Reviews

Damascene (2017)

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The democratization of filmmaking technology has meant that it’s now affordable for anyone to have a voice in modern cinema, whether or not they have properly funded distribution or production values to back them up. Films like Creep, Primer, and Tangerine, while benefiting from traditional modes of distribution, have been exciting reminders of just how much a no-budget indie can accomplish with the right players & screenplay. The recent found footage dark comedy Damascene, which saw its world premiere at this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, isn’t nearly as high profile of a release as those shining examples of minimalist digital filmmaking, but is just as worthy to be lauded for the effect it accomplishes with severely limited, available-to-anyone means. Detailing a single, hour-long conversation shot on two bike helmet-mounted GoPros, Damascene boasts the bare bones storytelling of a one act stage play. It makes the best of its limited resources it can, though, reaching into the discomforting dark humor and emotional trauma typically reserved for deep-cutting stage dramas. It’s an exciting reminder that a great film doesn’t necessarily require a great budget, that a handful of people and a commercially-affordable camera are enough resources to produce top tier cinema in the 2010s.

Two old lovers reunite by accident after a long absence while biking to a mutual friend’s party. They film each other in conversation with their own helmet-mounted GoPros while cruising the streets, parks, and back allies of a sunshine-drenched London. The conversation starts amicably enough. The woman is guarded & perhaps even annoyed by the intrusion of her old boyfriend on what was a solo bike ride, but they find enough common ground to casually discuss as they leisurely make their way to the party: making fun of their friends for treating romance like a social media meme, reminiscing over half-remembered anecdotes and a shared political interest in war-torn Syria, pop culture touchstones like Friends, Event Horizon, Bukowski, etc. Thiis protective shield of social niceties eventually corrodes, however, and their rapport takes a dark turn. Picking at the barely-healed scabs of their failed romance uncovers a long-buried trauma and an unresolved act of violence that can’t remain undiscussed forever. The darkness at the heart of Damascene gradually creeps in with a casually tossed-out sexist joke or an alcoholism-blurred memory of an nonconsensual public groping, chipping away at the pair’s apparent camaraderie. Once the guard wall is fully breached there’s a full, unstoppable catharsis in the film’s tragic streak that poisonously overpowers any kindness or illusion of healing that came before it.

It’s initially tempting to view Damascene as a Before Sunrise descendant, if not only for its structure as a single conversation contained mostly between two romantically-linked characters. The film is so much more caustic than Richard Linklater’s melancholic romance series, however. Its thematic explorations of unchecked privilege, toxic masculinity, and lingering trauma sit heavy on the audience’s conscience, especially as they’re brushed aside with playfully dark social humor. It makes total sense that one of the two main players is a former playwright, since this mix of comic & tragic tones combines with the conversational storytelling to amount to a very distinct stage play aesthetic. Staging this conversation through hydraulic-smoothed GoPro footage makes this dialogue-based work feel inherently cinematic, though. The camera operators build tension by squeezing between cars in London traffic and offer an eye-level version of drone footage of the city that feels unique to its productions style. Better yet, it’s often easy to forget you’re watching GoPro footage at all, once the dread & mystery of the dark places the conversation is going commands the back half. Damascene is proof in itself that there are great films to be made out of less than ideal equipment, even if it is never distributed wide enough for most audiences to see that proof for themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

The World is Mine (2017)

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Truth is elusive & reality is a bore. Many modern, post-Herzog documentaries feel free to distort & subvert the “real life” facts of the stories they capture once they accept those basic tenants of their craft, which requires them to make a tidy, exciting story out of an untidy & frequently mundane existence. Ann Oren’s cosplay “documentary” The World is Mine is fully committed to this distortion, to the point where its presentation of a simulated, heightened reality is essential to both its form and its subject. As Oren appears onscreen herself, crafting a conspicuously false version of who she is and how she relates to the cosplay fandom she invades, she reflects the artificial, simulated existence of the pop culture character she dresses as throughout. Hatsune Miku is a “vocaloid,” a computerized simulation of a Japanese pop music diva who can be programmed to perform any song her democratized collaborators/devotees can conceive. Miku is a conduit, a non-person simulated as a human form only so she can fulfil the fantasies of as many people as possible. In The World is Mine, Oren attempts to serve the same function by dressing in Miku’s stylized persona & garb, hiding the truth of her own existence behind the false, fantastic shield of cosplay. As a documentary, her story has little interest in the truth of “real” life, instead searching for an eerie, distorted truth in a life that’s artificial by design. The results aren’t exactly informative in a traditional documentarian sense, but they are effectively uncomfortable and, at times, deeply sad.

