Reviews

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

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three star

One year after the Art Deco silent horror masterwork The Bat made the jump from stage to screen, Universal Studios got their feet wet in the horror game with an adaptation of a very similar play, The Cat and the Canary. Along with the much lesser trifle Midnight Faces, The Bat & The Cat and the Canary combined to establish what would become a very popular subgenre of early horror: the “old dark house.” In the “old dark house” story, guests at an ancient, spooky mansion are terrorized by seemingly supernatural events & a mysterious killer. At the story’s natural end the killer’s identity is revealed and all of the preceding supernatural events are explained to be their doing. This was a very popular murder mystery/horror plot form the 30s throughout the 50s until the murder mystery aspect was dropped & the supernatural elements were played up & developed into the “haunted house” genre. By the 1970s & onward the “old dark house” plot was spoof fodder for properties like Murder by Death, Clue, and Scooby-Doo, but in the 1920s it played remarkably fresh, with The Cat and The Canary standing as a prime example of the horror genre’s merits as an artform. Unfortunately, in retrospect the film feels a lot less special & a little more flawed than it did to the audiences it floored in 1927, especially with the towering presence of The Bat casting its shadow over the ordeal.

A wealthy eccentric on his death bed bemoans the fact that his family hungers after his money like a gang of cats circling a caged canary. In order to fight them off, he sets the reading of his will 20 years into the future, when the family returns to learn that the money has been willed to his most distant relative. There is then a conspiracy to drive this distant relative insane as a means to strip them of their newfound wealth due to incompetence. In the meantime anyone foolish enough to get in the way is mysteriously murdered and, because the mansion setting is so very spooky, their deaths are blamed on “ghosts.” The Cat and the Canary boasts a very straightforward plot structure that calls a lot of attention to its stage play origins, but what the film lacks in a unique narrative, director Paul Leni makes up for in pure atmosphere. The German Expressionist filmmaker brings an incredible eye for visual play to the big screen, a bridge between art house Europe & the more rigid spectacle of Old Hollywood that I believe would guide the heights of Universal horror productions for decades to come. Leni unlocks the silliness of the film’s stage play origins and allows the camera to move in subtly haunting ways, as if exploring a crime scene with a flashlight (quite literally in an early moment). He also relies heavily on German Expressionism’s penchant for drastic lighting & dreamlike imagery. Gigantic cats & medicine bottles tower over a dying man. Overlaid images like a doorknocker, an envelope, and a gloved hand shift large in perspective, foreshadowing the deep focus technique Citizen Kane would pioneer in the early 40s. Just examining gorgeous, isolated frames of the film, it’s no wonder that The Cat and the Canary was known as the definitive  & haunted house movie,  inspiring no less than five other feature film adaptations of the same play & influencing horror giants like Alfred Hitchcock with its visual style.

The problem with The Cat and the Canary is a fairly common one with old school horror productions. It’s actually the sole reason I had to knock a half-star off my rating for the otherwise flawless The Bat. In order to soften the cruel blow of the film’s supernatural (and potentially blasphemous) terrors, old fashioned horror was often mixed with hokey yuck-em-up comedy, particularly in American productions. In The Bat, a dopey, dim-witted maid makes an ass out of herself by continually mis-guessing the true identity of The Bat. In Midnight Faces, the “old dark house” genre’s other founding father, the comedy takes the ugly form of racial caricature in a scaredy cat black sidekick. The Cat and the Canary, unfortunately, stretches the comedy element across as many characters as it can, turning what is otherwise a beautifully-constructed art film into a painfully hokey farce. Now-tired gags like a scared character stuttering, “G-g-g-g-ghosts!” & incomprehensible relics like, “It’s about time you climbed on the milk wagon,” (what?) drag a lot of what makes The Cat and the Canary special down into the depths of eyeroll-worthy comedic tedium and it’s honestly a damn shame.

There’s certain old-world cheese that I can forgive given this film’s ancient release date, such as the way it hammers home the central cat & canary metaphor that gives it a title over, I believe, three separate repetitions. That I can live with. The way the film’s hokey comedy routines drain the blood out of its supernatural horror, however, is a true bummer. The Cat and the Canary is ultimately a film at war with itself. As a cornerstone of what American horror would come to look like in it wake, the film is an indispensable artifact and an occasionally breathtaking one at that. It’s also a failed comedy, though, which is up there with the most difficult kinds of films out there to enjoy. This is a problem made even worse by the fact that it’s bested by The Bat in every single possible regard, especially in the look of its central killer antagonist, which is not at all catlike in his visage in comparison to the other film’s humanoid creature. The result is a flawed work that I admired, but also found a little disappointing. I hope somewhere else in Paul Leni’s career there was a film that made proper use of his stunning cinematic eye without cheapening it with broad humor.

-Brandon Ledet

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

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fourstar

I love the Internet. I spend a lot of time here. I’m also a huge sci-fi nerd. I love looking towards the future, thinking about highly intelligent A.I., and I’m not afraid of the great robot uprising. On top of all of that, I’m a big Herzog fan. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World kind of seems like it was tailored specifically for me. All that considered, though, it’s ambitious subject matter to tackle. How would anyone make a film about the Internet and how it’s affected our society? Herzog’s solution to that problem is to separate it into vignettes.

The first vignette is about the very beginning at UCLA’s campus. Very early on we get Herzog’s dry sense of humor as he remarks about how hideous the corridors are in the building that houses the start of this massive cultural and technological revolution. Then, we get the basic good and bad sides of the Internet, learning about the widely released EteRNA game which helps researchers learn about new RNA molecules and also meeting a family who’s faced very real harm after a privacy invasion. As the film progresses, however, the ideas and themes sort of spiral out of control in a way that mirrors what the Internet has done.  At some points, the spiral seems less intentional than at others and often times it’s unsure whether or not Herzog — who admittedly didn’t even make his first phone call until age 17 and still doesn’t have a cell phone — really understands the information being passed to him.

The real strength of any Herzog documentary is in the interview subjects. He has a strength in finding the most interesting people to talk to. He also handles each subject with such neutral respect. Whether it’s talking to Elon Musk or students trying to program soccer robots in the attempt to beat the World Cup champions or people in technology rehab, he’s never combative and respects their boundaries.

One thing I really appreciated about this documentary was all the technology-positive viewpoints. So often in our age of smart phone and augmented reality games people are extremely and unfoundedly critical. It was truly refreshing to hear people say positively that the Internet has been a great equalizer and that the conveniences brought on by robots and self-driving cars will be helpful. Yes, Herzog still interviews people who think the Internet is the embodiment of the antichrist and others who believe that wireless radiation is ruining their lives and causing chronic pain, but they are in the minority. Everyone else looks towards the future inquisitively and optimistically.

Lo and Behold is sprawling and out of control and at some points it feels like Herzog was in over his head like someone’s misguided documentarian great uncle. There’s history to speculation, best case scenarios, and worries about an impending apocalypse included here. The film is out of control in the way the Internet has become.

-Alli Hobbs

Creative Control (2016)

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three star

“It’ll be weird when we all have chips in our brains.”
“It won’t seem weird then. It’ll seem inevitable.”

Some of the most effective sci-fi works are the ones that don’t have to reach too far into the future to find something worth saying. The recent indie cheapie Creative Control doesn’t say exactly what year it’s supposed to be set in, but it might as well be next year, maybe even next month. Walking through the CBD in New Orleans every week, I see tons of tiny tech startups clacking away on their Apple computers in the giant, unobscured windows of their rented, cubicle-free workspaces. I usually assume most of these businesses are in the search optimization market or something similarly intangible, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be hammering away at creating or advertising Augmenta, the central technological advancement that drives the plot of Creative Control. The film starts from an entirely plausible place & doesn’t stray too far from that contemporary anchor, a decision that helps keep its technophobic paranoia surprisingly relatable, despite its hamfisted smartphone addiction shaming & the general unlikeablility of its characters.

The fictional technological advancement Augmenta, in case you haven’t guessed it, is posed as the next logical step in augmented reality. Housed in the clear plastic frames of hipster glasses, Augmenta is much more stylish than the Borg-ish look of Google Glass & aims for a Steve Jobs-esque attention to clean, fashionable visual aesthetic. The company hired to sell this product is a hipster Brooklynite version of Mad Men, complete with rampant alcoholism, model-chasing adultery, and hypermasculine ennui. This is cheap, casual sci-fi with occasional moments of off-putting acting choices, but it’s grounded in a very specific world of money-chasing advertisers & profit > people manufacturers that’s likely never going away, so it actually comes across as relatively pertinent to our current consumer culture. Creative Control toes the thin line that divides technology & magic, exploring the way that A.R. advancements attempt to “enhance real life with a magical layer in front of it.” It uses the uncanny, inevitable future of every consumer wearing a “face computer” to moralize about a modern society increasingly “addicted to misery & pain” and decreasingly engaged with life head on as characters multitask in both the real & digital worlds simultaneously, never fully focused on a single interaction in a constant attempt to focus on them all. Creative Control presents big ideas about digital & tangible interactions in a very realistic future, but those concerns merely color the anxieties of its beyond-grating cast of capitalist brutes rather than lead to some kind of grand, epiphanic statement about where our culture is headed.

For all of its see-through smartphones, holographic lap dances, and strange, geometrically-shaped pills, the world of Creative Control is still very much like our own. It’s even crawling with the same cocaine-numb bro monsters, douchebag fashion photographers, and overly flirtations yoga instructors that currently infest the masculine end of modern hipsterdom as we speak. Creative Control’s plot mostly revolves around a tangled web of adultery & romantic jealousies where an ad agency jerk (with a Yoni Wolf fashion sense) satisfies his lust for a skirt-chasing buddy’s girlfriend by masturbating to her avatar in his Augmenta-created fantasy world. In the process he loses touch with his girlfriend’s wants & needs and the basic demands of his job as he slips further into a drug & alcohol fueled confusion that blends reality & fantasy into a difficult-to-parse mess of petty romantic betrayals.

No one in the male-dominated film isn’t an asshole except the two girlfriends who get sucked into their partners’ corrosive bullshit and they’re treated like a nagging shrew & a magic pixie dream girl ideal, respectfully. The one exception there is Reggie Watts, playing himself as Augmenta’s chosen spokesman. It’s in Watts’s prankster-minded screen presence and in the film’s crisp, black & white digital cinematography that Creative Control finds its own voice as a distinct work. Its fretting over technology addiction & its anxious gaze into modern romance is a little less special, but also a natural element of its pedigree as a contemporary sci-fi drama. I left Creative Control glad to see Reggie Watts get paid for being his wonderfully weird self (along with a cameo role H Jon Benjamin) and super glad that I don’t have to deal with the film’s tech startup bros in my own life, though I know for sure that they exist. It worked pretty well for me in that way even if it wasn’t the cinematic breakthrough equivalent of augmented reality or “face computer” technology.

-Brandon Ledet 

Miles Ahead (2016)

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fourstar

“When you’re creating your own shit, man . . . even the sky ain’t the limit.” –Miles Davis, supposedly

After watching Miles Ahead in its entirety it’s difficult to tell if the above quote, which appears on an opening title card, was actually something Miles Davis said or if it’s something in the spirit of what Miles Davis would say. Either way, first-time filmmaker, longtime badass Don Cheadle holds onto the sentiment of that quote like a mission statement or a war cry. Miles Ahead is dressed up like a Miles Davis biopic, but functions much more like an expressionistic gangster film, mirroring the way Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song falls just on the art film side of blaxploitation. This Don Cheadle passion project (starring, written, and directed by Cheadle himself) pursues an over the top dedication to creative license with his subject’s life story that makes for a disjointed, but controlled variation on biopic conventions and, wouldn’t you know it, the result feels a little like jazz. I could see how someone could find Cheadle’s many eccentric decisions silly, but I found myself impressed by his cavalier ambition. In the end I believe your enjoyment of Miles Ahead boils down to whether or not you think its choices & attitude are, for lack of a better word, cool. Personally, I was buying all of the cool cat absurdism Cheadle was selling with very few reservations.

Instead of following the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative of biopic tedium, Miles Ahead focuses on two distinct points in its jazz legend’s career. In one storyline he’s the famous jazz world equivalent of a rockstar, struggling with typical music giant clichés you’d see ripped to shreds in spoofs like Walk Hard & Popstar: intense recording sessions, pressure to succeed, hedonistic lovemaking with strangers, trouble with a too-understanding spouse, etc. This lens is mostly a glimpse into the tame, by the numbers biopic Miles Ahead could’ve been. The other fixed temporal point is a highly fictionalized down period where Davis is a strung out, Howard Hughes style loner, except trading in germaphobia for depressive squalor. In this 1970s spiritual low point he teams up with a Rolling Stone reporter charged with writing his supposed comeback story to go on a guns & coke-fueled caper to maintain control of his latest unreleased recordings in the face of the record company execs & thugs desperate to rip him off (by satisfying his contract), including an eternally underutilized Michael Stuhlbarg among their ranks. This bifurcated structure recalls the genre subversion of last year’s Love & Mercy, except that Cheadle chooses not to keep his two halves separate. The haze of memory & drug fueled hallucination allow the walls of reality to break down and the two timelines bleed together, mixing the action thriller absurdism & glory days revisitation into a highly explosive cocktail that might be more interesting than essential, but is certainly much more entertaining that it would’ve been if Cheadle played the material straight.

A lot of viewers have been turned off by Miles Ahead’s gleeful tampering with its subject’s life story (with curmudgeony critic Rex Reed being the biggest whiner/detractor out there, which is usually an automatic sign of greatness), but I think the film’s gambles pay off just fine as soon as you separate the real life Miles Davis from the fictional, gun-wielding drug addict Cheadle brings to the screen. This is not a biographical portrait so much as an attempt to capture Davis’s energetic spirit in the weirdly cool & inherently tragic shape of an action cinema anti-hero. Where I find this experiment brilliant is in Cheadle’s willingness to trade in one genre’s flat, uninteresting, trope-laden formula for the much more exciting, much trashier energy of an entirely different kind of picture, one audiences usually have a much easier time focusing on. The writer-director-star has even admitted that he constructed Ewan McGregor’s Rolling Stone writer character merely because he needed a white face onscreen to sell more tickets & secure better funding, which is obviously fucked, but incredibly practical. Cheadle obviously holds tremendous adoration for Davis and wanted his film, which he believes captures the artist’s spirit, to reach the widest audience possible, presumably to spread that adoration.

Ultimately, though the results in Miles Ahead are too strange for wide commercial appeal, mirroring too many eccentric energies from Davis’s work, whether funk or jazz or subculture cool, for any hopes of runaway commercial success. The movie’s similarly unlikely to win over a large chunk of the art film crowd either, since they can be less kind to experimental, but messy debuts from actors-turned-directors, as we saw with Ryan Gosling’s better-than-its-reputation Lost River last year. I don’t want to suggest that Miles Ahead is 100% successful in capturing spirit instead of truth or bringing jazz’s idiosyncrasies to cinematic life. I do think, however, that it’s a surprisingly fun & playful marriage of fine art technique with trash genre thrills, which is more or less my favorite kind of movie magic formula. The only time Don Cheadle’s gambles don’t particularly work for me is in a closing concert sequence that bleeds into the end credits. I’m willing to overlook that discomfort, though, and mileage may vary there since, truth be told, I don’t really like jazz (sorry y’all). I mostly showed up for Miles Ahead’s dangerous, iconoclastic experiments with action-packed absurdism. Cheadle’s debut did not disappoint there. I hope he gets more chances to step behind the camera & deliver more work this confidently strange in the future, despite his first film’s muted reception.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Ponyo (2009), and the Weirdly Relaxed Plotting of Hayao Miyazaki Features

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Although the animation medium he works in sometimes pigeonholes his accomplishments, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of the masters of cinema, right up there with names like Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Corman. And just like with a lot of the masters of cinema, I’ve only seen a small fraction of his work and I’m scrambling to catch up. Lately I’ve been making more of an effort to familiarize myself with a wider range  of Miyazaki classics outside re-watching Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro multiple times a year, which has lead me to a few less readily recognizable titles like Howl’s Moving Castle & Princess Mononoke over the past year. It’s been difficult for me to distinguish Miyazaki’s work form the rest of the filmmakers at Studio Ghibli in terms of style outside of his fascination with themes like immersion in the natural world & the wonder of flight. While recently watching the features Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service in a single weekend, though, something struck me about the way Miyazaki’s features’ approach plot & pacing I hadn’t yet noticed. Once the director establishes the majesty of his films’ worlds & settings, he’s remarkably comfortable with bringing the story down to a full stop simply to marinate in the immense beauty he’s constructed. I had never noticed before how his films all tend to work this way in their own individual moments of lowkey self-reflection & immersion in setting before watching these two titles in rapid succession. Nor had I noticed how oddly comforting that plot structure can be.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple story about a young witch coming of age as she leaves home to start a new, autonomous life in a foreign city. In an early jaunt of exposition the Miyazaki trademarks of intricate, detailed animation (seen most easily in its shots of wind blowing through tall grass) & wonder with the majesty of flight (she’s a witch after all; she even made her own broom) seem to promise an epic story of witchy misadventures as Kiki tries to find her footing in an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying world. I was more or less expecting The Worst Witch restructured as a big budget adventure epic. The film does feature some dangerous run-ins that fit the mold I’m describing, like an early tussle with some vindictive crows & a climax revolving around a downed zeppelin, but for the most part action & adventure are the furthest thing from the film’s mind. Most people in Kiki’s new city are supportive of the witchy visitor, especially once she becomes familiar & finds a sense of purpose in her broomstick-driven delivery business. For the most part the film’s plot is centered on small scale concerns like “Will she make new friends?” “Will she make her deliveries on time?” and “Will she beat the rain?”  Kiki’s Delivery Service isn’t a tale of a witch venturing out into the world as much as it’s about a witch finding confidence & autonomy within herself, with the film’s most major crisis being whether or not she’ll get her mojo back once her magic begins to fade. The way Miyazaki allows this inner struggle to play out & resonate is to establish a living space (an indoor-kid’s fantasy of an attic loft above a bakery with an ocean view) and allow Kiki to ruminate within it, as if she were morphing inside a cocoon. To pile any more action onto the plot would detract from the impact of Kiki’s inward journey & Miyazaki’s brilliance is in the way he’s comfortable with letting his protagonist’s downtime breathe & slowly mature.

Although its setting trades Kiki’s Delivery Service’s high in the sky adoration with flight for a polar opposite physical realm deep under water, Ponyo follows a similar trajectory in terms of plot & pacing. Miyazaki opens the movie with an immensely intricate galaxy of deep sea wonders, dazzling the audience with a majestic display teeming with underwater lifeforms. This peaceful balance is disrupted when a humanoid fish befriends a small human boy on dry land & shapeshifts to please him, playing out a strange slant on the fairy tale structure of The Little Mermaid. Ignoring the warning that “Fishes with faces who come out of the ocean cause tsunamis,” the two unlikely friends explore a life together at everyone else’s expense, causing a massive flood, as promised, that separates parents – both underwater wizards & overworked nursing home employee mothers alike – from their young children. Again, what’s interesting in the way Miyazaki constructs this fable is that he doesn’t push for big, exciting action sequences at every turn in Ponyo but instead seeks out a languid kind of majesty that’s remarkably confident & emotionally affecting in the way it allows you to sink into the places he’s created. Ponyo’s story works twofold in its development of a heartfelt, but doomed friendship and its sense of loss & confusion in the search of a misplaced loved one. What sticks with you in the film isn’t necessarily specific events or plot points, but rather visual details like a jellyfish galaxy or a candle-powered boat and, yet, an emotional story arc caries through in that setting-specific artistry

I think a large part of the brilliance of Miyazaki’s slow crawl pacing & sparse plotting is the way it allows you to sink into a space. The underwater world of Ponyo & the above-the-bakery apartment of Kiki’s Delivery Service live vividly in my imagination long after the end credits, feeling as real or as tangible as real-life spaces I’ve physically inhabited. As I look back to past films I’ve seen from the director I realize that this aspect has always been a major aspect of his appeal to me. I don’t always remember the finer points of the various adventures & mishaps in his films as much as I remember details like the gloriously crowded bedroom in Howl’s Moving Castle or the inside of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro or the old woman’s cottage in Spirited Away. I was pondering the other day about what didn’t quite work for me in the recent French animated feature April and the Extraordinary World and I’m starting to think it had something to do with the film’s decision to crowd its runtime with an action chase plot instead of slowing down & luxuriating in the intricately detailed space it had created. The only animated film outside of Studio Ghibli I can think of that similarly pulls this trick off is Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (it even features a Ponyo-like flood), which, no surprise, Miyazaki himself had apparently worked at some point during its long, troubled production. The director’s reverence for defined space over quickly plotted pace has a special touch that allows you to mentally live in his worlds that some less pointed works would allow to fly by in a blur. For some reason it took rapid succession viewings of Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service for me to catch onto that aspect of his work, but looking back I realize it had been there with me all along.

-Brandon Ledet

Princess Mononoke (1999)

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fourhalfstar

I’ve gradually become accustomed to a certain warmth & comfort in Hayao Miyazaki films, where a slow, languid pace allows the plot to trickle as we come to settle in an infinite, domestic space full of immense wonder. Even otherworldly dangers like Howl’s Moving Castle’s bird wizards & Spirited Away’s No Face are tamed & consoled by the warmth & domesticity of Miyazaki’s intricate, natural worlds. His characters always seem to find their way to calmness & peace in interior space, occasionally contrasted with the expensive majesty of flight. Imagine my shock, then, when I recently watched Miyzazki’s Japanese folklore masterpiece Princess Mononoke for the first time. It was like a glorious, unexpected punch to the face. Princess Mononoke might be the single most metal animated feature I’ve ever seen. Its shapeshifting warthog demons, severed arms, decapitations, and eco warrior terrorism were not only unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a Miyazaki film before; they were also inexplicably invigorating in a way that only the best of cinema can be. Its PG-13 violence was shocking, but also darkly beautiful and added a whole other layer of complexity to a director I’ve been gradually less able to fully understand or pigeonhole with each passing feature. It’s an exciting feeling.

The story of Princess Mononoke appears to be heavily steeped in Japanese history & folklore, but its basic elements are fairly understandable to a cultural outsider. A young prince must leave his village on a quest to lift a curse from his arm he incurred while slaying an undead demonic boar. His cursed wound allows him to “fight like a demon,” but being a mighty warrior is a small consolation prize for a spreading illness that will eventually bring his death. On his journey he finds himself stuck between two sides of an impending war. On one end stands an industrial iron-producing village helmed by a warmongering matriarch, representing the modern world. On the opposite end stands the natural world, represented by mythically large talking beasts, ancient spirits, and a Jungle Book-type princess who was raised by a pack of wolves. The prince must negotiate a peaceful balance between the modern world & the natural one before the two sides’ bloodbaths get out of hand, an escalating tension reflected in the way his cursed wound pulsates & worsens each time they clash.

It’s difficult to capture the fierce beauty of Princess Mononoke in words. I can’t describe the pure badass beauty of its titular character riding into battle equipped with a spear & mask on a giant wolf’s back, but nothing could supplant seeing it for yourself. Although his accomplishments are typically contextualized solely within the world of animation, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of cinema’s modern masters & Princess Mononoke is one of his finest works, as complex & violent of an outlier as it is. The film juggles concepts as varied as war, deforestation, ghosts, industry spirituality, and the basic instructions on how to kill a god, all without ever feeling bogged down or overstuffed. In some ways its story is as simple as a young man fighting on both sides of a war he finds abhorrent in order to put an end to it & find peace. The implications of what that war means and how we define balance in a modern, industrialized world is much vaster & more fascinating, though, a depth Princess Mononoke commands in very few brushstrokes. Besides, it really is just so goddamn metal. You really need to see that girl riding that wolf into battle.

-Brandon Ledet

April and the Extraordinary World (2016)

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twohalfstar

Movie magic is complicated alchemy. The hand-drawn French animation feature April and the Extraordinary World seems tailor made to have me on the floor, drooling. It’s a welcome reprieve from the flat, CG animation style that’s dominated nearly everything outside Studio Ghibli productions & stray stop-motion animations for the past couple decades. It stars a cool, fiercely independent female scientist & her sarcastic cat sidekick in its lead roles. It begins with an impressively ambitious alternate history sci-fi premise that sets the table for a grand, one-of-a-kind adventure. By all means I should’ve been over the moon with what the film delivers, but it never quite clicked for me. April and the Extraordinary World has all necessary ingredients to make movie magic, but there’s something noticeably off in the recipe.

Part of the problem might be that the movie throws so much of its narrative weight into its go-for-broke premise that there’s not much room left for genuine wonder after its opening exposition. Before we meet our scientist & feline heroes we’re steamrolled with a history lesson in an alternate timeline where famous scientists are abducted by a totalitarian French Empire of Napoleonic lineage and the resulting world is a steampunk’s wildest dream of coal-powered inventions & antiquated-yet-futuristic doohickies. There’s an awe-inspiring aspect to the film’s Future in the Past fantasy realm that recalls Miyazaki works like Howl’s Moving Castle, but never quite touch that master’s skill for emotional impact or his patience with luxuriating in the worlds he creates. The film somehow boils its vast, exciting plot into a generic chase film in which our two outsider heroes must protect a magical MacGuffin (a fix-all cure to death, aging, seemingly any illness) out of the hands of a malicious government & a mutated pair of failed experiments hellbent to destroying the planet. Once you strip it of a few quirks, the story is more or less interchangeable with that of any bloated superhero summer blockbuster of the past decade, which is a damn shame considering the massive potential of its launching point.

April and the Extraordinary World is a beautifully animated film, but I spent most of its runtime passively enjoying that visual treat without engaging with its emotional or narrative core. There are a couple ideas at play that make great use of its premise – only the older generation remembers a world with trees thanks to pollution & the world’s remaining scientists are forced into either hiding or weapons production – but for the most part it crams its extraordinary sci-fi ambition into an extra ordinary action chase plot. April and the Extraordinary World has all the necessary pieces to construct a gorgeous work of sheer wonder, but I found myself instead often wondering when it would finally be over. I hope its formula is more impactful for other people intrigued by the various charms of its individual building blocks, but I mostly zoned out on its emotionless proceedings & focused on the pretty lights & sounds. The movie is almost passable as pretty good, but it’s made of some fantastic material, an alchemist’s formula that should have produced pure gold.

-Brandon Ledet

Don’t Think Twice (2016)

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fourstar

It’s tempting to say that you won’t get much out of stand-up comic Mike Birbiglia’s latest film, the improv comedy scene indie Don’t Think Twice, unless you’re the kind of comedy nerd who finds yourself regularly reading Splitsider, religiously awaiting the next episode of Comedy Bang Bang, and fostering a lifelong love-hate relationship with Saturday Night Live. I do believe that’s selling the film’s merits a bit short, though, especially since it’s more of a drama than an outright comedy. It just happens to be a drama that centers on characters immersed in that comedy world nerdom, a culture Birbiglia & his stacked cast of up & coming greats (Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate Micucci, etc.) seem to know intimately well. Much like how the recent Jemaine Clement comedy People Places Things structured its story around a formal, art school lesson on comics & the graphic novel as artistic mediums, Don’t Think Twice offers a history lesson & a crash course instruction on the basic tenets of improv comedy theater. Underneath that specificity of setting, though, lies a heartfelt drama about a tight knit group of friends at an insurmountable impasse. Most of the film’s actual laughs come from a truly dark, black soul sense of humor that contrasts itself sharply with its more crowd-friendly improv sketches, which, like a lot of improv, aren’t really all that funny. It’s kind of a you-had-to-be-there artform. Birbiglia knows how to make that real world melancholy clash nicely with the stage show artificiality in a way that’s both emotionally revealing & intellectually engaging. Don’t Think Twice smartly plays into the strengths of small stakes filmmaking instead of the appeal of improvisational comedy, which is an elusive spirit that evades strict documentation.

Don’t Think Twice details the lives of the fictional improv troupe The Commune as they struggle to hold themselves together in the face of two modes of impending doom: imminent financial ruin & the jealousies that arise when one of their own gets called up to “the big leagues.” The same way their comradery shifts into seething anger when one member finds mainstream success, Don’t Think Twice morphs the comedy institution Saturday Night Live into a nasty fictional surrogate named Weekend Live, a weekly ritual The Commune & other comics treat like a sports event (if you’re the kind of sports fan who mostly like to get drunk & heckle). The film does a great job of contrasting the thrill of watching the live sketch comedy show in person vs. the lifeless bitterness of watching it broadcast at home, especially if you’re resentful that someone “made it” on the cast when you feel you deserved their spot. There’s a Party Down vibe at work here where writers & comedians are stuck in the rut of working menial service industry jobs while their peers find their paths to success seemingly with ease. The Commune and its individual members aren’t able to break this bitterness cycle until they realize that there’s more than one definition of success and that a place on Weekend Live, a very limited window of opportunity, is not necessarily the thing that would make each & every one of them happy. Watching these comics deal with personal & professional jealousy is only the beginning of the journey; the rest is nested in seeing them find their own place in a broad spectrum of comedy outlets, whether that means pursuing a new medium or it means staying put in the less-than-lucrative world of improv theater.

There’s an incredible, knowledgeable attention to detail in Don’t Think Twice’s portrayal of improv comedy, both in capturing the feel of Weekend Live’s obvious source of inspiration & in its depiction of backstage ritual, but what the film nails particularly well is the specificity of its comedy scene personalities. Much like the nasty Tim Heidecker vehicle The Comedy, the film depicts the darkness & discomfort of hanging around with comedians who turn everything into “a bit” instead of dealing with their own emotions in a direct, genuine way. The difference is that Don’t Think Twice’s characters are empathetic & human in a way that makes you want to root for their success, even when they’re mocking a friend’s dying father or, worse yet, “yes-and”ing during sex. In this world characters mask their malice & aggression with an unapologetic, after-the-fact cry of “It was a bit!” There’s a lot of deconstruction of craft at work here that captures how working on an impression can look a lot like madness or how improv survives on the strength of groupthink, but comedy is mostly used as  vehicle to mask pain in what’s most essentially a coming-of-middle-age drama about a once-close group of friends seemingly meeting their communal end. Don’t Think Twice is both cruelly truthful about how that dynamic can tear a group apart and hopeful about how it can pull a backs-to-the-wall community together to create exciting art. The film values genuine sincerity over “It was a bit!” sarcasm, but also recognizes why a wounded animal comedian would use that emotional distance as a protective shield. There’s a great empathy at work here for each of the film’s characters, no matter where they are spiritually or emotionally & no matter how much or how little empathy they have for each other at any given moment.

In the Apatow & McKay era of ensemble cast comedies the tendency has been to unravel the scripted work to a sprawling, improv-driven looseness. Don’t Think Twice reverse engineers that alchemy and turns an artform built on spontaneity into a tightly controlled narrative where recurring bits & motifs gain new meaning & significance each time they reappear. Mike Birbiglia accomplishes a lot here that speaks directly to my tastes: he delivers the year’s third unofficial SNL film (after Popstar & Ghosbusters); he provides space for yet another showcase of Gillian Jacobs’s immense wealth of dramatic talent;  he finds new modes of promoting the value of sincerity over arm’s length sarcastic engagement, etc. I don’t think you need to be plugged into any of those niche interests or the improv comedy scene at large to enjoy what Don’t Think Twice has to offer, though. Its charms as a small stakes drama hoisted by gallows humor & a uniquely talented cast should be near universal. And if you end up not liking the film at all, it still should be fun to heckle.

-Brandon Ledet

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

/ swampflix / 20 Comments

fivestar

It would be dishonest of me to echo the complaints about how lackluster this summer’s movie offerings have been, since I’ve enjoyed so much of what’s been released, from major productions like Paul Feig’s unfairly-reviled Ghosbusters reboot & Shane Black’s neo-noir comedy The Nice Guys to weirdo indie outliers like The Fits & The Neon Demon. Where I sour on 2016’s movie industry output, however, is in those films’ box office numbers, which are dismal at best. Seemingly, the only movies able to make significant money in our current cultural climate are either bloated superhero spectacles or CG-animated films featuring talking animals. What’s frustrating me the most this week is that Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest masterful offering from the stop-motion animation marvels Laika, satisfies both of those requirements in its own way. It features both an in-over-his-head protagonist with superhuman abilities and his talking animal sidekicks and yet, like so many other great films this year, it’s flailing in its opening weekend attempt to recoup a significant fraction of its production costs. Kubo and the Two Strings alone is proof positive of 2016’s major cinematic conundrum: great films are being made; it’s just that no one’s paying to go see them.

Inspired by Japanese folklore & the rich cinematic past of samurai epics, Kubo and the Two Strings is at heart a story about the power of storytelling & the ways memory functions like potent magic. The film’s titular protagonist is a small boy who makes a living for himself & his disabled mother by telling stories for market place shoppers’ spare change in town. Kubo illustrates his own tales by playing his banjo-esque musical instrument, the shamisen, which brings to life colorful sheets of paper that fold into origami shapes & act out his stories as he narrates. What the townspeople don’t know is that the witches, samurais, and magic moon kings of Kubo’s stories are also a real life part of his past . . . which is why his tale doesn’t yet have an ending, a frustrating quality that always leaves his audience hanging. When that past catches up to him Kubo is caught in the middle of two opposing quests: his own mission to reclaim his deceased father’s armor and his witch & moon king enemies’ quest to steal his only remaining eye (finishing a job they started when he was only a newborn) and, thus, destroying his capacity for empathy & his free will. Kubo’s only company on this journey are a goofball beetle in samurai armor (Matthew McConaughey in his best performance since Interstellar) and a no-nonsense monkey (Charlize Theron, who’s just as fierce here as she was in last summer’s Fury Road). Along the way Kubo learns the responsibility & discipline necessary to command his magic abilities, but more importantly he learns that only he can bring a happy ending to his own story, however bittersweet.

A lot of what makes Kubo and the Two Stings such an overwhelming triumph is its attention to detail in its visual & narrative craft. As with their past titles like Coraline & ParaNorman, Laika stands out here in terms of ambition with where the studio can push the limits of stop-motion animation as a medium. The film’s giant underwater eyeballs, Godzilla-sized Harryhausen skeleton, and stone-faced witches are just as terrifying as they are awe-inspiringly beautiful and I felt myself tearing up throughout the film just as often in response to its immense sense of visual craft as its dramatic implications of past trauma & familial loss. The film also allows for a darkness & danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but balances out that sadness & terror with genuinely effective humor about memory loss & untapped talent. What’s really impressive here, however, is its efficiency in storytelling. There isn’t a single image or element at play, from a woven bracelet to a paper lantern to an insectoid buffoon, that doesn’t come to full significance if you lend the film enough patience. Kubo and the Two Stings could’ve easily rested on the laurels of its visual spectacle, a result of infinite hours of painstakingly detailed labor in an animation studio, but it instead pours just as much care & specificity into its reverence for traditional storytelling. Nothing presented onscreen is wasted. This is narrative prowess at its most essential & efficient, an attention to craft reflected in the fact that the film’s protagonist himself is a storyteller & an animator in his own right and that his quest mostly centers on a desire to seize & steer his own narrative to a satisfactory ending. This film definitely falls into the category of cinema about cinema, art about art, but it doesn’t call attention to that conceit. It all takes naturally & beautifully as the plot continually folds in on itself like intricate origami.

What films do you consider the height of stop-motion animation as a medium? The Nightmare before Christmas? Fantastic Mr. Fox? Alice? Mary & Max? Kubo and the Two Strings easily belongs in the conversation at even a moment’s glance. The film boasts an impressive depth of visual detail & intricately mapped-out story structure, yet it’s remarkably light on its feet, leaving plenty of room both for moments of levity & for heart wrenching blows of emotional impact. Just watching the endless parade of bland talking CG animal kids’ comedies in the trailers preceding Kubo and the Two Strings, each more annoying & forgettable than the last, is enough of an eye opener as to why this film’s arrival in our current cinematic climate is such a goddamn relief. You owe it to yourself to watch this modern classic on the big screen and, please, bring a friend. The idea that there are no great films being released this year, that Hollywood is simply out of ideas and the world was somehow more creative or inspired in past decades is honestly getting to be more than a little silly. There are plenty of great films in the theater right now. We just need to get smarter about throwing our attention & dollars at them. I suggest starting with Kubo and the Two Strings. You could do far worse with your money than escaping the August heat in the air-conditioning, admiring a projection of a modern animation masterpiece in the comfort of public darkness.

-Brandon Ledet

Hell or High Water (2016)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

I’m going to preface this review by saying that Hell or High Water is far outside my comfort zone in terms of genre. A story about a world-weary lawman attempting to chase down & outwit a pair of haphazard bankrobbers just days before his retirement, the film resembles an awful lot of ultra-macho neo-Westerns I’m often told are great, but usually leave me bored silly. The problem is fairly deep-seated too. Even the Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men, which I’m sure is fantastic, has put me to sleep every single time I’ve tried to watch it, including twice in the theater. So, I totally believe people when they say Hell or High Water is their favorite movie of the year so far, but I suspect these folks are just more finely tuned to the intricacies of its genre & tone than I am. For me, the film is formally a little flat, playing like what I’d imagine a modern Showtime drama version of Walker, Texas Ranger would look like, right down to the wince-worthy music cues. However, even as an outsider I did find myself entertained, especially by the film’s showy dialogue & muted performances.

Outside being a fairly standard bankrobbing thriller, Hell or High Water mostly stands out as a screenwriter’s playground. Taylor Sheridan, who also penned last year’s Sicario, recognizes the rigid restraints of the film’s simple narrative & throws most of his weight into the its quietly humorous dialogue. When Jeff Bridges’s perpetually exhausted Texas Ranger asks a recently robbed bank teller whether her assailants were black or white, she retorts, “Their skin or their souls?” It’s these kinds of colorful turns of phrase that make him mutter to himself, “God, I love West Texas.” I can’t echo that sentiment, but I do appreciate the film’s ability to capture that terrain’s slow, desolate atmosphere by bringing the more action-packed aspects of the plot down to an occasional halt in favor of some porch sittin’ & beer drinkin’, a perfect stage for showy exchanges of phrase. Sheridan understands the glass beer bottles, vastly empty roads, grunts, football, and poverty that make up a large part of that state & he uses that terrain to stage a somewhat believable modern version of a Cowboys vs. Indians Western. One of those Native Americans just happens to be a cop (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Gil Birmingham) trying to hold his aging white partner together for a final ride. His cowboy opponents are two in-over-their-heads brothers living out a revenge plot similar to Jeff Nichols’s (far superior) Shotgun Stories, except their target is a predatory banking institution instead of a rival family. The only question is if the calm, collected half of the criminal duo (played by an admirably restrained Chris Pine) can hold together his wildcard brother (a grimy Ben Foster, who plays the part like Guy Fieri reimagined as a methed-out murderer), long enough to escape the cops’ wrath. The evenly-distributed amusement of the proficient dialogue leaves a lot of grey area of which side to root for here (although, I guess you’d have to be a monster to root for the banks), so the fun of Hell or High Water is mostly in watching the pieces fall into place in an inevitably satisfying way, whatever the result.

I can’t say for sure if I would’ve enjoyed Hell or High Water more if it were staged in a different setting or if it didn’t feature gruff country songs with lines like, “I am lost in the dust of the chase my life brings” (an aspect of the film Nick Cave had some apparent involvement with, speaking of things I’m often told are great but I don’t really understand). My brain does usually shut all the way off when it comes to certain macho genres like Westerns or James Bond flicks or straightforward war movies, though, and I have to admit I didn’t have that problem here. This was far from my Film of the Year, but I was mostly on board with its Who’re the Real Thieves, Really? approach to predatory banking & its last legs lawman performance from Jeff Bridges (which brought me back to the novelty for Kurt Russell’s similar role in last year’s Bone Tomahawk). Like I said, though, it’s the film’s dialogue that really makes it distinct and I suspect that aspect is what’s going to have the moviegoing dads, uncles, and grandfathers of the world chuckling to themselves in delight. This movie was seemingly made with that specific crowd in mind & I’m not sure they’re going to appreciate its finer charms more than I was able to tap into myself.

-Brandon Ledet