of archaeology and invites a handsome young research assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to stay with them during the summer. Elio is a seventeen year old with wit and talent beyond his age, and Oliver, while extremely intelligent, falls a little into the frat boy stereotype. At first, the two develop a friendship that involves intellectual conversation, daily swims in gorgeous Italian waters, and going out to local night clubs. Slowly, Elio begins to develop more of a sexual interest in Oliver. Without stating that he is homosexual or bisexual, he approaches Oliver and makes his desires known. Oliver, while hesitant at first, indulges in these desires as he feels the same for Elio. The two then engage in a very brief, yet passionate affair over the summer.

What I love the most about Call Me by Your Name is the film’s pace. It doesn’t move too fast or too slow; it’s just the right speed. There’s a gradual build-up before Elio and Oliver consummate their relationship, but the film doesn’t come to an abrupt end after this occurs. Instead, the audience is able to watch their relationship blossom into something beautiful. This kind of intimacy was responsible for getting me so emotionally invested in the film. Understanding Elio’s feelings before he approached Oliver and watching the passion between them grow more and more each time they were together was absolutely magical.

This is the first Guadagnino film I’ve seen, and I am immensely impressed by his ability to create an atmosphere that is so appealing to all the senses. I could taste the fresh apricot juice as it was flowing down Oliver’s throat. I could feel the warmth of the sun as it was beaming down on Elio’s face. Even the use of music in the film was phenomenal. From the memorable sequence of Oliver dancing in his high socks and Converse shoes to The Psychedelic Furs hit, “Love My Way” to Sufjan Stevens’ “Mystery of Love” (nominated for Best Original Song) during Elio’s heartfelt moment of self-reflection, all of the film’s musical components add emphasis to these little moments.

While the performances from Chalamet and Hammer were above par, the most pivotal exchange in the film is Stuhlbarg’s monologue during a father/son discussion that goes beyond a father telling his son that he’s supportive of his sexuality. Chalamet showed up and showed out during this scene, and it had everyone in the theater in tears. In film, these conversations usually occur between mother and son because the father is usually too “macho” to understand anything about homosexuality. I was thrilled that this memorable moment was shared between Elio and his dad rather than Elio and his mom.

Call Me by Your Name is a coming of age love story that has left me with nothing but fond memories. I’m looking forward to watching this one a few more times once it’s released on DVD.

-Britnee Lombas

The Open House (2018)

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Warning: Spoilers ahead!

A Netflix Original thriller set in a big, spooky house deep in the mountains seemed like the perfect first 2018 film for me to watch. I made a cup of hot chocolate with whole milk just for the occasion. For the majority of The Open House, I was on the edge of my seat. My anxiety levels were at an all-time high as I waited for the killer to be revealed so I could get some closure. Unfortunately, that never happened. Not only was the killer’s face never shown, but the two individuals being hunted by the killer both die in the end. I’ve never been more disappointed in the ending of a film in my entire life. Concluding a film with unanswered questions is quite common and even enjoyable if done properly, but The Open House doesn’t leave many clues for viewers to come up with their own version of who the killer was or why was he/she so set on killing our main characters. It’s a damn shame because everything leading up to the ending was actually entertaining.

The Open House gets its cheesy title from its setting: a mansion in the mountains that is on the market. After the sudden death of her husband, Naomi (Piercey Dalton) and her son Logan (Dylan Minnette) are forced to move into her sister’s mountain mansion until it sells due to financial reasons. From the moment they settle in, strange things start to occur. The pilot light turns off while Naomi takes showers, Logan’s phone goes missing, the basement door randomly opens, etc. Their creepy neighbor, Martha, makes an appearance a handful of times, and each one is more peculiar than the next. There’s even a scene where Dylan is in the pitch black basement and Martha’s face appears behind him. For a good while, it seems as though Martha is responsible for the mysterious happenings, but then Chris (Sharif Atkins), the friendly salesman Naomi meets in town, randomly shows up at the house. He claims that he noticed the open house sign in the front of the road, and he is interested in taking a look inside. Naomi lets him in, and while she isn’t looking, he disappears into the basement with a unsettling look on his face. At this point, he becomes a suspicious character as well.

The film’s pace picks up quickly when Naomi is out on the town and receives a call from her sister informing her that someone broke into the house. Once the police arrive, they aren’t much help and basically blame the break in on local kids pranking around. Chris is then invited to spend the night to provide some comfort to Naomi and Logan since there scared shitless. Because Chris had this artificial kindness to him, I really thought that he was going to reveal himself as the person responsible for all the strange activity, but Logan ends up finding him with a slit throat in their family SUV. Was Chris’s character purposely supposed to seem suspicious or was Sharif Atkins a crappy actor? We may never know.  Logan then gets his head bashed into the window and is doused with water while passed out in freezing temperatures by what appears to be a man. With Chris scratched off my suspect list and the killer not matching Martha’s physique, I assume that this person may be Martha’s son or husband.

The unknown killer then gets into bed with Naomi with his hands in prayer position across his chest. This was probably the most bone chilling part in the film for me. Naomi gets up to use the bathroom and gets back into bed with him! I’m assuming this is a California king size bed for her to not even flinch before getting in. As soon as she realizes the creep in the bed, he captures her, ties her up, and breaks her fingers one by one. Frozen Logan makes it back into the house, and accidentally stabs his mother, which then led me to believe that he was going to get Final Boy status because one of them would need to survive in the end, right? Nope. Just when I thought Logan escaped, he meets his death by the still unknown killer, and the movie comes to an abrupt end.

The ending just felt so lazy. There were so many cool elements in this film that could’ve been used to create a jaw-dropping conclusion, but all the buildup in the film’s last 20 minutes led to nothing but disappointment. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, even though the film is available on Netflix. Watch The Open House only if you enjoy frustration and disappointment.

-Britnee Lombas

Mom and Dad (2018)

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Over-the-top Nicolas Cage performances are often conversationally boiled down to a single moment of absurdist novelty. Entire movies are remembered solely as “the one where Nic Cage yells about the bees,” “the one where Nic Cage angrily recites the alphabet,” or “the one where Nic Cage stares at imaginary iguanas.” By that measurement, Mom and Dad will surely be remembered as “the one where Nic Cage destroys a pool table with a sledgehammer while singing ‘The Hokey Pokey.’” It’s that exact kind of delirious lunacy trash-hungry audiences pray for in every Nic Cage cheapie, a novelty he stubbornly withholds in most of his direct-to-VOD dreck. Admittedly, though, the “Hokey Pokey” scene in Mom and Dad is only a brief diversion (in a movie composed almost entirely of brief diversions). He doesn’t even sing the entirety of the novelty dance song before he runs out of energy, just barking out a few lines in a single angry burst. The absurdist novelty of that moment cannot be undervalued, though; it truly is a wonder to behold. It’s also just one minor detail in a much larger, nastier tapestry of unexplainable violent outbursts. Mom and Dad thankfully amounts to much more than merely being “the one where Nic Cage destroys a pool table with a sledgehammer while singing ‘The Hokey Pokey.’” It’s also a wickedly fun satire about modern families’ barely concealed hatred for their own, a chaotic portrait of selfishness & self-loathing in the modern suburban home.

Cage stars opposite Selma Blair as middle-aged parents struggling to find fulfillment within a traditionalist family unit. Light banter barely disguises parents’ & kids’ seething hatred for each other as they lie, cheat, steal, and insult their bonds into tatters. This tension transforms into externalized violence when an unexplained supernatural event compels all parents of children everywhere to murder their own offspring in an epidemic of blind rage. Some of the widespread fallout of this event is captured in flashes of news coverage and in sequences of blood-splattered mayhem as parents swarm like zombie hoards to pick up their kids from schools & hospital nurseries. Mostly, though, the violence is contained to the suburban housing development where Cage & Blair’s rabid parents live. They chase their children around their home with various domestic objects, hellbent on murdering the ungrateful little brats while still doling out weaponized barbs of parental advice & commands. Meanwhile, memories & daydreams yank the audience outside the chaos of the moment to consider how the self-loathing midlife crises that preceded this bloodbath aren’t actually all that different from the violence itself. These relationships were never healthy, even when they were covered up with a smile instead of the buzz of an electric-powered jigsaw. This is an inversion of the dark humor we’re used to seeing in pictures like Cooties & The Children, where the kids are the otherworldly creatures to be feared. Here, parents are made to fear themselves, especially in regard to their unexamined jealousies & resentments toward their own offspring, who still have their glory years ahead of them instead of bitterly fading in the rearview on the road to selfless familial sacrifice.

Judging by the general negative reaction to last year’s similarly cartoonish home invasion horror comedy The Babysitter, I suspect many audiences will be frustrated by the frantic tone & editing rhythms of Mom and Dad. This is, paradoxically, a hyperactive movie with zero narrative momentum. Individual moments may indulge in the sugary energy of a breakfast cereal commercial and the whole thing is scored with a barrage of playful pop music, but its commitment to tangential asides & abrasive flashbacks often keeps its story static. Fully enjoying Mom and Dad, then, requires a forgiving appreciation of its pitch-black comedic nastiness, a wicked sense of humor where every parent is an untrustworthy monster and no child, neither newborn nor middle-aged, is safe from the malicious creatures who spawned them. I do think the movie plays it a little safe when it comes to explicitly depicting that child-endangering violence onscreen, especially in comparison to the recent cheap-o monster movie Clown. What it lacks in shock value brutality, however, it makes up for in a gruesome tone & worldview. The movie hides behind tongue-in-cheek touches like a 70s exploitation-themed credits sequence & stylized dialogue like “My mom is a penis,” but just under its ironic camp surface rots a charred, bitterly angry heart, one with no respect for the almighty Family Values that mainstream America holds so dear. To be honest, it’s a dynamic I find much more honest & relatable than the Family Above Everything messaging offered in feel-good-films like Coco. Even if you’ve never had a family member chase you down the hallway with a meat-tenderizer, Mom and Dad’s violent, deep-seated resentment is sure to resonate with you on some level (especially if you’re a middle-aged parent with ungrateful teens at home).

Show up for Nic Cage destroying a pool table with a sledgehammer while singing “The Hokey Pokey;” stay for the pitch-black humor about “successful” adults who find their manicured, suburban lives with the right career & the right family bitterly unfulfilling. Nic Cage is literally barking mad in this picture and is destined to steal much of its spotlight, but Selma Blair & Crank director Brian Taylor match his energy admirably at every step. This is a deranged collaboration among that unholy trinity and no family bond, no matter how sacred, is safe in its satirical war path. Mom and Dad may occasionally stumble in terms of pacing or tone, but you have to respect this kind of gleefully taboo social anarchy, especially coming from a comedy.

-Brandon Ledet

The Hatred (2017)

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Sometimes a movie comes along that’s so awful, you wonder why anyone even tried, or how anyone who watched the final product could have ever signed off on its release. The Hatred is such a film: a bargain basement haunted house flick about four young women and a little girl being terrorized by the apparition of the long-dead daughter of a Nazi war criminal via a mystical object that induces hatred. It’s as nonsensical as it sounds.

The film opens with an overly long sepia-drenched prologue showing the day-to-day rural “1950s” life of Samuel Sears (Andrew Divoff, aka the title character of the Wishmaster series, and definitely someone who deserved better than this), an escaped Nazi higher-up who now lives a life of simplicity on his “farm” alongside his wife Miriam (Nina Siemaszko) and daughter Alice (Darby Walker). Samuel receives an ugly iron cross talisman along with a personal letter of thanks from Hitler himself for his service, both of which he boards up inside his Nazi paraphernalia room. Alice, ignorant of her father’s past, wants to start going in to town and open herself up to being courted by local boys, but Samuel keeps her locked away in their home. One day, however, his anger is so great that he drowns Alice in a water trough and hides her body. The local police are unable to locate her body and assume that she has run away. Miriam eventually kills Samuel and leaves the home herself, never to appear in the film again.

In the present day, Regan (Sarah Davenport) is en route to the home of a family friend/professor, to babysit his daughter Irene (Shae Smolik) for a period of time. My apologies if this is vague, but so is the screenplay. Along for the weekend (?) are her friends (Gabrielle Bourne, Bayley Corman, and Alisha Wainwright). After a couple of run-of-the-mill scares and the occasional bump in the night, the ghost of Ashley enacts revenge and picks the girls off one by one until the film concludes with Generic Horror Ending 3.01A: Final Girl™ and Precocious Innocent Child™ escape from Haunted House™.