As a documentary subject, I have no idea who Ann Oren is, where she’s from, or how she makes a living. I’m not even certain of whether or not she even speaks Japanese (she often smiles & nods silently to subtitled dialogue). She just appears as a conspicuous Westerner on a popular Tokyo street corner, already dressed as the Hatsune Miku character in search for strangers’ attention. We will never see her outside the costume. We learn slightly more about Miku “herself,” but only through incrementally-detailed interactions with the vocaloid’s rabid fandom. Oren presents herself to Miku’s fans and to the audience as an in-the-flesh extension of the anime-style simulated character who sings lost-in-translation pop music lyrics about “deciding to become a god” & “the homecoming of our future” in a roboticized voice throughout. Her camera infiltrates cosplay meetups whether pop culture obsessives dress as Miku & the like and, more surprisingly, “concerts” where hundreds of fans crowd to cheer for Miku’s onstage performances via a projection screen. Her drift through this obsessive fandom occasionally strays into the kawaii territory of aggressive, meticulous cuteness, but the ambient horror of the film’s score, the disjointed poetry of Miku’s song lyrics, and Oren’s own shaking hands as she pretends cosplay affords her confidence & contentment convey something much more sinister. Suggestions of BDSM-leaning age play & unspoken asexuality color her attempts to find romance as a human extension of Miku. Obsessive fans’ collections of Miku ephemera and Miku-adorned apartments & vehicles vaguely touch on the empty consumerism of obsessive fandom. Mostly, though, The World is Mine explores the alienation of living without a sense of self-identity, finding an awkward, upsetting tone of discomfort as its director & subject takes on an artificial life in a foreign culture with little use for who she “really” is.

It would be easy to imagine a more traditional, informative documentary about Hatsune Miku’s history as a cultural phenomenon or Westerner cosplay as an act of cultural appropriation, but The World is Mine isn’t especially interest in either line of thought. Instead, Oren implies a simulated identity crisis performed for the camera through the guise of an already simulated character. Lines like “The problem with reality is that fairy tales are full of frauds,” don’t help much in illuminating what Oren’s learned as a living doll modeled after a popular computer program. She’s just one physical copy of Hatsune Miku among many and the eeriness of her lack of a distinct personality is only amplified in the Miku fandom visually approaching a kind of ecstatic singularity. I don’t know how much of The World Is Mine to accept as true or personal to Oren, but I also don’t believe documenting real life was chief among her concerns while making the film. There’s an awkward, isolating eeriness to the film’s estimation of Hatsune Miku fandom that Oren’s much more enthusiastic about documenting than any kind of factual, historical, personal, or cultural reality. As long as you don’t need documentaries to be traditionally informative to be worthwhile and an evocation of a discomforting feeling is enough to satisfy with what you want from the picture, The World is Mine is an effective little chiller with a strong sense of eeriness in its mood.

-Brandon Ledet

Serenade for Haiti (2017)

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A lot of the best documentaries we have on difficult subjects “luck” into capturing an important moment by happening to film something seemingly innocuous just when tragedy or an unexpected shift occurs. I’m not sure Serenade for Haiti qualifies as that exact type of happenstance, since the Haitian capital it was documenting, Port-au-Prince, is constantly undergoing some kind of fundamental change, whether political or Natural. The film does find a very specific lens to view the city’s biggest upheaval of the past decade through, however, by watching it unfold through the profile of Saint Trinité Music School, a very insular community in the larger picture of Haitian culture. By following staff & students of the music school in the years preceding & following the city-destroying earthquakes of 2010, the film finds a hyper specific frame for capturing the way Haiti has dealt with the once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.

Founded in the 1950s, Saint Trinité Music School was founded as a charitable Catholic institution specifically meant to improve the lives of Port-au-Prince children who live below the poverty line. Early conversations with the students before the earthquake reveal lines like, “We want to show that people from our class can achieve wonderful things” and “Music is our refuge,” establishing just how important the school is to the community. Its results are easily detectable too, as Serenade for Haiti contrasts the angelic sounds of its longterm students with the unsure needling of its younger hopefuls. The school takes on an entirely different meaning after the 2010 disaster, with music becoming an act of therapy for students struggling with post-disaster PTSD. Their refusal to directly discuss the horrors of the earthquake that destroyed their school, city, country, and families is very much reminiscent of the way New Orleans (a city with strong Haitian roots) gradually recovered after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, especially once the healing sounds of music & Carnival culture creep back in through the rubble & the silence. The physical school of Saint Trinité is destroyed halfway into this film, but the school itself somehow continues to thrive.

The visual craft of Serenade for Haiti makes little effort to match the angelic sounds of its music, outside a few glimpses of Carnival celebrations or vibrantly-painted historic murals. The most the film has to offer as cinema is an intimate look at a tragedy most people are used to examining from a much greater remove. There might possibly be a more informative documentary to be made about the grand scale aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, but by profiling members of a single music school within Port-au-Prince before & after the event, the film offers an intimacy & a specificity a more wide-reaching documentary could not accomplish. The filmmakers behind Serenade for Haiti would have had no way of knowing the significance of what they are documenting when the film first began production, but they stumbled into a personal, up-close look at a historic tragedy in the process. More importantly, though, they also happened to capture the cultural perseverance that emerged in its aftermath, documenting through music a culture that’s unfortunately grown accustomed to massive violent upheavals as a routine of daily life.

-Brandon Ledet

The Joneses (2017)

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The subject/star of the documentary The Joneses, Jheri Jones, is introduced to the audience goofily modeling a one-piece swimsuit at 74 years old while favorably comparing herself to Madonna & Marilyn Monroe. The movie could use more of Jheri’s magic charm from this moment, which recalls the over the top fashion modeling Little Edie delivers in the classic doc Grey Gardens. Unfortunately, we only get it in glimpses as the film (somewhat understandably) focuses on the hardships suffered in her life, particularly in regards to her family. Jheri Jones is a trans woman & mother of four who transitioned late in life in rural Mississippi. Living with two of her sons & supporting her other two children in an almost equal capacity, Jheri bears a lot of weight on her shoulders. She finds tight social & economic restraints on what modern Mississippi living affords her as a working class trans woman with multiple family members struggling with disability. She’s absolutely fabulous as a personality, though, something The Joneses too often loses track of while it searches for the visual & emotional details of her hardships, often to its own detriment.

Because Jheri’s public gender transition is decades behind her, there isn’t much to The Joneses in terms of immediate plot. The film makes unnecessary attempts to build conflict around two central revelations: Jheri revealing her assigned-at-birth gender to her grandchildren and Jheri’s son revealing a secretive personal journey of his own to both his family & himself. The tension built in these conflicts is a distraction from what makes the movie special. The Joneses works better when it functions as a plot-free portrait of an American family living within highly specific circumstances, but universal commonalities. Flipping through The Joneses’ old picture albums or watching Jheri prepare an endless cycle of routine meals for her boys is far more interesting than the dramatic structure the film attempts to apply to their lives. You can feel the camera searching for tension in the family’s Confederate flag & trailer park surroundings, but none of it is ever as exciting as Jheri accidentally burning toast or the intrusion of a previously unseen house pet. The Joneses is at its best when it simply sits back to watch its titular family perform small acts of routine domesticity.

I’m not sure if the ideal version of this documentary would be a more investigative look at what it was like for Jheri to transition as a middle-age woman in modern Mississippi (something that’s only referenced in passing) or if it would be just a solid 90 minutes of her bullshitting & modeling her fashion for the camera. There’s nothing in the film’s domestic conflict that’s half as exciting as Jheri cutting jokes while wearing sunglasses & a fur coat, a testament to how endlessly charming she is as a personality. As such, I don’t think I actually enjoyed the New Orleans Film Fest Screening of the film itself as much as the Q&A with Jheri that followed, which I’m only mentioning here because I typically hate post-screening Q&A’s. I can’t recommend The Joneses as much of a transformative feat in documentary craft; if anything, the filmmaking style often gets in the way of the work’s best asset: its subject. As a work of progressive queer politics, however, it’s often endearing just for its patience in documenting a universally recognizable American family that just happens to have an adorable trans woman at the center of it. There’s a political significance to that kind of documentation the film should have been more comfortable with instead of pushing for immediate dramatic conflict.

-Brandon Ledet

As Is (2017)

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Imagine being told the best band you’ve never heard before just played a mind-blowing concert nearby, but it’s okay that you missed it because there was an all-access documentary produced around the event. The documentary shows you all of the practice, fine-tuning and songwriting leading up to the day of that mind-blowing, life-changing, world-stopping concert, and then documents none of the performance itself, just the reactions of the people who were there in the audience. Would that leave you frustrated or satisfied? The recent small scale documentary As Is details the behind-the-scenes production of a one-time-only multimedia performance staged by visual artist Nick “Not That Nick Cave” Cave in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2015. The film documents all of the artist’s intent, production logistics, and cultural context in the weeks leading up to this performance, then stops short of documenting any of the real thing once it’s executed. It’s like watching the behind the scenes footage of a concert you weren’t invited to for a band you’ve never heard of before. It’s very frustrating.

Glimpses at Nick Cave’s visual creations is certainly the draw for this unassuming art doc. Cave is most well-known for his “sound suits,” costumes that essentially look like a Yo Gabba Gabba! character made out of brightly colored cheerleader pompoms. The construction of these costumes is very reminiscent of the similar traditional garb worn at Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations (Courir de Mardi Gras); the beaded blankets meant to accompany them in the one-time performance are similar to the beading of Mardi Gras Indian costumes. This Louisiana cultural context is entirely ignored by Cave, an “international artist” who acts as if he were creating these works in a void. Incorporating over 600 collaborators from the Shreveport area as beaders, dancers, musicians, and lyricists, he certainly interacts with the local community. He just treats that interaction like an act of charity instead of a cultural exchange by making a huge to do about how his show has elevated local visual art with high falutin’ NYC production values. He speaks of the cultural & religious undertones in As Is in such vague terms that by the time a gospel choir arrives to sing about how “He changed my life and now I’m free” it’s understandable to assume they’re praising Nick Cave, not God. Lip service is paid to healing the trauma of Katrina, homelessness, mental illness, and so on among the local people of Shreveport, but as the film goes on the whole show starts to feel like a complex ego boost for Cave himself and nobody else.

So, was As Is a once-in-a-lifetime art event that forever transformed Shreveport and sealed Nick Cave’s legacy as a charitable, soul-healing deity? It’s tough to tell, because this film does not invite the audience to see the performance for themselves. The gospel, zydeco, light shows, sound suits, and (appallingly muted) Big Freedia performances suggest that it could have either been a total mess or a work of genius. Without being given enough evidence to verify either way, it’s difficult not to turn on Nick Cave as he boasts at length about the transformative nature of his art and all of the good deeds he’s done bringing real culture to Shreveport (again, without acknowledging the immediate similarities between his work & long-established Louisiana culture). As Is might be a much more rewarding doc for anyone who actually witnessed its subject in person, but for everyone on the outside looking in, it’s a frustratingly incomplete work about the supposedly transformative accomplishments of a very vain man. At least the beading and sound suits are verifiably cool-looking; there isn’t much else to latch onto.

-Brandon Ledet

Clinical (2017)

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Vinessa Shaw, the love interest from 1990s Halloween classic Hocus Pocus, is all grown up now and starring in her own features, as evidenced by this year’s Netflix release Clinical. Shaw stars as Dr. Jane Mathis, a psychiatrist who specialized in post-trauma therapy until two years ago, when teenage patient Nora (India Eisley) broke into her office around Christmastime and slashed Jane several times with the same piece of glass that she was using to slit her wrists, before attempting to slash her own throat.

The scarred Jane has re-established her practice in the home in which she grew up and works with much more low-risk patients: workaholics, struggling couples, etc. She finds the work less fulfilling, however, and against the recommendation of her own therapist Terry (William Atherton), she accepts a new patient named Alex (Kevin Rahm), the recipient of a face transplant following a car accident that left him with significant scarring, both physically and mentally. Despite the support of her childhood best friend Clara (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) and her policeman boyfriend Miles (Aaron Stanford), Jane finds herself haunted by images of Nora in her waking life and her sleep paralysis dreams, perhaps exacerbated by her sessions with Alex. Her fears are further amplified when she learns that Nora has actually been released from the facility where she was being treated by Doctor Saul (Nestor Serrano), meaning that the nocturnal disturbances and creepy events befalling her may not be just in her mind. Or are they?

Response to this film has been overwhelmingly negative, which is both disappointing and a demonstration of just what a negative and profound impact the past decade of “jump scare” horror has had on western film consciousness and casual criticism. It’s not a good sign that every armchair critic is complaining about how “slow” and “dull” this throwback gem is, or bragging about how early they caught on to the “twist.” Admittedly, being unimpressed by how telegraphed a plot twist may be is something that I’ve been guilty of, but I’d like to think that this is only the case when the upset of expectations is the relevant film’s primary selling point. I’ve also complained about a film’s pacing as well, but that’s a complaint about a problem with a filmmaker’s methods and editing, and I’ve never said that a film was bad because it chose to evoke a mood or create atmosphere by telling a story with a deliberately slow pace.

Make no mistake: this is a movie that invests time into the nooks and crannies of every scene, but it does so with the (successful, in my opinion) intent of creating a sense of verisimilitude. It’s no more taxing on one’s patience than a classic thrillers like The Stepford Wives. Jane’s return to her practice is deliberate and thoughtful, demonstrating that recovery is a process both for her and for her patients, and the time that she spends trying to break through Alex’s shell is relevant to the narrative and a strong demonstration of the importance of good character work. The concept of an epiphanic moment, in which a character participates in a single therapy session and has a sudden clarifying realization that “fixes” their problems, is overplayed in the media; on the other hand, sometimes those moments in which a patient realizes that some event or repeated rationalization is a cornerstone of their mental disorder or bad thought patterns do happen, albeit after many, many sessions.

In film, the essence of a twist that actually works requires that the ironic reveal or sudden turn forces the viewer to reconsider all that which appeared before, which is in itself a kind of revelation, not dissimilar to what one might experience when working on their own mental health and personal growth. The way that Clinical‘s twist plays out forces the viewer to re-examine the content and context all of Jane and Alex’s sessions in a new light. It’s subtle, but the film plays out as a kind of macrocosm of the psychological process: a lot of conversation and discussion that normally drips little bits of insight and sometimes demonstrates no obvious progress at all, until there’s a breakthrough.

Shaw is also excellent in this role. Looking at her IMDb page, she’s stayed active but kept a relatively low profile. This film hinges largely on her performance, and she knocks it out of the park, radiating a professional warmth in her role as counselor but tempering that competency and self-assurance in her private moments of terror and self-doubt, not to mention the doubt and self-recrimination. It’s a wonderful dichotomy of character that Shaw fulls off effortlessly, as Jane preaches the importance of talking therapy to her patients while also abusing her relationship with her own trusting therapist to illicitly get prescriptions for her own maladies. Shaw is utterly fascinating to watch, and I can only hope that we’ll be getting to see more of her in future projects. The normally vivacious and energetic Rahm is also great in his role as Alex, playing against type as a physically mangled man completely withdrawn from the world, pathetic but never so much that he loses your sympathy, even as you start to suspect that he may be hiding something about the tragic accident that left him with a scarred face.

If I did have a complaint, it would be that the film’ conclusion barrels along at a pace, accelerating in a way that dredges up and ties different plot threads together almost too quickly as they crash into one another, but that’s a matter of personal taste. I would also object to the way that Doctor Saul treats his patients, were it not for the fact that, all too often, real world psychologists also behave this way toward those under their care. Overall, however, this is a great thriller that I’d recommend to anyone who can sit still for a little while without checking their phone, and especially to all those who like to temper their Christmas cheer with a scare or two.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wallay (2017)

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A somewhat common narrative from recent European indies has been detailing the lives of the massive immigrant communities that live in the large housing block projects at the fringes of cities like London & Paris. Titles like Girlhood, Swagger, and Attack the Block have found an unfathomably wide range of stories to tell within that context, but remain confined to those insular communities in a kind of stationary, immersive experience. The recent French indie Wallay offers a take on the housing block immigrant experience I haven’t seen before by transporting its subjects to a drastically external, literally foreign setting. Wallay is worthy in its own right as an endearing coming of age story about a second-generation French immigrant learning small scale lessons about responsibility, romance, and identity, but those are familiar story beats we’ve seen many times before. It feels much more unique & revelatory in the way it details the cultural limbo immigrants occupy between the European cities that keep them at arm’s length & the African villages they left for economic opportunity by thoughtfully profiling both ends of that divide.

A second-generation, teenage French immigrant butts heads with his exasperated father who cannot control his behavior. A little badass in a bucket hat, the teenage delinquent commits minor acts of small scale rebellion in his Parisian housing block for payoffs as glorious as black market tennis shoes & appearing in YouTube-upload rap videos. He runs into trouble when he’s caught committing one of his more egregious schemes, siphoning off funds from the money orders his father sends back home to their extended family in West Africa. As punishment, he’s sent to the African village where his father was raised to live with the family he stole from, where he is tasked with paying back the money through months of manual labor. As a spoiled brat, he of course initially refuses to participate in this lesson in humility, scoffing in horror at his new “home’s” infrequent power supply & lack of indoor plumbing, His struggle to adjust to & learn from his mistakes is especially apparent in his relationship with his new caretaker & would-be employer, a harsh authority figure of an uncle. The language & cultural barriers between the mismatched pair eventually break down in the exact ways you’d expect them to, but Wallay finds plenty of delicate moments of humility, romance, familial love, and personal growth in the struggle, with many of them being solidly, endearingly comedic.

Berni Goldblat’s directorial debut saw its American premiere at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival. Outside a few scenes of its bratty teen protagonist struggling to trek through African wilderness or listening to hip-hop in headphones inside a mosquito tent, Wallay is only about a visually striking as you’d expect from a mini-budget indie with those means of distribution. The film finds its own tonal groove elsewhere, though, especially in its minimalist, plucked cello score & its circumcision-obsessed cultural humor, which can be much cruder than you’d expect from this kind of story. Teen actor Makan Nathan Diarra also elevates Wallay with genuine character moments as the lead grows into a better, more empathetic person. Mostly, though, the film feels significant in the way it adds a new wrinkle to the European housing block narrative by giving that community an external perspective. These kids really are caught halfway between two identities and I haven’t seen that cultural limbo represented onscreen quite like this before.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Girl (1966)

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Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 feature Black Girl is mostly known for its historical context as the first film from a black filmmaker from Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve wide critical acclaim. Sembène adopted the black & white, handheld “immediacy” of the French New Wave to boost the likelihood of French audiences & critics taking note of his breakthrough/debut feature, a gamble that paid off immensely and solidified his legacy as an artist. What that legacy might not immediately convey until you actually engage with the film as an isolated work is just how deeply, unapologetically angry Sembène was as an artist & a political mind. Black Girl may be most remembered for its historical significance, but what makes it an exceptional work is how it uses its French cinema aesthetic & international attention to punch Sembène’s newfound audience in the gut with an angry political screed about modern colonialism & racial subjugation. Black Girl is important not only for the previously unseen wide reach it was able to achieve for African cinema on the world stage, but also for the fiery political message it delivers on that scale.

Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, is recruited by white, French tourists to nanny their children while on vacation. This short-term gig evolves into a full-time career as the woman emigrates to France to live permanently as the family’s employee. Her drive from the international steamship that dumps her into a sea of white faces is the last she’ll see of seaside France’s beautiful buildings, beaches, and leisure culture. Expected to confine herself to the few rooms of the family’s condo for a 24/7 work schedule with essentially no pay, Diouana finds herself to be less of an employee and more of a prisoner or a slave. The French family she serves are “cultured” yuppie colonizers who collect African people the same way they collect African art & travel stories. They cut Diouana off from the outside world with a promised fantasy of what life in France could be like, then gradually strip her of her identity & self-worth until all she has in the world is her uncompensated duty to serve and the often-repeated question, “Why am I here?” They talk about her like she’s not in the room, declaring her “useless” & “lazy” for not immediately obliging every whim. Their guests forcibly kiss her cheeks and vocally estimate her to be “like an animal.” Instead of giving in to this subjugation, Diouana protests with the only means that are available to her: allowing her body & soul to tragically break down so that she is no longer useful to her modern day slave owners.

I greatly respect Sembène’s choice to adopt the cinematic aesthetic of French intellectuals in his political screed railing against the colonialism of French intellectuals. However, Black Girl‘s seething anger steers its take on the French New Wave away from an imitation of the genre to something much more fiercely unique for its time. The dangerous-feeling voyeurism of French New Wave technique would later be adapted to the cheaply produced, often exploitative horrors of 1970s American grindhouse pictures; Black Girl is just rough enough around the edges to feel prescient of that cultural shift. It’s wobbly enough in its shocking jabs of sex & violence and overall political anger to feel predictive of the onslaught of violent horrors that would emerge from New York City just a few years later (which was likely more of a mutation of the erotica subgenre “roughies” than anything, admittedly). Black Girl is saturated in voice-over narration (almost to the point of functioning as a diary) that provides it a sense of well-behaved structure, but there’s an overriding D.I.Y. punk sensibility in its political anger that makes it feel more like an intrusion & an act of rebellion than a simple French New Wave devotee. At just an hour in length and entirely unconcerned with playing nice once it gets a foot in the door, Black Girl is much more in line with the political anger of a punk messaging piece like Born in Flames than it is with the artsy fartsy ennuii of a Jules and Jim or The 400 Blows. It’s a historically significant work both for its achievements in breaking through cultural/critical barriers and for setting political fires once those barriers were breached.

-Brandon Ledet

Play the Devil (2017)

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I was perpetually on the verge of allowing myself to enjoy the minor indie feature Play the Devil but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen the film before, except set in a different locale. Then it struck me: Play the Devil is essentially a queer retelling of the 2015 JLo “thriller” The Boy Next Door, except with most of that film’s campy humor & sex surgically removed. Besides reframing that one night stand-turned-stalker thriller within a same-sex dynamic & moving its location from the United States to Trinidad, the major difference is its central abusive romance is which character is asked to play the villain. In The Boy Next Door, Jennifer Lopez has sex with a teenage neighbor who becomes her tormentor once she calls off the affair. In Play the Devil, it’s the adult participant who’s tasked to play the villain, which changes the dynamic just as much as the added queer context. Unfortunately, I can’t say either change was especially beneficial to the film as an entertainment, as it both ruined the fun of the premise & made the film’s queer identity politics muddled & unintentionally uncomfortable.

A Trinidad high school student is stuck between his ambitions to pursue art in either drama or photography and his grandmother’s desire for him to attend med school. With the economic rut of his home life & his best friend’s burgeoning career in petty crime weighing heavily on his mind, he faces a coming of age identity crisis that gradually becomes intertwined with a struggle to negotiate a balance between his in-the-closet queerness and societal expectations of adult masculinity. All of this sexual & economic anxiety makes our troubled protagonist the perfect prey for a wealthy, married businessman who wishes to take him on a sexual concubine. Scared by the implications of this potential role as a wealthy man’s sugarbaby, he only allows himself one sexual encounter before backing away in fear. The predatory older man won’t take “no” for an answer and pursues the young student anyway, practically twirling his mustache as he stalks the poor kid as an over-the-top, effete personification of queer desire. Their dynamic is effectively uncomfortable, but not self-aware enough to justify its potential homophobia, especially as it barrels towards an inevitably violent climax.

The climactic sequence of Play the Devil is a gorgeous catharsis that’s so stunning it almost forgives the piss-poor acting & boneheaded homophobia of the movie’s villain. During a Carnival ritual known as “The Dance of the Blue Devil,” locals smear their bodies with blue & gold paint and rhythmically scream out the frustrations our protagonist has been bottling inside the entire film. The imagery of this emotional release and the tranquil forest sounds of men later washing off their paint under a waterfall in its denouement is undeniably powerful. I can’t claim that much else besides the brightly painted houses & intense Natural backdrops of the film’s Trinidad setting are as successful as the Carnival sequence. Play the Devil is effective in its evocation of a spiritual & cultural atmosphere, but the story it manages to tell within that frame is a disjointed mess. I assume that the movie was aiming to be a poignant coming of age drama and not the less fun The Boy Next Door remake with #problematic queer subtext in accidentally stumbled into, which is a total shame. The Carnival imagery almost makes up for it, but not quite enough to turn the tide. At least it can boast that it features the absolute worst villainous performance of the year; there’s a kind of honor in that dishonorable distinction.

-Brandon Ledet

Justice League (2017)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Look! Up on the screen! It’s big! It’s dumb! It’s loud! It’s Justice League!

And it mostly works. Mostly.

The very first scene of Justice League does some good work walking back the problems—and they are problems, not merely criticisms—of the first few non-Wonder Woman films in this universe. We see Superman as children see him, which is also the way that this franchise keeps trying to retroactively force its audience into reconceptualizing him: as a true-blue (literally, given the lightening of his costume) hero and symbol of hope. He’s kind, sympathetic, and, you know, Superman, as he’s supposed to be. And then, just as his life was, the video is cut short. This leads into a beautiful opening credits montage, a strength of Zack Snyder’s as a director (even those who hate his Watchmen adaptation, which I surprisingly don’t, are all but universally pleased with its Dylan-composed credits sequence).

This sequence is not without contentious issues, of course. First, there’s a headline seen in a newspaper box mourning the loss of David Bowie, Prince, and Superman, but not Leonard Cohen, which is pretty disrespectful given that the whole thing is set to a really, really terrible cover of “Everybody Knows.” There’s also the issue that we’re supposed to be seeing a world in mourning for the space god who showed them some truths about themselves, but if you’re going to enjoy anything about this movie, you’re just going to have to accept this retcon.

Consider the speech from Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the first Richard Donner Superman film (and later repurposed for the trailer for Superman Returns): “They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you… my only son.” This same speech was actually echoed by Russell Crowe in his turn as Papa El in Man of Steel: “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” Unfortunately, this franchise has made zero effort to actually follow through on these lofty ideals of the Superman-is-Messiah beyond paying lip service and a couple of “subtle” images in Man of Steel. The problem is that this was never present in the actual text of the film, which presented us with a broody, angry, super-powered alien whose only affection for the beings of his adopted world were his love for his mother and an office romance. He was more Tyler Hoechlin’s Derek Hale in Teen Wolf than Tyler Hoechlin’s Clark Kent in Supergirl (he’s killing it, by the way), and that absence has been sorely lacking in this film series so far.

But. But. Justice League, for all the baggage that its carrying from three bad movies and one spectacular one, actually works if you ignore all that needless, pointless, and out-of-place GRIMDARK nonsense that preceded it in the earlier installments. And it’s not just with Superman either; the scene that immediately follows the opening montage shows Batman out and about being Batman, and even uses some passages from Danny Elfman’s previous work on Tim Burton’s 1989 film adaptation (but which will always be a keystone for me as the theme music for the Batman animated series).

This first Batman scene is both good and bad. Your standard Gotham City burglar is exiting onto a roof at night, sees Batman, attacks the Bat, gets his ass handed to him, and is dangled over the side of a building to attract a Parademon (the foot soldiers of the film’s villain), which can apparently smell fear. Bats traps the Parademon in a net, tests out a series of sonic disruptions on it, and it dies, leaving behind a clue about the three Mother Boxes. It’s so, so dumb, but the combination of the old Elfman theme and the absurdity of the whole thing makes it feel like the cold open of an episode of the animated Justice League, where Kevin Conroy’s Batman would do something just like this: lure, trap, find weird clue that matches something he’s already investigating, detective it up. It shouldn’t (and for most people won’t) work in a feature film with live actors that is supposedly trying to take itself seriously, but that narrative works for me on a certain level. On the other hand, there are other elements of this scene that are inarguably bad story choices, like Batman just kind of grappling away from the scene to do detective stuff, completely disregarding the theft he just interrupted and leaving the burglar to his own devices.

The overarching plot of the film concerns the arrival of Steppenwolf, one of the members of Jack Kirby’s cosmic DC creations The New Gods, on earth. Millennia ago, he attempted to invade the planet and turn it into a “primordial hellscape,” but he was repelled by an alliance of Amazons, Atlanteans, the tribes of Man, and a couple of others that we’ll explore in a minute. Steppenwolf carrier with him three Mother Boxes, pieces of advanced technology that, when combined, create the terraforming effect that will make the earth his new home (yes, this was the exact same desire of the villains of Man of Steel). Now, after several millennia, he has returned in the wake of Superman’s death because mankind’s mourning of that great symbol of hope has made it ripe pickings for the invader’s crusade, and Batman has to recruit five superheroes with attitude to repel his forces (yes, this is essentially the same plot as the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, and yes, I would love to see the trailer for JL recut with the opening narration of MMPR).

I’m not going to lie to you: this movie is clearly half-baked and it makes a lot of mistakes. Beyond the fact that Bats uses a street level criminal as bait and then ditching him without even notifying the police, there are other mistakes both big and small. For instance: the janitor working at Star Labs is seen bidding Dr. Stone good night, and it’s obvious (at least on the big screen) that the ID he’s wearing is for a different person, as he has dark hair and is clean-shaven, while the picture on the ID is of a man with a big bushy head of white hair and a glorious Mark Twain mustache. You can imagine sitting in the movie theater and thinking, like me: “Oh, he must be a spy who stole this ID, that’s a neat clue.” But no, it’s just a mistake; later, after said innocent janitor has been kidnapped by the villain, we see his belongings left behind in a pile, including an ID with an accurate photo. That’s this movie in a microcosm: when you think that it’s being clever, it’s actually just a goof.

When I was a kid, the DC comics characters were much dearer to me than Marvel’s. Although becoming an adult and becoming more socially aware has meant that I’m less inclined to love Batman uncritically (i.e., he’s kind of a fascist who spends most of his time attacking poor people out of his own sense of morality, rarely actually inspecting the causes of poverty and crime and trying to correct the problem at the root, although some of the best Batman writers have taken note of this and written him accordingly), he’s still the first character I think of when I think of superhero comics. The aforementioned Batman animated series was a defining piece of media for young Boomer, as were reruns of Superfriends, and I loved visiting the one aunt whose cable package included FX, as that meant I would get to see an episode of the Adam West Batman and, if I was very lucky, Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. It’s for this reason, and not because I am a “Marvel fanboy,” that I’ve been pained to see this franchise handled so, so poorly in the past few years. Wonder Woman was not just a step in the right direction, but a wholehearted plunge into how to to this whole thing right (Alli may have given it a mere 3.5 stars, but that was a 5 star movie for me personally).

Justice League is having a harder time straddling that fence, seeing as it has to undo the immense damage done to the franchise as a whole by Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. Sure, Suicide Squad was a terrible movie on the whole, but at its core it was a C-grade movie dressed up as a blockbuster, which is an aesthetic that I’m always a little bit on board for in spite of myself, especially when the actors really commit to the nonsense; additionally, the backstory and arc of Jay Hernandez’s Diablo contain far and away the most effective emotional beats of the first three films. It certainly didn’t fracture the fans in the same way as BvS, which some people are still defending for reasons that are unclear to me. Still, JL is trying hard to course correct, and the job that it’s doing is admirable, even if it stumbles every ten minutes or so. It works as a cartoon about the Justice League that just happens to be live action and have a tonally dissonant visual aesthetic from the text of the actions on screen.

The most important thing I can tell you if I’m trying to give you an idea as to whether or not you should see this film is this: Justice League works, if you accept it not as part of this franchise, but as an entry into the larger cultural understanding of Superman specifically and DC in general. What I mean by this is that the story it’s trying to tell, about a world without a Superman, does not work as a piece of the DCEU divorced from the context of the DC animated universes, or comic books, or even the earlier Donner and Burton films. But within that larger conversation, in which we do have a Superman who is a beacon of hope, truth, and justice, it does.

Additional notes:

  • I, too, saw all of the photos of Henry Cavill’s uncanny valley face online before I went to the theater, but I never noticed it when actually watching the movie. Maybe it says something about how my brain works that I completely overlooked it, but I’d wager it has more to do with the fact that if this were real life, Superman would have had to keep telling me “My weird face thing is up here.” You know what I’m talking about.
  • This has been addressed in other reviews that I’ve read and heard, but it is super weird that no one is at all concerned about maintaining their own or other’s secret identities in this movie. Aquaman calls Bruce Wayne “Batman” in front of a whole bunch of villagers, and Lois calls the newly awakened Superman “Clark” in front of several Metropolis police officers, which is only going to make it more obvious when he shows back up at work after having disappeared and reappeared at the exact same time as Supes did.
  • Ezra Miller’s Flash is charming, and I liked him a lot. A lot of his jokes fell flat, but I liked that they were overlooked in universe as well. I think that he’s probably the best addition to this universe since Wonder Woman.
  • Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is given almost nothing to do other than to be the machina that the deus exes.
  • All the stuff that you heard about Wonder Woman being more sexualized in this film is true, as I noticed the lingering shot of her rear, but she’s still Wonder Woman and still the best thing about this movie. I can’t wait for WW2.
  • The design for Steppenwolf is terrible. A stop-motion Starro would have been better, and would have made for a better villain overall anyway. Can you imagine a film where Starro the Conqueror appeared and tried to terraform the world into something more suitable to himself (i.e. covering the whole earth with the ocean)? There would be no need for the cliche sky beams, and instead there could have been the opportunity to discuss the rising oceans that are the result of climate change and Starro’s need to barely push humans into doing his will. The insistence on doing the New Gods stuff right out of the gate, especially after the imagery and ideas of Jack Kirby were so much better utilized in Guardians 2 and Thor: Ragnarok earlier this year, was a bad decision.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond