Reviews

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

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After watching Todd Haynes gradually shift towards traditionalist, Douglas Sirk-inspired dramas like Carol & Far From Heaven, it’s been fascinating to return to the wild, fractured, untamed excess of his earlier, more transgressive works. Haynes’s debut feature, Poison, was a roughly assembled, anxiously queer anthology that covered territory as widely varied as 1950s mad scientist B-pictures & Jean Genet’s masterful, poetic smut Our Lady of the Flowers. Before that debut, his name-making short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story re-imagined a high profile celebrity tragedy through hand-operated Barbie dolls. It’d be near impossible to reconcile the two disparate ends of Haynes’s beautifully improbable career, the controlled drama & the wildly fractured art film, if it weren’t for his magnum opus, Velvet Goldmine, a glam rock opera that somehow encapsulates the totality of what the director has accomplished to date in a single picture. Velvet Goldmine remains Haynes’s grandest achievement by somehow elevating his youthful passion for melodrama, disorder, and camp to the level of the Oscar-minded prestige productions he’d later settle into as he aged within the industry, all while remaining aggressively, unapologetically queer. It’s overwhelming to watch a filmmaker this ambitious throw every possible tone & technique he can achieve at the screen, but drowning in Haynes’s chaotic, yet glamorous sensibilities is a pure, intoxicating pleasure.

Christian Bale stars as an ex-Brit reporter working out of NYC on an investigative assignment about the publicity stunt “murder” of a glam rock star he had worshipped religiously as a queer teen. It had been a decade since British rocker Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) faked his own death onstage & disappeared from the public limelight. It seems as if the glam rock lifestyle, with its outrageous gender-androgynous costumes & conspicuous absence of sexual norms, had died along with that persona. Through the relatively dull framing device of watching Bale’s gloomy reporter research the missing Slade, Haynes opens up the wild world of glam rock past in a series of disjointed vignettes following Slade’s life from birth to “death”. The film is primarily concerned with Slade’s musical collaboration & bisexual affair with American proto-punk icon Curt Wilde (Ewan McGregor), an obsessive relationship that wrecked his sobriety, his closeness with his wife (Toni Collette), and his overall ambition to change the world through the transformative power of rock n’ roll. Haynes crafts a deliberately messy, loose story out of this rock n’ roll romance by employing every tool he had in his arsenal: the Barbie doll performances of Superstar, the James Bidgood tableaus & Jean Genet allusions of Poison, the Douglas Sirk melodrama of Safe & Far From Heaven, flesh on flesh pansexual erotica, etc. He also conjures glam rock’s natural mystique by allowing X-Files style record company conspiracy theories & supernatural claims that Oscar Wilde’s origins as a space alien changeling to inform his narrative without batting an eye. The only restrained-feeling aspect of the plot is Bale’s investigative framing device, but even that boasts the perverse virtue of essentially reimagining Citizen Kane as a glam rock opera.

Although narratively loose & ambiguous, Velvet Goldmine clearly evokes two real-life romances/collaborations in this patchwork plot: David Bowie’s affair with Iggy Pop & Britain’s affair with American rock. Slade is a clear Bowie stand-in, a connection deliberately referenced in the title & unappreciated by Bowie himself, who threatened to sue before the script went into rewrites. The film mostly follows the Ziggy Stardust & post-hippie eras of Bowie’s career before his romace/heroin-sharing/music collaboration with Iggy Pop unraveled those glory days. It’s a relationship that’s understood more through myth & rumor than confirmed, openly admitted fact, so Haynes is smart to abstract any 1:1 comparison, even if it was a decision inspired by threat of a lawsuit. Bowie’s life story is blended with other pop stars like Marc Bolan & Buster Poindexter to create the figure of Brian Slade, while Curt Wilde emerges as a similar blend of Iggy Pop & Lou Reed. This abstraction & democratization of their characters leads to the film feeling like a larger, more mythical tale of American & British rock n’ roll’s endless back & forth romance & collaboration than an affair between two queer men in the 70s & 80s. A childhood Little Richard drag routine Slade stages in his parents’ living room feels just as essential to his stage persona evolution as any of the film’s Oscar Wilde space alien weirdness, making this moment in time shared between British & American rock to feel like a smaller thread in much larger tapestry, albeit an essential one. Velvet Goldmine depicts glam rock as less of a craze or a passing fad than a failed revolution that very nearly topped the world in a flood of glitter & lube before it lamely succumbed to the pitfalls of heroin & romantic jealousy. Bowie & Iggy were useful figured for that story, but the overall effect is much larger than anything two men could amount to alone.

Velvet Goldmine was a box office bomb that was met with middling, confused critical response upon its initial release. It’s the exact kind of overly ambitious, insularly passionate art picture that’s doomed for cult status over wide appeal, but I selfishly wish that were the kind of art Haynes were still making today. As much as I appreciate Carol‘s intoxicating allure, it feels like a film that could have been pulled off by any number of visually skilled, queer-minded craftsmen. Velvet Goldmine, by contrast, is undeniably a Todd Haynes film. The same way Citizen Kane posits that a man’s full persona can’t be contained by a single picture, Velvet Goldmine argues the same for the spirit of glam rock at large. Haynes structures this argument around a sprawling all-inclusive clusterfuck of every weird, passionate idea he’s ever projected onto the screen in his life. It’s a magnum opus that makes room for drag queens, Barbie dolls, Bowie worship, Oscar Wilde conspiracy theories, an extended cameo from glam-revivalist band Placebo, and Ewan McGregor’s spread-open butt cheeks. It’s risky, go-for-broke cinema that doesn’t have a 100% success rate in its individual elements at play (Christian Bale’s gloomy sulking is a lot to stomach), but consistently impresses in its visual beauty & sheer audacity. It’d be a cultural tragedy if we never see Haynes working in that mode again.

-Brandon Ledet

Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century (1999)

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When we were listening to the Old People Rap Station the other day, the Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes duet “What’s It Gonna Be” prompted me to joke about the brief time in the early 00s when all R&B videos looked like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. That’s when I realized I had never actually seen Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, despite being aware of it for more than half my life. The only reason I could conjure the made-for-TV movie’s aesthetic in that moment is because it was that heavily advertised before it first aired. It turns out, though, that it’s not a film you actually have to watch from start to finish to get the full picture. Just in knowing that Zenon was originally conceived as a pilot for a Disney Channel television series set on a space ship that vaguely resembles the set of the “No Scrubs” video is enough to clue you in on what the film can deliver. The only question, then, is how you’ll feel inhabiting that world for 97 minutes.

Imagine if the satirical wit was surgically removed from Clueless, the characters were age-regressed to junior high, and the whole thing were set on a space station. The titular Zenon, played by forgotten Disney Channel starlet Kirsten Storms, is essentially a futuristic Cher Horowitz in-training, far too whip-smart to obediently live a quiet life on her near-lifelong space station home. After acting out in a few too many (harmless) outer space pranks (often with the help of a sidekick played by a young Raven-Symoné), Zenon is literally grounded by being sent to live with her aunt on Earth. Besides her adjustments to the allergies, gravity, and Fahrenheit measurements Earth life presents, she also struggles with the pressure to beat the clock in two pressing concerns: 1) Saving her space station home from an evil corporation’s plans to corrupt it with a computer virus and 2) Making it back in time to attend a Microbe concert, which will be the first-ever boy band performance in space. I’ll leave it to you to discover for yourself whether she’s able to save the day and attend the big dance climax, but I’m not sure plot is the most important aspect of this fine work either way.

In the second act stretch where Zenon is stuck on Earth and dodging the flirtatious/contentious attentions of her new classmates, I shared in her painful longing to be back in space. The most fun the movie has is its writers’ room playfulness with futuristic Heathers slang, casually tossing out phrases like “stellar,” “lumerious,” and “zetus lapetus” as if they meant something to the audience. Other turns of future-phrase that tickled me: “Gossip travels at the speed of light,” “I wouldn’t miss it for all the stardust in the galaxy,” and “Terra firma . . . the firma the betta.” I also was amused by off-hand references to President Chelsea Clinton and to how the band Microbe is so old-fashioned because their songs still have melodies. If the Zenon concept had been developed into a television stories, as intended, it’s easy to see how this kind of goofy future-slang could’ve been fun weekly fodder for the nerdier set of late 90s Disney devotees. It’s probably better for its legacy that it wound up being a television event movie (with two “zequels”!), though, since it’s still remembered fondly by the folks who caught it nearly twenty years ago. I imagine it was a great gateway drug into sci-fi nerdery for plenty of burgeoning geeks and its girly version of a pigtails, jellies, and shiny lip gloss futurism still stands as a great encapsulation of a very specific time in pop culture visions of the future my mind will continue to conjure every time I hear the right note of old school R&B.

-Brandon Ledet

Pokémon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back (1999)

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I’ve always interacted with the Pokémon brand from the fringes, a casual fan at best. When Pokémon reached its fever pitch popularity as a cultural presence in the United States, I happened to be making my awkward transition into a mood teen, wary of being associated with Kids’ Stuff, and embarrassingly dedicated to making nu metal the cornerstone of my Personal Brand. Still, the appeal of the “pocket monsters” that populate the Pokébrand’s various trading card collectibles, Nintendo games, and television series was always apparent to me, even if I didn’t know the intricate minutia of its Pokélore. It’s incredible that a Japanese pop culture brand has been able to get American kids hooked on collecting & trading what’s essentially a stylized version of yokai, despite having no real connection to its cultural significance. What’s even more amazing still is the longevity of that obsession. Not only has the smart phone game Pokémon Go recently reinvigorated a lot of what BuzzFeed would call 90s Kids’ interest in the brand, but in the couple decades of its international cultural presence, its output has not really subsided for those who never left. I may not personally be able to rattle off more than a handful of pokémon types off the top of my head, but after following family & friends around to the city to “catch” the little digital bastards on their phones and seeing the hordes of like-minded players doing the same in massive clusters of dork, it’s become apparent that they do have a kind of cultural longevity that can’t be ignored. This fact is convincingly backed up by the evidence that there are twenty feature length Pokémon films to date, including five that earned theatrical distribution in the United States. That’s a whole lotta catching/battling of miniature monsters.

As immediately apparent as the appeal of hoarding & imagining the staged battles of various pokémon types (that resemble creatures as varied as space aliens, dragons, ducks, and kittens) is to kids who encounter it at an early enough age, it can be exasperating to an outsider. In his 1999 review of the first Pokémon movie, Roger Ebert is stunned in his befuddlement. He spends most of the review attempting to define what pokémon even are and struggling to find reference points to entertainment media he does understand, which is how he ends up comparing the film (unfavorably) to My Neighbor Totoro. His confusion is entirely justified, to be honest. Even the film’s title, Pokémon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back, is an intimidating warning that it is not a self-contained story that can be easily grasped by the uninitiated. Mewtwo Strikes Back wastes no time explaining the gyms, stadiums, “catching,” pokéballs, teams, trainers, or even the little monsters of its world (although it does waste time elsewhere). Instead of starting with a clean slate, it functions as a 90 minute episode of the original television show. Our human heroes (Ash, Brock, and Misty) are introduced in a brief narrative paragraph about their penchant for getting into all kinds of pokémon-related adventures, but much more attention is paid to staging a pokémon match in the middle of the opening credits (complete with a dance remix of the television series’ theme music) to set the mood. If you’re new to the Pokémon universe, I’d recommend at least watching the pilot episode for the series to get a hold of the basic narrative. Otherwise, the best you’ll be able to grasp is that The Good Guys and The Bad Guys are competing To Be The Very Best in a world of tiny monsters where the main objective is to Catch Them All and train them for battle (where victory means both establishing supremacy & collecting more pokémon).

This particular episode in the Pokésaga concerns the creation and the radicalization of the titular Mewtwo, The World’s Strongest Pokémon. Much like how the rarity of certain specimen in all trading card circles (Pokémon, Magic, baseball, or otherwise) increases their value, there are rare pokémon that tower over more common types in their strength & narrative significance. According to this film, the rarest of them all is a psychic pokémon named Mew, so much so that it’s considered by most trainers to be extinct. An Evil Corporation (the standard go-to villain for kids’ media) that seems tied to the series’ Team Rocket baddies employs scientists to clone this long lost creature, which resembles a hybrid between a kitten & a space alien, into a more powerful form, known as Mewtwo. Bigger, stronger, and more leopard-like than Mew, Mewtwo is essentially the nuclear bomb of pokémon, even leaving behind a mushroom cloud in his wake as he destroys the scientists who created him. He’s so psychically powerful that he can control the weather with the wave of a finger, but he struggles with questions like “But why am I here?” is his RoboCop-inspired rise to sentience. Mewtwo does eventually find meaning in his own existence: righting what he perceives to be a power imbalance between pokémon and their human trainers based in his interactions with his evil Team Rocket creators. Believing that “Humans and pokémon can never be friends” and that pokémon have disgraced themselves by serving humans as slaves, Mewtwo crafts an army of pokémon “superclones” to attack the world’s greatest trainers, hoping to level society so that it can be properly rebuilt. Ash & his travel companions, of course, became central figures in this massive battle and just barely hold their own against Mewtwo thanks to the help of other trainers and (*gasp*) the original Mew. In the heat of the battle, Ash sacrifices himself to save his closest pokémon companion, fan favorite Pikachu, and is turned to stone. The pokémon in the battle bring him back to life with their magical monster tears and, realizing he was wrong about the human exploitation of pokémon, Mewtwo calls off his revolution and flies his superclones off to Pokéheaven or somewhere pokéadjacent.

You can tell as soon as the title that Pokémon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back will have no real finality as a self-contained story and will ultimately function as Just Another Episode within the larger Pokémon brand. Given that same ongoing narrative structure’s popularity in popular media like pro wrestling, soap operas, and The MCU, that’s not necessarily a problem. The film does little to wow anyone who’s not already devoted to the Pokémon brand, but it’s entertaining enough as a kids’ fantasy animation to feel worthwhile. Its various monster battles are old-fashioned kaiju fun, Picachu & Mew are absurdly cute character designs, and the hand-drawn animation is much more complex, & visually interesting than what modern CG kids’ media has devolved into (especially considering the recent release of The Emoji Movie). I can only point to a few details where Mewtwo Strikes Back‘s novelty amounted to much more than that. Besides the absurdity of the title and climactic choices to treat both Ash and Pikachu as christ-like figures (complete with a hilariously tragic Turn the Other Cheek sequence), I can really only single out the final battle as a must-see highlight. Clones of various pokémon fight their originating doubles to the point of fatal exhaustion while a heartfelt acoustic ballad titled “Brother My Brother” overpowers the soundtrack with bleeding heart cheese. Lyrics demand “Tell me, what are we fighting for?” and the movie takes a strong, tear-filled “Fighting is meaningless & horrible” stance of pacifism, despite being a part of a universe where battling for supremacy over other trainers is everything. The narration’s ponderings about “the great mystery and the great miracle” of Life sometimes approach the over-the-top absurdity of that “Brother My Brother” scene, but the movie generally lacks that kind of energy throughout. At the very least, there are some glaring missed opportunities in Mewtwo’s abuse of pokémon cloning technology, which could have easily led to to some Cronenbergian pokémonstrosities radically different than the ones that regularly appear on the television show. Instead, we’re treated to exactly the kinds of entertainment offered by the show, just for a longer stretch of time.

I sympathize with Ebert’s desperate in-over-his-head feeling in being assigned to professionally review this movie, which he had no real business watching. Even having a longterm semi-familiarity with pokélore, I found myself frequently confused with rules of the universe established in Mewtwo Strikes Back, especially in regards to the volume & variety of particular pokémon types and the scope of the evil Team Rocket. As there are nineteen more feature films in this series (the most recent of which was released just this year), that sense of knowing the rules of the Pokéverse is either more easily grasped by those who regularly play the brand’s various video & card games or doesn’t matter at all, even to devotees. Maybe watching more of these features will better acclimate me to the rules of its lore, but I’m going to need a lot more of that “Brother My Brother” absurdity to carry me across the finish line if that’s the kind of dedication it requires. Pikachu is pretty damn cute, but not cute enough to pull all that weight on their little electric rat back alone.

-Brandon Ledet

Patti Cake$ (2017)

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I remember thinking last year’s indie darling Sing Street (which celebrates the joy of watching a young new wave band come into their own in 1980s Dublin) was cute & mostly enjoyable, but 2017 has already offered two cheaply-made features that improve on its basic formula. The darkly funny romantic dramedy Band Aid juxtaposes the joys of watching a garage band come together with the tragedy of a marriage falling apart, adding a sense of purpose to the songwriting missing in Sing Street’s dedication to nostalgic pastiche. Patti Cake$, by contrast, sticks much closer to Sing Street’s recipe, a rags to slightly-nicer-rags story where a young pop music act struggles to gain the confidence in their own voice they can only experience in their music video daydreams. The difference for me is that Patti Cake$ steers this narrative towards a much more satisfying emotional climax and happens to frame its setting in a world I can much more readily identify with. Its tale of misfit nerds trying to leave their mark on a behind the times, low stakes New Jersey rap scene feels specifically geared to remind me of Coming of Age in my own shitty industrial suburb (Chalmette is pretty much a New Orleans-scale Jersey) when nu metal and Ca$h Money were a huge deal. It even includes an out of nowhere Bikini Kill needle drop plucked directly from my personal high school soundtrack just to drive the last nail in the coffin. It’s a celebratory music scene fairy tale version of a life I’ve already lived, which makes Sing Street’s coming of age romance feel increasingly hollow in the rearview.

The titular Patti Cake$, aka Killer P, aka Patricia (breakout actor Danielle Macdonald), is an aspiring white girl rapper whose service industry jobs (bartending at a karaoke dive bar & picking up extra cash catering) are far from the pop star excess she longs for in her music video-inspired daydreams. She hopes to be signed one day by local rap legend Oz, who appears to be half A$AP Rocky/half wizard, but doesn’t have the confidence to even challenge the Vanilla Ice-flavored EDM idiots who stage concert at the local VFW halls. Her addict mother (Lady Dynamite‘s Bridget Everett) knocks her down for not having a talent for “real” music, unlike her own past of fronting a hair metal band in the 80s. Neighborhood bullies insult her from all sides for being overweight before even hearing what she has to say. Rap game rivals & idols, including the all-powerful Oz, tell her she has no business even trying to make it, that she should just stick to her service industry purgatory. Still, she hones her skills at writing bars around the clock, rapping while she’s brushing her teeth, pissing, and preparing the morning’s Pop Tarts. Eventually, she finds her own scarecrow & tin woodsman (a nerdy pharmacist hype man & a goth version of Nell with a shack full of expensive beat-making equipment) to follow the mixtape road to success with her, despite the constant flood of reasons to quit. The speed bumps along the way are undeniably cliché (including a subplot about her mother’s jealousy so old hat it was spoofed on a Strangers With Candy episode nearly two decades ago), but feed into the film’s charms as an old fashioned fairy tale. By the time the Hero’s Journey concludes with a climactic concert and an alternate path to (minor) success, the cumulative effect is awe-inspiringly great. We’re all rooting for Patti Cake$.

Director Geremy Jasper’s debut feature is impressive not only in its parallel-thinking improvements on the Sing Street formula, but also in its infectious sense of style. Patti Cake$‘s slightly heightened sense of reality feels like a Ca$h Money album cover adapted to a feature length fairy tale. It’s less of the ramshackle 8 Mile it’s been marketed as than it is a surreal comedy that clashes the green smoke & bubble bath fantasy of rap videos against the strip mall & cigarette butts reality of industrial suburbs for relatable, darkly humorous effect. It’s like a hip-hop version of Drop Dead Gorgeous in that way, especially in scenes where it undercuts its small scale triumphs with the visible awkwardness of details like fumbling, nerdy sex and celebratory mozzarella sticks. Everyone in the film, from the rebellious go-nowhere twentysomethings to their bitter went-nowhere authority figures, feels as if they’re permanently stuck in the summer after high school graduation, rotting in a stasis of indecision & dwindling opportunities. Some of the details of this world are very specific to New Jersey, including a real life Cookie Puss, but a lot of it applies to every small town industrial suburb in the US. If Patti Cake$ were set in the Midwest, it’d likely be a Juggalo story. If it were set in Chalmette, Louisiana, its nu metal moment in the VFW Hall (featuring an industrial metal song with the lyrics “You’re sheep! Wake up!”) would’ve commanded the entire feature. If it were set in Dublin, well, I feel like I’ve already seen that movie. Patti Cake$’s Jersey rap scene setting isn’t essential to its storytelling, as hinted at by the cycle started by the mother character’s hair metal past, but it does afford the film a striking sense of cheap-to-produce visual imagery that helps distinguish its supernatural fairy tale tone. What’s much more important is the way the film succeeds in making that fairy tale feel freshly funny & emotionally satisfying, despite its overriding sense of familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

The Red Turtle (2017)

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I made the mistake of believing that, because it was a PG-rated Studio Ghibli release, The Red Turtle would be able to hold my 10 year old sister in law’s attention for its brief 80min runtime. It turns out that this Oscar-nominated animation is less whimsical kids’ fare like a Kiki’s Delivery Service or a My Neighbor Totoro and more of a quiet art film reflection on existential stillness. The Red Turtle is a quiet, lonely fairy tale with no backstory and, more notably, no dialogue. Its grimly whimsical retelling of The Little Mermaid (now with a giant turtle!) feels much more closely aligned with its nature as a French Art Film than its distribution through Ghibli might suggest. I wouldn’t recommend making a small child sit through it (I really should have more thoroughly researched it beforehand myself), but it does have a quiet power in its visual, emotional storytelling style that makes it worthwhile for those with the right amount of patience.

A nameless man shipwrecked on a remote island spends his days building a raft that might lead him back to civilization and his nights dreaming of signs of humanity: bridges, string quartets, etc. His few successful attempts to build a raft are disrupted by a giant red sea turtle that, seemingly without purpose, destroys his vessel by ramming it from below. Angered (and now outfitted with a beard that makes him resemble the Sad Keanu meme), the man exacts violent revenge on the turtle that leaves it similarly shipwrecked on his new island home. At this point, the narrative’s similarities to The Little Mermaid emerge and the walls dividing fantasy & reality gradually break down. The turtle transforms into a human woman, the pair’s guilt over their violent acts & their isolation lead to lifelong devotion, and they form a romantic partnership that lasts decades, making room for both awe-inspiring triumphs & emotionally devastating downfalls as Nature take its course.

The most striking aspect of The Red Turtle is its fascination with the ebb & flow cycles of The Natural World. Plant life is treated with the complex visual detail of a classic children’s book illustration. An intense contrast is established between the muted grays of night & shadow vs. the vibrant colors of day & sunshine. Baby sea turtles & scattering crabs go about their daily business no matter the significance of the times in the human lives that surround them. Violence, love, survival, death, and rebirth flow across time in a full spectrum of the human condition. Even the back & forth cycles of dream & conscious reality are treated with a respectful awe & religious reverence for their Natural power. Without a word of dialogue outside a couple desperate shouts of “Hey!”, The Red Turtle finds a lot to say about the Natural course of human existence (and I suppose, by extension, turtle existence).

I don’t mean to scare parents off from sharing The Red Turtle with young children. The film’s themes sometimes stray toward the somber & the cruel, but there’s nothing especially traumatizing about its overall narrative. The film is more “adult” in its requirement of patience for stillness & quiet. If you’re watching movies with a child who isn’t easily distracted in long stretches of silence, you’re likely to have a better time of it than I did. My personal expectations of a Studio Ghibli animation release clashing with the delivery of a silent French art film was a poor exercise in Doing Research & Reading the Room. When I return to The Red Turtle, it’ll likely be at a time when I can watch it alone in that late night or early morning headspace where the walls between dreamworld fantasy & daytime reality are more malleable than usual. It’s the cinematic equivalent of what’s referred to in pop music as “a headphones listen,” so choose your audience with a lot more care than I did.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Gates (2016)

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Do you remember VHS board games? What if you found one that was haunted; or worse, possessed? What if completing the game was the only way to save your father’s soul?

Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) Hardesty are archetypically, even stereotypically, different brothers. Gordon is a buttoned-down salaryman with a dependable girlfriend (Margot, played by Brea Grant of Heroes), a mortgage, and skeletons in his closet that have driven him far from his home town. John, in contrast, is a scruffy layabout with frequent run-ins with the law. Their troubled father, the proprietor of a VHS rental outlet, has been missing for seven months, and the two come together to close down his store, sell off the merchandise, and part ways, presumably forever. Following some strange dreams and bizarre nighttime occurrences, the two brothers are finally able to enter their father’s office, where they find Beyond the Gates, an 80s-style VHS board game that contains the last tape their father watched.

Upon playing the tape, the brothers first experience lost time, but when Margot convinces them to play the game, a strange woman (Barbara Crampton, of Chopping Mall and Re-Animator) appears on screen and explains that they must play through the game and go in order to save their father and themselves. The tape is obviously interacting with them directly, not playing straight through, and even attempts to enlist the authorities in the form of their cop friend Derek (Matt Mercer) fail, as he can see nothing on the screen but static. Gradually, the trio comes to accept that they’re stuck in a Jumanji situation, and there’s no way out but to beat the game and go . . . beyond the gates.

This film is a bit of a surprise, as it doesn’t get off to a strong start. Gordon is ostensibly the lead, but Skipper is the weakest actor of the main trio, and his performance comes across as broad and unrefined. Williamson’s John is supposed to be a deadbeat, but other than his perpetual five o’clock shadow, his appearance is pretty well-maintained, and there’s no real menace to his presence. The film is also awfully cheap-looking, so much so that even visually dynamic shots, like the slow pan across seemingly endless shelves of VHS tapes, look more like they were shot for a daytime soap than a feature. Once we’re out of the starting gate, however, the ride gets weirder and gorier until you’re lost in the moment. My roommate even compared the film to those of David Lynch (although I wouldn’t personally go that far), citing that he often evokes the facade of normalcy before tearing down the curtain to show the evil that lies beneath. Here, we start with a fairly basic story about brothers in conflict that gets more cinematically complex as the narrative progresses, until you’re suddenly captivated and carried away by the film than anticipated.

The game itself has a board that’s prettily designed, even if the mechanics are unclear (and ultimately kind of irrelevant), and the gore is both hilarious in its overkill and surprisingly effective in the way that it suddenly appears in the film as a complete surprise after a long period of mostly-psychological horror. There’s also a great attempt to give the characters an interesting backstory, as we learn that Gordon and Margot are working out some relationship issues that arose from his overindulgence, and John’s elaboration of how he was the son who stayed when Gordon went out to find a new life belies the cliches that this genre convention usually relies upon. My favorite part of the film may be the scene in which the brothers visit the shop where the game was purchased and have a conversation with the creepy owner (Jesse Merlin) who’s so delightfully transparent in his evil that his name may as well be “Mr. Needful.”

It takes a little patience to get into Beyond the Gates, but it’s pretty rewarding if given half a chance. There’s a lot of love for the VHS era of horror in the movie’s DNA, but unlike other throwbacks, it’s not beholden to that aesthetic or the trappings thereof. The film is currently streaming on Netflix, and is a delightful way to keep Halloween in your heart on a hot summer night.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Ghost Story (2017)

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A Ghost Story is mostly dialogue-free in its slow, insular reflections on the vastness of time & the universe, so it’s strange to me that the one scene its most fervent fans seem to pick a bone with is its sole monologue. After watching a ghost solemnly haunt a single home in silence for, presumably, decades, the film pauses to allow Will Oldham/Bonnie Prince Billy to pontificate about the nature of time & the human condition in an uninterrupted, minutes-long diatribe. In the middle of a house party, Oldham’s unnamed, beer-swilling philosopher explains that, because of the impermanence of the human race & the enormity of time, all art is ultimately insignificant. A great artist might be remembered for the merits of their most substantial work generations after their death, but since humanity & the galaxy that hosts it will ultimately collapse, it’s a temporary impact at best, a complete waste of time at worst. For me, this one speech that seems to be aggravating so many otherwise-enthusiastic audiences is one of the only interesting, honest ideas presented in A Ghost Story. It was one of the few scenes that actually made me perk up in my seat. Unfortunately, its nihilistic worldview also positions the movie as a solidly convincing argument against itself. If all art is ultimately insignificant because of the impermanence of humanity & the destructive forces of time, why should I waste my life watching somber, existential reflections on stillness & regret like the one A Ghost Story presents? It seems like I’d get more out of cheap, immediate thrills like Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering ice pun one-liners or Tom Green swinging a baby above his head in a circle by the umbilical chord. At least I’d have more fun while waiting to be crushed & forgotten by an uncaring universe that way.

Rooney Mara & Casey Affleck star as a visibly dour romantic couple whose main argument seems to recur around Affleck’s deep devotion to their lackluster home. Early in the first act, the poor sap dies in a car wreck mere yards away from the shit hole property he loves so much, then spends the rest of the film silently observing (as a ghost) the ways the home evolves as several different generations pass through it. He watches as Rooney Mara gradually processes her grief & learns to move on with her life. He throws a hissy fit when an eye-rollingly superstitious Hispanic family moves in to replace her, chasing them out of their home. He becomes even more bitter listening to the aforementioned Will Oldham speech, then sorta gives in to his despair as society moves on to bigger & “better” things. While time folds in on itself in the cyclical way the universe tends to go about its business, he’s still left standing in the same spot, stuck, and possibly forgetful of why he stayed behind in the first place. This is obviously a mostly visual narrative. A Ghost Story‘s square frame, with its rounded-off corners (recalling Instagram or an old-fashioned Viewfinder toy), commands much more power & attention than any of its traditional story beats as the centuries roll on and the same drab, Active Child-riffing song loops endlessly on the soundtrack. The still, intimate conflicts of its early scenes eventually evolve into decades-spanning sweeps in later sequences, suggesting a kind of narrative progression in a vague sense, even while Affleck’s ghost remains a fixed point. Excepting Will Oldham’s bloviating at the house party centerpiece, the movie doesn’t do much to perk up its audience outside the strength of its imagery, which is interesting, but never interesting enough.

Besides its 4:3 aspect ratio, A Ghost Story‘s main visual hook is the look of its titular ghost. Casey Affleck’s ghostly visage takes a page from the book of Beetlejuice, adopting the old-fashioned Halloween costume look of a white bedsheet with two cut-out eyeholes. Great costume design detail is paid to the folds & draping of that bedsheet and it’s honestly welcome to have a break from gazing at Affleck’s sexual harasser, Boston bro face for the majority of the movie, but the choice doesn’t amount to much more beyond that. There’s a Tumblr account I follow that adds ghostly bedsheets to old photographs via layers of white-out that does a lot more with this visual conceit in a single frame than A Ghost Story does in an entire feature. It even has the added bonus of not employing a known movie industry creep who seems to be falling upwards in Hollywood right now despite his entitled, abusive misbehavior. Affleck’s presence in the film is most effective when his inherent creepiness is actively put to use, like when he hides in children’s closets or smashes a Latina single mother’s dishes in a temper tantrum. Outside of a couple jump scares, this is no more of a horror film than Personal Shopper or, going further back, Ghost, but there’s still some potential here in the idea of Casey Affleck tormenting PoC families & the women in his former life from beyond the grave that I find more amusing & worthwhile than any of the film’s philosophical ponderings. It’s a shame neither Rooney Mara nor the nameless single mother were afforded as much uninterrupted dialogue as Will Oldham was in his single scene appearance, since their interactions with the ghostly Affleck were much more prolonged & substantial.

In accepting that all art is inconsequential outside its in-the-moment entertainment, the best I could hope to find in A Ghost Story was some sense of novelty. A few stray images like a prismatic reflection on a living room wall transforming into a galaxy or a sheeted Affleck floating through a massive office building were temporary reliefs, but mostly the movie felt like slightly more trouble than it was worth. In A Ghost Story‘s sole moment of true novelty, Rooney Mara attempts to suppress her grief by aggressively eating an entire pie in a single, unbroken shot before inevitably puking it up. I appreciate the dedication in forcing the audience to stew in the discomfort of that moment, but it’s difficult to not feel disappointed that she doesn’t even eat the whole pie before her body gives up. That kind of 75% follow-through corrupts the entire act of watching this film for entertainment in the first place. This is especially true once Will Oldham’s big speech rattles around in the air, questioning the point of watching something like this at all when you could be having cheap fun instead. It’s all meaningless & temporary anyway, so we might as well fill our time with the kind of pictures where, metaphorically speaking, Rooney Mara eats the whole pie.

-Brandon Ledet

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

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I was really expecting a lot out of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and while I wasn’t disappointed per se, as a great deal of it lived up to the expectations that I had, there was still enough to detract from its majesty to leave me feeling relatively cold in the end. This may come as a surprise to you, given that I was and am a staunch defender of Jupiter Ascending (going so far as to put it on my Top Ten of 2015 list), but it comes as even more of a surprise to me. Maybe it’s that the charisma score of the two leads in Ascending (Channing Tatum +10, Mila Kunis -4, sum total 6) was still higher than that of Valerian (Dane DeHaan, normally a +8 for me, comes in at a +1.5 here, and Cara DeLevigne at a surprising +4), or maybe it’s that Ascending was a dumb-but-pretty thrill ride that escalated over the course of the film while Valerian is front-loaded with a lot of greatness that peters out into a banal “love” story by the conclusion.

The film opens on a magical and beautifully rendered sequence, set to “Space Oddity,” that shows the progress of the Alpha space station as it grows over time to include a multitude of different national space programs and astronauts, then to include delegates and additions from other space-faring races, to ultimately become so massive that it has to leave earth’s orbit and move into the Magellan Current (there’s no such thing that I know of, although there are dwarf and satellite galaxies near our own that are known as Magellanic Clouds). 400 years after leaving our solar system*, Alpha is home to millions of life forms from over a thousand races. Major Valerian (DeHaan) and his partner Laureline (DeLevigne) are special agents of the Human Federation (it’s unclear why the amalgamation of races is referred to this way, or if the humans merely administrate the station due to the fact that they built the original core) on a mission to retrieve a valuable life form from a Jabba-esque alien (John Goodman) at an interdimensional bazaar. En route, Valerian receives a soul-powered dream/vision from a young alien princess who died following a catastrophic disaster on her home planet of Mül, an event that destroyed her world and drove her people to the brink of extinction.

Following their success, Valerian attempts to research Mül, but all information about it is classified, even to their four-star general superior Okto Bar (Sam Spruell). Their attempts to further discern what happened to the planet are thwarted when General Filitt (Clive Owen) is called upon to give a speech to assembled member species about a radiation zone which has appeared in the center of Alpha, and from which no survey team or tactical party has yet returned. This assembly is attacked and the general kidnapped, forcing Valerian to pursue and Laureline to investigate further, leading her down a rabbit hole adventure of duck-like aliens with trunks and scrotal skin, a psychic jellyfish that feeds on memories, a steampunk submarine pirate named Bob, and nearly getting eaten. Meanwhile, Valerian’s misadventures lead him to enlisting the help of a shapeshifting alien named Bubble (Rihanna), and finding out what really happened on Mül and who’s responsible.

I was so on board for this film, and I was completely in the moment, despite some reservations, until the point when Laureline is kidnapped. I wasn’t a huge fan of Valerian’s creepy possessiveness of and desire for Laureline, but I was willing to forgive this transgression as a kind of blind deconstruction of the Han/Leia relationship (YouTube channel Pop Culture Detective has a pretty good video essay on this subject here) until it became apparent that their relationship was meant to be read as completely sincere. This was the biggest sticking point for me in the first half of the movie, but I was still along for the thrill ride through that nonsense and a belabored info dump. However, the film starts to drift when Laureline is captured by the languageless alien monsters that hate outsiders (a friend compared them to Jar Jar Binks, saying that they weren’t explicitly racist caricatures like he was, but their tribalism, cannibalism, and lack of higher speech functions smacks of “space ignorance”). Meanwhile, Valerian has to recruit Bubble to help him as a disguise to enter their xenophobic culture to save Laureline (after she saved him first, so she’s no damsel in distress). This, too, is pretty dull, give or take a PG-rated shapeshifting Rihanna exotic dance number.

If you’ll recall, when Avatar came out, there were stories about people who were so obsessed with living in the world of Pandora that they were getting cosmetic surgery and considering suicide. That seemed absurd to me then (and now), but while I have no desire to shuffle off my mortal coil, I’ve never before experienced such an intense desire to live inside a film’s aesthetic than I have when watching the delegates of fish people and mechanical men arrive on Alpha. Aside from an expositional infodump as Valerian and Laureline return to the space station, there’s too little exploration of the world that’s been created. Instead, the film gets distracted by plot cul-de-sacs that explore areas of Alpha that are far less interesting than those of which we get only a glimpse. I used to think that we would never again live in a world where the special effects in a movie would be the film’s biggest draw, along the lines of how the word of mouth about Independence Day revolved around the monumental destruction of landmarks, bringing in more audience members than could have been expected. That’s not really true, however; the effects in Valerian are so effective at rendering a beautiful world that you can’t help but get lost in it. It’s so engrossing that, when a supposedly emotional moment is happening between Laureline and Valerian near the end of the film, you forget to pay attention to the plot, such as it is. Combine that with some heavy-handed (and questionable) use of the Noble Savage trope, a dramatic “reveal” of the film’s villain that is anything but, and a notable lack of chemistry every time DeHaan and DeLevigne are on screen together, and you’ve got a beautifully imagined world captured in a fairly lackluster film.

*Except not really. The film states that Alpha has progressed 700 million miles from earth at the time that the majority of the film takes place, which is . . . still in our solar system. To put it in perspective, the earth is an average distance of 93 million miles from the sun (a distance referred to in astronomy as an “astronomical unit,” or AU), so this would put Alpha less than 8 times further from our sun than we are, or, more poetically, further than Jupiter but closer than Saturn. The furthermost planet, Neptune (please refrain from expressing your non-scientific sentimentality for Pluto in the comments), is 2.795 billion miles from the Sun. Of course, it’s absurd that the film (and I in this footnote) are charting anything in miles, since astronomy is a science and science uses the metric system. Even if I misunderstood and the film said that Alpha was 700 billion miles (or 0.119 light years) out, our closest stellar neighbor Proxima Centauri is 24.94 trillion miles (4.243 light years) away, so it really hasn’t gotten far, especially in four centuries. That’s a mere 43.435 light days from earth! If this were set today, August 1, 2018, that means that I could live on Alpha and pick up radio transmissions from June 19. But just because they think Chester Bennington is still alive and have no idea that Anthony Scaramucci has been appointed and deposed, they’ll know soon. It’s hardly a distance befitting the majesty of pulling Rutger Hauer out of his bed of mothballs to give a grand speech about travelling among the stars. But I digress.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Atomic Blonde (2017)

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There’s been some extensive discussion lately about how nostalgic media had gone too far with its Remember This? relics & references to 80s & 90s pop culture. Titles like Stranger Things & Ready Player One have proven popular with mass audiences, but have also drawn eyerolls from plenty critical outlets for their easy nostalgia bait. One of the more bizarre aspects of the Charlize Theron action vehicle Atomic Blonde is the way it hops on that same 80s nostalgia train, yet somehow its pop culture throwbacks feel oddly curated and not quite part of the trend. Set on both sides of The Berlin Wall in the few days leading to it being torn down in 1989, the film’s pop culture references include things like David Hasselhoff, Tetris, skateboarding, grafitti, neon lights, etc. In one indicative scene, Theron beats up a horde of faceless goons in front of a movie screen at a cinema that happens to be projecting Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Atomic Blonde is a weird little nerd pretending to fit in with the popular kids. Its blatant nostalgia for 80s pop culture should make it a widely accessible work, but there’s something off-kilter about its reference points that immediately single it out as a sore thumb outsider.

As nerdy as Atomic Blonde‘s 80s pop culture references can be, its basic pleasures are lizard brain simple. This is a summertime popcorn picture that banks on the central hook that its audience will never tire of watching Charlize Theron beat down men while wearing slick fashion creations & listening to synthpop. Its central mystery about double/triple agents jockeying to get the upper hand at the fever pitch of the Cold War is never nearly as significant as a David Bowie needledrop or a panning shot detailing Theron’s complicated underwear as she gears up for another day of crushing dude’s throats. Costume designer Cindy Evans deserves just as much credit as ex-stuntman director David Leitch or Theron herself for making the movie feel at all distinctive or memorable. The brutality of the action choreography (much of which Theron performed herself) & the immediate pleasures of the soundtrack (which includes acts as varied as New Order, Public Enemy, George Michael, Ministry, and Siouxsie & The Banshees) are entertaining enough as post-Tarantino/Scorsese pop cinema diversions. It’s the fashion design set against the Crimes of Passion-esque neon lighting that helps distinguish the film as its own idiosyncratic work, however, which should give you an idea of how surface level & visual its merits are on the whole.

Although the feeling wouldn’t last long, I was actually very much excited for Atomic Blonde‘s narrative structure when Theron’s ass-kicking protagonist was first introduced. She begins the film already icing her wounds in a freezing cold bath, recovering from a spy mission to the Eastern side of The Berlin Wall. This decision reminded me so much of the archetypal JCVD & Schwarzenegger action pics of the 80s & 90s, which usually introduce the hero at the tail end of one adventure before beginning the one that will command the plot. Instead, this opening is soon revealed to be a feature-length flashback, wherein the story is told in an investigative interview with British & American intelligence agencies. A needlessly complicated plot about double agent assassinations & a McGuffin referenced to as The List gradually emerges, but is told in such sweeping, summarizing swaths that any in-the-moment suspense over the central mystery is left muted at best, incomprehensible at worst. Instead of trying to figure out which of her collaborators has sold her out to the KGB (James McAcoy? John Goodman? Toby Jones?), the audience is better off letting go of narrative completely & indulging in the image of Theron kicking ass to kick-ass synthpop. The flashback structure undercuts a lot of the immediacy of that simple pleasure (with the major exception of an extended stairwell sequence that wisely slows down to allow the sheer brutality to fully sink in), but the strengths of the fashion design, the soundtrack curation, and Theron’s physical presence are enough for the film to persevere.

Atomic Blonde‘s origins as a graphic novel adaptation and a pet project from one of the minds behind the John Wick franchise are blatantly apparent. Its reliance on the slickness of its imagery and the Hey Remember This? quality of its off-kilter 80s nostalgia are much more firmly in its wheelhouse than the complex double/triple crossings of its Gotcha! mystery plot. Now that Theron’s rock solid protagonist had emerged as a high fashion, animalistically brutal James Bond type, despite the lackluster plot that surrounded her, the world is primed for that Just Another Adventure, JCVD-style sequel. She’s got a killer look, a signature drink (Stoli on the rocks), an established bisexual flair for bedding other agents, and, most importantly, is damn convincing as a physical threat to faceless baddies. Since the movie leaves off at the dawn of the 1990s, she even has a whole new era of odd duck nostalgia bait to milk on her next mission. I enjoyed Atomic Blonde for what it is, but it has some glaring narrative issues I feel could easily be course-corrected in an Atomic Blonde 2. I fear this picture’s box office returns will be too slight to generate a sequel, but at least its sense of fashion has left us with a killer lookbook as consolation.

-Brandon Ledet

Junior (1994)

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There’s no question that in the very limited subgenre of Ivan Reitman comedies where Arnold Schwarzenegger is teamed with Danny DeVito in a mismatched comedy duo, Twins is the crown jewel. Where does that leave its only competition, though? Much like how Twins finds it endlessly hilarious that Schwarzenegger is large & DeVito is small, the follow-up to that pairing, Junior, is tickled by the idea of the smaller actor getting the larger one pregnant. That’s not an idea that necessarily generates brilliant comedy on a joke to joke basis, but it does lead to very pressing questions like How?, Why?, and Wait What? that could never be fully answered by a single motion picture. Reitman & company were so amused by the idea of a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger that they never stopped to consider the reasoning or the implications behind the unholy creation, leading to an oddly tame studio comedy with an absurdly bizarre basic premise that’s made all the more jarring by the fact that it’s not fully explored. Twins is the funnier, more successful Schwarzenegger/DeVito comedy in Reitman’s catalog, but Junior is clearly the strangest.

Schwarzenegger begins Junior as a caricature of a meat-head supernerd near-identical to the one he played in Twins. The only difference is that this nerd is uptight, a cynical academic who’s nervous around the children & social obligations he encounters through his career in fertility research. As his foil, DeVito is also similar to the chauvanistic snake oil salesman he plays in Twins, except this time he works in the field of gynecology. In the name of saving their collaborative research project from having its university funding pulled (or some other such contrivance), the two goofs make the rash decision to experiment on themselves to prove their very sciency science serum is effective in increasing fertility. This leads to Arnold being impregnated with an egg stolen from a fellow researcher’s (and eventual love interest’s) competing project, fertilized by his own sperm. Their experiment is never supposed to continue past the first trimester, but Schwarzenegger’s shifting hormones convince him to carry the child full-time, against all logic & good taste. We watch in amusement/horror as pregnancy slowly opens his cold, dead heart to life’s simple joys and he finds true love with the researcher (a befuddled, Nutty Professor-mode Emma Thompson) whose egg he hijacked without consent. It’s all very conventional in a textbook romcom sense, except for the obvious deviation from that model in having the film’s emotional work carried on the back of a male, pregnant bodybuilder.

The strangest aspect of Junior is not the presence of a visibly pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the general absence of traditional jokes. Besides the absurdity of its premise and a couple stray jabs of gay panic humor, the film does little to reach for moments of over the top comedy. What’s left, then, is the uneasy feeling of watching DeVito & Schwarzenegger gestate a baby, which feels subversively bizarre only in the way it’s mostly played straight. DeVito compliments Schwarzenegger’s sperm in a flat, matter of fact tone, remarking “Strong swimmers. Big load. Way to go.” He penetrates Schwarzenegger’s abdominal wall to impregnate him with a giant needle, with little attention paid to how he will carry a baby without the help of a womb or umbilical cord. Schwarzenegger’s struggles with morning sickness, nipple soreness, and hormone-induced horniness are only amusing because of the physical presence of the actor conveying them. Besides a third act drag routine at an expectant mothers’ retreat or his action movie one-liner delivery of “My body, my choice,” there aren’t many comedic touches to his presence in the film. In fact, in a nightmare sequence where his face is superimposed over a screaming baby’s, a brief moment of mid-90s CGI, he can even be outright terrifying.

Junior‘s one joke begins & ends with its basic premise: Danny DeVito gets Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant. There’s something perverse about playing that premise straight instead of reaching for a laugh-a-minute giggle fest, but the fact of the matter is that the film’s main attraction is the absurdity of its own existence. If you want to see DeVito & Schwarzenegger bounce off one another as a top of their game comedy duo, watch Twins. Junior should be reserved for when you want something other than humor: unease, confusion, and (in the case of the CG Arnold baby) horror. The film feels like Reitman somehow got away with a longform prank on pop culture at large. I’m sure he was tickled with the results, but he rest of us can hope to muster stunned awe.

-Brandon Ledet