This feels like a movie that fell through a portal to a parallel dimension where David Decoteau makes films for a straight male audience. Decoteau, for those not in the know, earned his stripes directing B-horror fare like Creepazoids! and sequels to various Full Moon properties, like Puppet Master and Prehysteria. In the late nineties and continuing into the new millennium, however, he took up directing direct-to-video in-name-only horror flicks starring young actors and underwear models looking to break into the industry. His filmography is largely composed of fare like The Brotherhood and its five (!) sequels, Boy Crazies, Haunted Frat, and other homoerotic “movies” that exist primarily as vehicles for long, static scenes of nubile white twinks with only one film credit showering and running around the woods in their briefs. Also, sometimes Alexandra Paul is there.

With the rise and spread (no pun intended) of the internet, the demand for softcore not-quite-porn subsided, leading Decoteau to new heights of laziness, churning out family fare like A Talking Cat?! and An Easter Bunny Puppy. This isn’t meant to be a dig at Decoteau; the man got his start working for Roger Corman after all, and movies like Beastly Boyz are an important part of DTV film history even if they’re no longer relevant. And the man obviously learned a lot from Corman, seeing as he managed to release seven films in 2011 alone. The problem is that it’s painfully apparent that he’s not even trying anymore. He just shoots all of his movies in and around his house now, with no attempt to hide his apathetic approach to cinema (there’s a couch made out of the back of a VW Beetle that appears in every single film).

The Hatred is in this same vein. The midcentury “farmhouse” that is the setting for the introduction (which takes up over a quarter of the film’s runtime and is, despite its laziness, still the best part of the film) is obviously a modern home, in spite of the half-assed attempts to disguise this with set dressing. It’s not out of the question that the Sears family would have a wicker loveseat or ornamental mirrors, but they probably wouldn’t have been the kind you can see at your nearest Target, or have been awkwardly placed in the background in such a way that it was obviously covering a modern electrical outlet. The sepia is so omnipresent that you get the feeling you’re watching a film set in the 1800s, not the 1950s, and the dissonance of that visual rhetoric makes it impossible to take it seriously, even when Divoff, Siemaszko, and Walker are giving decent performances (regardless of truly atrocious dialogue).

This is a movie that’s coming apart at its (very visible) seams at all times. The location is never established in the dialogue; there’s a shot of the North Carolina flag early in the film, but when Regan’s gaggle of gal pals is giving her a hard time about her decision to move to “the country” from “the city,” we’re never given a clear picture of where either of these places are supposed to be. Is “the city” Raleigh? Is “the country” Louisburg? The lines as written and recited paint a picture of Regan as a NYC gal moving to some distant backwater. There’s an ineffable haziness to the whole film that would be notable if the filmmaker was creating a timeless dreamlike Everywhere, but it’s not–it’s just lazy. As further illustration, in the same scene where this “expository” dialogue is spoken, the girls express appreciation for “hot cowboys.” The audience does not see these cowboys in a reverse shot, nor did the director stick an extra in a flannel shirt and jeans and have him pass between the women and the camera; it’s just the four of them looking off-camera and exaggeratedly waggling their eyebrows. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

What separates this from being a true alternate universe Decoteau film, however, is the overall lack of any impropriety. One of the girls (Stock Character 40A.4™) is killed by the vengeful spirit while talking her boyfriend out of phone sex, which is so scandal-free it’s almost laughable. There are no shower scenes or long tracking shots of Regan and a friend slowly walking down a hallway in their bleach-white undergarments. All of the girls are quite pretty and are perfectly suitable as the gender-bent equivalents of Decoteau’s stable of twunks. In fact, I would dare say that they’re all far more talented than any of the one-and-done “actors” from Decoteau’s films, giving performances that range from passable to decent, although the lead actress feels a little insincere, like an overly-kind waitress that you recognize is being nice to you because she has to (here’s a tip, boys: she’s never flirting with you; she’s working).

Normally, even if a film is objectively bad, we here at Swampflix can still find something nice to say about it, or advise that there could be a specific audience who could glean some nugget of joy from a mess. Not this time, I’m afraid. To call this film “half-assed” is to betray an ignorance of fractions; I’d be surprised if even a quarter of an ass was used in the making of this film. There’re too many great movies, streaming and not, to waste your precious time on this stinker.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond