Reviews

The House with the Laughing Windows (1976)

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threehalfstar

The House with the Laughing Windows is a 1976 giallo film directed by Pupi Avati, and is the film in that director’s canon that has experienced the greatest visibility outside of Europe. The film follows Stefano (Lino Capolicchio), who has been invited to a small village in the Valli di Comacchio area in order to restore a fresco depicting the killing of Saint Sebastian, which is on the rotting wall of a church. The friend who helped him get the job, a conservatory scientist recovering from a breakdown of an undisclosed variety, becomes increasingly paranoid and warns Stefano that the village hides a dark secret, cryptically referring to a house with laughing windows. When this friend is killed before he can reveal the full truth, Stefano starts to wonder if all the threatening phone calls he’s been receiving are more than just pranks.

Stefano learns that the fresco’s original artist, Legnani, was considered to be mad, and the villagers imply that his two sisters were worse; Legnani had a tendency to portray his subjects, like Saint Sebastian, in states of torture, and it is rumored that the Legnani sisters would torture innocent travelers in order to provide their brother with models. Stefano reveals the faces of the two killers in the fresco and matches them to an old photo of the Legnanis, but no one seems interested in helping him except for Coppola (Gianni Cavina), the town drunk who takes him to the place where the Legnanis buried their victims (behind a house painted with large laughing mouths, hence the title). Everyone else treats Stefano’s concerns as unfounded, but events transpire to put him out of his hotel, which eventually lands him in a mostly-abandoned home occupied by Laura, a paralyzed woman who depends upon the assistance of Lidio (Pietro Brambilla), a mentally handicapped man who is also an acolyte at the church where Stefano is working. Eventually, Stefano goes to the police, but they are unable to find the evidence that Coppola previously showed to him.

Dejected, Stefano returns to the house where he is staying, only to discover that his love interest Francesca (Francesca Marciano) has been killed; when he brings the police around, all the evidence is gone. Still later, he discovers that the sisters of Legnani are alive and well and are attempting to bring their dead brother back to life by presenting sacrifices. Stefano barely escapes with his life, but for how long?

There’s a lot to unpack in this film, and I like that the entire village is in on the murders, a la the original Wicker Man or the modern classic Hot Fuzz, although the reason for why the consent to be complicit in the murders requires inspection. As is the case with many gialli from this era, there is a larger cultural context that I am unfamiliar with, and that knowledge may lend itself to a clearer interpretation of the film’s themes; one reviewer of the film refers in his analysis to a metaphorical attempt to transcend the Fascism of Italy’s past, especially in the wake of WWII.

This reading of the film is, no pun intended, foreign to me, and I can’t say that House illustrates this as well as, say, Your Vice is a Locked Room, which explicitly made mention of growing European solidarity and international trade. Still, a film should work in and of itself and succeed or fail on its own merits, and this one mostly succeeds. There is a sense of tension that permeates the proceedings, and the film is smart to open with a long diatribe from Legnani that encapsulates his artistic desires and his madness, as this sets the tone and keeps the maliciousness of the villain(s) in mind even when the scenery is idyllic and serene.

The one sticking point that I keep coming back to is the fact that (spoiler) the Legnani sisters are still alive, and the townsfolk seem content, for no immediately apparent reason, to let them continue their murderous machinations long after their brother has died. The best interpretation I can summon is that the villagers may be trying to cover the sins of the past (just as one of the sisters covers the revealed faces in the fresco with fresh clay to obscure their identity), which works well as a metaphor. The townsfolk cannot expose the current serial killings without revealing that they hid the Legnani’s crimes decades before. The final sequence, in which Stefano rides around the deserted village in a scene reminiscent of High Noon, pounding on doors and begging for help while the villagers ignore him with great difficulty, lends itself to this interpretation. They could stop this from happening, but they won’t, out of fear or guilt. The problem with this is that the villagers do not simply seal themselves off from the world until their past sin of allowing the Legnanis to reign in terror is interred with their bones; instead, they willingly accept newcomers like Stefano and Francesca into their midst with no warning.

The Legnanis terrorize by consent of the terrorized, and while that is an interesting twist on the genre, it doesn’t mix well with the giallo trappings. Overall, it’s a good horror film and deserves more than the modicum of attention that it has at present, but it falls short of greatness.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Pom Poko (1994)

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fourhalfstar

The Japanese animation empire Studio Ghibli (most closely associated with the brilliant work of Hayao Miyazaki) is an intimidating force from the outside looking in. I’m familiar with the bigger works like Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro that dominate the studio’s branding, but there’s dozens of Ghibli titles I’ve never taken the time to approach partly due to the intimidation factor of the studio’s staggering output, despite the fact that most of their work seems to be of impossibly high quality in the medium of hand-drawn animation. If there’s just one Studio Ghibli film I wish I had seen years & years sooner it’d be the raccoon eco-warrior mockumentary Pom Poko. The small-community-vs-the-empowered-hegemony political tone, harsh mix of tragedy & black comedy, and ungodly amount of raccoon testicles that shape the story of Pom Poko would’ve made it a perfect fit for a movie night favorite in my younger, punker years. It’s all too easy to see how young anarcho-punks could empathize with the raccoons fighting the impossible-to-topple enemy of an encroaching housing development & even if they couldn’t align with the creatures politically, they’d still be able to draw a great deal of humor from the creatures’ ever-present, comically oversized testicles. Because it was a film we all grew up with, the movie that filled this niche when I was actually young & angsty was Ferngully. Pom Poko offers a much more beautiful, well-crafted, crass, and ultimately pessimistic version of the Ferngully sentimentality, though, and would’ve made a much more appropriate choice for repeated drunken viewings in my salad days.

The plot of Pom Poko is a fairly straightforward one, though its kookier details gradually escalate to heightened degrees of insanity over the course of its runtime. As a massive housing project threatens to level the forested area where a large tribe of magical raccoons reside, the woodland creatures decide to fight back through their limited means. Think of the guerrilla Ewok resistance on Endor in Return of the Jedi & you pretty much get the picture. The major difference, of course, is that these woodland creatures are not only cute, they’re also magically transformative. They can shapeshift from their natural raccoon shapes to look like supercute cartoon raccoons or an average human being or everyday inanimate objects or anything, really. Some use this skill to scare humans from encroaching on their territory. Some use to live among the humans to escape persecution. Some use it to transform their testicles into gigantic weapons to punish/kill human intruders, a move that positions Pom Poko as the premiere children’s film that deals in testicular homicide. As a small crew of wisened elders join the raccoons’ ranks, the transformations get more complicated & mythical from there, leading to stunning recreations from Japanese folklore (the exact kind you’d find in Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare). The ethereal display is supposed to intimidate the humans from encroaching any further, but any & all actions taken to protest the impending housing development seems doomed to fail. Business as Usual sees no threat big enough to discourage a potential profit & stopping the housing development proves to be a Sisyphean task.

Much of Pom Poko feels as is it may have been lost in translation from Japanese culture & language to its Western, English-speaking version. Firstly, despite what the English dub labels them, the tanuki portrayed here aren’t truly raccoons at all, although the two species do look remarkably similar. Tanuki also have a long history in folklore that justifies the excessive presence of their magical testicles in a children’s movie. The English translation (which features voice work from J.K. Simmons, Brian Posehn, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and at least three Futurama vets) does its damnedest to soften the oddity of its testicular content by translating “testicles” to “pouches” as if kids would mistake the creatures for being marsupials, having never seen themselves or anyone else naked. The yokai folklore on display in the film’s visually stunning third act might also fail to fully translate for Western audiences as well, even though it’s easy to tell from the outside looking in that there’s a rich history backing up its exquisite artistic craftsmanship. The film obviously didn’t have too hard of a time traveling to Western markets, though, since it was submitted for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994 (not that it won any accolades or even an official nomination). That kind of pedigree is not too shabby for a children’s cartoon drowning in a sea of furry testicles.

What easily breaks through the language & cultural barriers in Pom Poko is the flm’s anarco-punk spirit. As a radical community uniting against a much larger, better-equipped enemy, the racoons of Pom Poko have many philosophical discussions about the acceptable levels of violence & the effectiveness of non-violent protest in their tactics to combat the housing development, which is a never-ending debate among young progressives, I assure you. Their youthful spirit is also a detriment to their cause, as they’re prone to celebrate small victories long before achieving any longterm goals. The little creatures just love to party. They’re all too easily distracted by beer, pizza, pro wrestling, sex, cheeseburgers, and all sorts of hedonistic temptations that also often distract human punks from organizing & enacting a significant socio-economic change. If you’re looking for proof that this metaphor holds any water, just look to the political chants the raccoons use to rouse their ranks in times of depression or distracted partying. With the right guitar & percussive backing track any one of their chants could easily pass as a song from the seminal anarcho-punk band Crass. The film even addresses the concerns of what happens when these kinds of communities grow up, give in, die off, or decide to join the enemy, which is pretty much the plot of every 00s mall punk’s cinematic handbook, SLC Punk.

Besides the incredible level of skill in the film’s hand-drawn craft, the aspect that makes all of this work in Pom Poko is in its matter-of-fact storytelling style. The film is presented as a documentary & a collection of oral histories, which saves it from delving into the broad, slapstick frivolity of its spiritual cousin, Ferngully. The film can be cartoonishly humorous, sure, but it also aims to break your heart with depictions of death & defeat that a lot of modern children’s films (unfortunately) avoid at all cost. It’s an all-the-more rewarding film because of this detached tone, too, since you not only accept that racoons for who they are & cheer for their victory, but you also fear the idea that it’s a fight they can never possibly win.

-Branodn Ledet

The Witch (2016)

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fourhalfstar

A lot of times when you tell people that you really liked a horror movie the first question they ask is “Was it scary?” Now, that’s not a requirement for me to enjoy myself at a horror showing. Horror can be funny or gruesome or just eccentric or interesting enough to make questions about whether or not it was scary to even be relevant. With The Witch, however, I can actually answer that question bluntly & with enthusiasm. The Witch is a scary movie. It’s a haunting, beautifully shot, impossibly well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan, so it has many virtues outside the simple question of whether or not it was a scary movie, but yes, The Witch succeeds there as well. At times it can be downright terrifying.

What makes The Witch scary, though, might also prevent it from becoming a commercial success. With the full title The Witch: A New England Folklore, this is a film much more concerned with upholding traditions in the mythology surrounding witchcraft than it is with entertaining its audience with a kill-a-minute sense of modern horror momentum. Far from the cinematic witchery you’d see in films like Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, or The Withes of Eastwick, The Witch is scary because it feels real. It strays from the temptations of movie magic escapism by telling a small, grounded story about a slowly-escalating supernatural event in the most muted, straightforward methods possible. I can see a lot of audiences seeking a typical horror movie experience being turned off by The Witch‘s art house sense of hushed drama & pacing, but that’s exactly what makes it such an engaging, terrifying experience if you can get on its wavelength.

Depicting the unraveling of a small Puritan family at the edge of the New England wilderness in the 17th Century, The Witch makes it clear very early that its supernatural threat is not only real, but it’s also really fucked up. The titular witch is an ugly, uncaring, unapologetically Satanic force of Nature. Her devout, pious victims are a paranoid family of many superstitions, all of which seem to prove true one at a time as if the witch were systematically confirming every horrific thing ever said about her & her kind. The strange thing about this set up is that the witch checks into cause havoc in occasional spurts (stealing an infant, seducing the weak-willed, spreading sickness & ritually participating in genital mutilation, etc.), but for the most part her presence is felt, but not seen. The main source of terror in the film is the cruelty of Nature at large. The witch is just one weapon in Nature’s arsenal, which is revealed to be quite large & varied by the time the film reaches its stunning conclusion. The Puritan farm family suffers many blows at Nature’s uncaring, ungodly hand, especially as their religious faith is tested & strained by heartbreaking loss & physical pain.

The old-timey vibe aimed for in The Witch is not only a matter of aesthetic. It’s essential to the film’s entire existence. The Witch is set in a time when its tales of cursed goats, Satan’s attempts to recruit the youth, and minor sins like “prideful conceit” causing you to fall out of God’s protective favor would’ve been very real, tangible concerns. As the film’s central family fails to navigate these Old World dangers on New World turf while remaining intact as a single unit, a deeply unnerving effect swells from the nightmare sound of the string arrangements in the film’s gloriously-evil sounding musical score. The Witch doesn’t solely evoke its 17th Century time frame by peppering its dialogue with “thee”s & “thy”s and lighting its characters like an old Dutch painter. It transports the audience to the era, making you feel like fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel and folklore about wanton women dancing with the devil naked in the moonlight might actually be real threats, just waiting in the woods to pick your family apart & devour the pieces. It’s not the usual terror-based entertainment you’d pull from more typical works about haunted houses or crazed killers who can’t be stopped, but it is a significantly more rewarding film than strict genre fare can be when it too closely plays by modern rules. The Witch is a scary movie, but what’s impressive is that it scares you with an outdated threat of a tratidional folklore that’s no longer supposed to feel as real as it does here.

-Brandon Ledet

Zoolander 2 (2016)

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threehalfstar

It’s been fifteen years since the release of the original Zoolander, which seems like an awfully long stretch of time before deciding the world needs a sequel. A lot has happened since 2001, including (perhaps least importantly) a major turnaround on Ben Stiller’s fashion world comedy’s cultural cache. Zoolander suffered mixed-to-negative reviews upon its initial release, but has since grown a strong cult following that seems too large to even consider “cult” at this point. I even remember personally going into the theater prepared to hate Zoolander‘s guts as a grumpy teenager & being wholeheartedly won over as soon as the explosive Wham!-soundtracked gas station gag in the first act. The funny thing about Zoolander‘s fifteen-years-late sequel is that it’s on the exact same trajectory for long-term cultural success as the first film. The reviews are dire. The box office numbers are hardly any better. However, the dirty little secret is that Zoolander 2, while being nowhere near as perfectly inane as its predecessor, is actually a damn fun time at the movies. Nowhere near every joke lands in the film, but it’s smart to flood you with enough impossibly idiotic humor that you’re bound to laugh at something, maybe even more often than you’d expect.

In order to justify its own existence, Zoolander 2 has to undo a lot of the happy ending denouement of the original. Former male models/makeshift political intrigue heavies Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) & Hansel (Owen Wilson) must again start from the bottom. Hansel has been horrifically scarred & is experiencing growing pains with his in-effect wife, an orgy of weirdos. Derek’s own wife has passed away due to his own failures as a businessman & custody of his son has been revoked by the state due to his total lack of parenting skills in areas as basic as “how to make spaghetti soft”. In order to reclaim their estranged familial relationships & earn back their rightful place on top of the fashion world, Hansel & Derek have to repair their irrevocably broken friendship, putting aside the narcissism that plagues them both so deeply. Obviously, the plot doesn’t matter too much in a comedy as aggressively vapid as this, but I do think there’s something oddly sweet about Zoolander 2‘s central bromance that wasn’t nearly as fully realized in the first film. Derek & Hans really do need each other. They’re entirely codependent in their joint efforts to understand a world that doesn’t make sense to their tiny, uncomprehending minds. It’s a fascinating, even touching companionship even if it is an assertively brainless one.

Zoolander 2 does have an Achilles heel, but it’s not exactly the first place you’d expect. The film sidesteps most concerns about being late to the table in terms of following up its original iteration by making the outdated, past-their-prime cultural irrelevance of the its protagonists a major plot point. The redundancy of a second film following the same protagonists as they transition from male modeling to a life in political intrigue is also avoided by adding concerns about familial bonds and, absurdly enough, radical Biblical interpretations & quests for immortality into the mix. Where the film gets a little exasperating is in its never ending list of cameos & bit roles. Even in the film’s trailer swapping an appearance by David Bowie for the much lesser musical being/tabloid fixture Justin Beiber felt like a weak trade-off (although Bieber is actually far from the worst cameo on deck; his time is brief & fairly amusing). The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two. Will Ferrell was a welcome return as the impossibly wicked megalomaniac Mugatu, Penélope Cruz was charming (not to mention breathtakingly gorgeous) as a secret agent for INTERPOL’s fashion division, and current SNL cast member Kyle Mooney proved himself to be a stealth MVP as a double-talking sleazebag hipster piece of shit who’s ironically stuck in the nu metal 00s (an archetype he always nails without fail). These are just a few faces in a sea of many, though, and the nonstop torrent of names like Kristen Wiig, Willie Nelson, Fred Armisen, Katy Perry, and whoever else felt like walking through the film’s perpetually open door did little for Zoolander 2 except to make it feel a little sloppy & out of control.

There were thing I loved about Zoolander 2 & things I easily could’ve done without. The film’s Looney Tunes physics & complete disinterest in stimulating the intellect felt entirely in tune with the original’s sensibility. The vaguely transphobic joke about Benedict Cumberbatch’s androgynous model All in the trailer is not at all improved by being expanded in the movie. Even though Hansel & Derek are close-minded imbeciles who believe things like fat = bad person, their treatment of All is an uncomfortable mixed bag at best & mostly just distracts from the film’s better realized gags. Many of the celebrity cameos & bit roles equally feel like a waste of time that could’ve been better step, but Zoolander 2 decisively aims for a quantity over quality M.O. & by the time the film finds its stride far more of its jokes land than fall flat. I spent most of Zoolander 2‘s runtime laughing heartily, which might as well be the sole requirement for a movie this militantly irreverent to succeed as a finished product. It’s not the best comedy in the theater right now (that would be Hail, Caesar!), but it’s also not the worst (*cough* Deadpool *cough*) & I could easily see myself watching/enjoying the film multiple times in the future. If nothing else, that’s a far better experience than I expected based on its early reviews, which is pretty much how this whole ordeal worked out the first time around in 2001.

-Brandon Ledet

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

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Paying too close of attention to reviews & hype surrounding a film can sometimes lead you to miss out. Besides its release date coinciding a little too closely to Mardi Gras, I had put catching up with the latest Coen Brothers comedy, Hail, Caesar!, on the backburner due to the film’s somewhat tepid response at the box office. Hail, Caesar! is flopping hard right now, failing to find a significantly sized audience despite the prominence of Big Name movie stars in its advertising & the Coens’ loyal (though not gigantic) fanbase. Many major publication critics are also seemingly lukewarm on the film, often citing it an overstuffed mixed bag. That lack of enthusiasm & no basic knowledge of the film’s plot lead me to the theater with essentially no expectations, but Hail, Caesar! floored me anyway. Honestly, if I don’t see a better movie in the cinema all year I’ll still be perfectly happy. It was that much of a delight. I should have gotten to the theater a hell of a lot sooner.

Hail, Caesar! is firmly in the highly respectable medium of art about the nature of art. More specifically, it’s a movie about the movies. Much like with Barton Fink, the Coens have looked back to the Old Hollywood studio system as a gateway into discussing the nature of what they do for living as well as the nature of Nature at large. Packed with theological & political debate/diatribes and a sprawling cast of both Big Name movie stars & That Guy character actors, the film sounds like a lot more effort than it actually is. The plot is, in essence, the day in the life of a “fixer” for a major Hollywood film studio in the 1950s. Imagine if Pulp Fiction was centered on Harvey Keitel’s “The Wolf” character instead of the organized crime ring he was keeping steady & his work was in major film production instead of the murder & drug trade (on top of being oddly sweet instead of quietly terrifying). Josh Brolin’s protagonist, Eddie Mannix, provides such an anchor for Hail, Caesar! as a whirlwind of film production snafus swirl around him. Rampant addiction, a kidnapped star, unwanted pregnancy, secret Communist societies, gossip column vultures, and all kinds of trouble on the studio lot’s various sets turn Mannix’s typical workday into a laughable, Kafkaesque nightmare. It’s a testament to the Coens’ screenwriting talents that the film feels so smooth & effortless while Mannix’s webs become increasingly tangled and the general tone is a mix of subtle humor & broad farce instead of plot fatigue.

A lot of movies are effortlessly funny, though. What’s special about Hail, Caesar! is the way it perfectly captures Old Hollywood’s ghost. It reminded me a lot of the feeling of seeing Georges Méliès’s work recreated so vividly in the theater during Scorcese’s Hugo, except that Hail, Caesar! covered a much wider range of genres & filmmakers from a completely different era. Every classic Old Hollywood genre I can think of makes an appearance here: noir, Westerns, musicals, synchronized swimming pictures, Roman & religious epics, tuxedo’d leading man dramas, etc. Audiences sometimes forget that these types of films weren’t always physically degraded so it’s somewhat shocking to see the beautiful costuming & set design achievements of the era recreated & blown up large in such striking clarity at a modern movie theater. Besides the breathtaking visual achievements, it’s impressive how many other aspects of Old Hollywood cinema the film manages to include, both in its “real” setting & in its fake film shoots: close attention to lighting, a briefcase MacGuffin, sets that look like backdrop paintings, the threat that television will destroy the movie business, reclusive editors who act like chain-smoking psychos, talent that’s owned by the studio in what essentially amounts to indentured servitude, a sea of white faces in a world where everyone else has been locked out, etc. Even the smallest turns of phrase like “motion picture teleplay” & character names like George Clooney’s leading man actor Baird Whitlock feel perfectly in tune with the vibe of the era whether or not they’re poking fun at its inherent quaintness.

Speaking of Clooney’s wonderful turn as Baird Whitlock, Hail, Caesar! is at heart an ensemble cast comedy. It’s difficult to pinpoint any exact MVPs among the film’s long list of cameos & supporting players (Brolin undeniably takes the honor overall). Channing Tatum continues his nonstop winning streak here, dressing like a sailor & leading one of the most wholesomely filthy song & dance numbers you’re ever likely to see. Scarlett Johansson looks peacefully at home as a classic Hollywood starlet in a mermaid costume & hilariously disrupts the illusion with a brassy performance that allows her to refer to her flipper as a “fish ass.” Following up his delicately winning performance in Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes continues to prove himself as a stealthily comic force to be reckoned with. Relative unknown Alden Ehrenreich threatens to steal the show with an “Aw, shucks” cowboy routine & the similarly obscure Emily Beecham is a near dead-ringer for The Red Shoes/Peeping Tom star Moira Shearer (and I mean that as the highest praise). And all that’s just scratching the surface of how attractive everyone looks in this film, how effective the smallest of roles come across, and the sheer number of recognizable faces on display here.

So what’s keeping a smart, star-studded, intricately-plotted, politically & theologically thoughtful, genuinely hilarious, and strikingly gorgeous film like Hail, Caesar! from pulling in ticket sales? Who’s to say? I was a good three or four decades younger than most members of the audience where I watched the film (although it should be noted that most young folks were probably watching Deadpool that weekend), so maybe it’s missing an appeal to key money-making demographics? Maybe the advertising didn’t sell the more gorgeous end of its visuals hard enough, so a lot of folks are calmly waiting for it to reach VOD? I have no answers, really. I will, however, defend the film against the accusation that it’s overstuffed or unfocused. Hail, Caesar! chronicles a day in the life of a world-weary man who operates in an overstuffed, unfocused industry, so the various plotlines could be perceived as overwhelming as you try to make sense of them in retrospect, but on the screen they play with the confident poise of an expert juggler.

Like I said, Hail, Caesar! is not performing well financially & the reviews are mixed so it’s obvious that not everyone’s going to be into it. However, it’s loaded with beautiful tributes to every Old Hollywood genre I can think of and it’s pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly. If you need a litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the film yourself, Barton Fink might be a good place to start. If you hold Barton Fink in high regard, I encourage you to give Hail, Caesar! a chance. You might even end up falling in love with it just as much as I did & it’ll be well worth the effort to see its beautiful visual work projected on the silver screen either way.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadpool (2016)

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Every year or so there seems to be a Ryan Reynolds vehicle waiting to test my resolve to stop trying to fall in love with the dude’s work. Last year it was the horror comedy The Voices, which pulled me in with an amusing premise & a candy-coated color palette only to waste it all on Reynolds’ unlovable smugness. This year Deadpool fits the bill. I was once again fooled that this was the Ryan Reynolds vehicle for me, because this time there was a Ryan Reynolds vehicle for everyone. Hell, I could even repeat my opening screed from my review of The Voices to cover a lot of how I felt watching Deadpool in the theater: “Comedy is risky. If you fail to connect with your audience the time you spend together can be brutal. Just ask any stand-up who’s bombed a set. That disconnect between audience & performer can be even more punishing if the material is aggressive.” Deadpool is both aggressive & aggressively unfunny. It’s making tons of money & most of the people in the theater where I watched it were howling at every gag, so there’s certainly an audience for what it’s selling, but I was left stone cold. Reynolds can play a perfectly good cad when you’re not supposed to like him (as with his turns in Adventureland & Waiting), but I find his shtick much harder to stomach when you’re supposed to cheer for his assholery. I’m still having a difficult time buying him as a leading man and an anti-hero.

Deadpool is, more or less, the Family Guy of superhero media. It’s a crass, hopelessly juvenile comedy that believes “adult content” means decades-old pop culture references & an onslaught of abrasive language. The thing is that a lot of people really like Family Guy & I’m not one to begrudge anyone from enjoying themselves at the movies, so I’m honestly glad the film has found a satisfied audience. For me, though, the pop culture-referencing, Gen-X snark that that properties like Deadpool & Family Guy seem determined to keep alive feels hopelessly outdated, a relic of the 90s. Watching the MCU films for the first time with Boomer for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. recaps, I’ve noticed that the earnest side of the superhero spectrum is what plays much more fresh & endearing in a modern context. Properties like Thor & Captain America (especially Captain America) are much more readily enjoyable to me than the bloated ego snark of properties like Iron Man (speaking of films that made tons of money & did nothing for me). Deadpool is firmly on that snarky, self-satisfied Iron Man end of the spectrum, always willing to poke fun at itself or detract from its run-of-the-mill Origin Story Formula by tossing out a name like Bernadette Peters or Wham! as if its detached irreverence was more of a game-changer than it would be to actually try a new idea in earnest. At the very least it could’ve gone further in the irreverent direction & functioned as a full-blown ZAZ-style spoof of superhero conventions instead of trying to have it both ways all while appearing not to genuinely care about anything at all (à la Seth MacFarlane). Deadpool is willing to wholeheartedly participate in the most generic tropes of its genre, but it wants you to know the entire time that it’s totally above it all & doesn’t give a shit. It’s not an endearing attitude.

From what I gather from comic book aficionados (both friends & internet commenters who’ve been viciously picking at the small list of critics who’ve dared to give this film a negative review), it’s the exact qualities I loathed about this film that made Ryan Reynolds & Deadpool as a character such a perfect match. From the outside looking in I have no reason to disagree with that idea. Deadpool’s 4th wall-breaking, winking at the camera, “Ain’t I a stinker?” meta snark is custom made for a comedy style Ryan Reynolds has been perfecting since the late-90s. In effect, both Deadpool & Ryan Reynolds have been working in the realm of Gen-X sardonic humor since it was actually in its heyday two decades ago. The movie wastes no time in setting that tone either. The opening scroll forgoes telling you who actually worked on the film to include credits for “A Hot Chick”, “A CGI Character”, “A British Villain”, “A Gratuitous Cameo”, etc. One of Deadpool’s first memorable lines is “I know, right? Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my own movie?” It’s pretty much a steady course from there. There’s a nonstop onslaught of “witty” jokes about death, poop, genitals, sexual orientation, babes with bangin’ bods, and things going up dudes’ butts (including a pegging gag that threatened to be playfully progressive for a half-second before falling back in line with the film’s bro-pleasing sensibilities) that eats up the film’s runtime, just barely distracting you from the fact that you’re watching yet another by-the-numbers superhero origin story. Personally, the biggest laugh I got out of the film is when the “British Villain” asked Mr. Pool, “You’re so relentlessly annoying. Why don’t you do us all a favor & shut the fuck up?” but those more in tune with Deadpool & Reynolds as personalities are a lot more likely to find humor that lands. Jokes are certainly in no short supply, since the film has zero interest in taking anything seriously (except maybe in a couple ten minute stretches when it pretends to be a cancer drama or a romance of the ages).

As much as the humor failed to connect with me, I did appreciate the way Deadpool staged its action sequences. Deadpool himself has a cool look to him, especially the way he totes both guns and swords into battle & it’s nice to watch a superhero film where the protagonist actually keeps his mask on for most of the runtime (especially since it saved me from Reynold’s eternally smug grin in this case). While I found most of its “adult” humor about as charming as Ben Kingsley’s potty mouth brute in Sexy Beast, the film’s R-rating worked wonders for its gore. The decapitations & blood-soaked torture upped the stakes to grindhouse horror levels that I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing in a more worthy superhero property. The rating also made room for a lot of naked Ryan Reynolds footage, which I know is sure to please plenty of folks who like to treat him as what Liz Lemon would describe a “sex idiot.” It was also cool to see X-Men characters Colossus & Negasonic Teenage Warhead in action if not only because X-Men is one of the few superhero comics I’m actually familiar with. Even the bloody, well-choreographed action sequences can be botched in their own way, though. Particularly, the opening sequence involving a fight-to-the-death on a freeway is really fun to watch, but is broken into frustratingly small pieces by elongated flashbacks that create a dual timeline structure, making the film feel like an incoherent mess on top of being painfully unfunny. The main goal of Deadpool is sarcastic humor & the genuinely awesome action sequences are often swept aside to serve that purpose, probably because they feel too sincere to fit the character’s M.O.

Like I said, I was never the target audience for Deadpool. I gave it an honest shot, but it was just never meant to be. The film never really tries to win over an outside audience, either, which I’d count as a huge positive. I didn’t need to be included here for the film to be successful. There’s a specific brand of mainline Nerd Culture™ that I always fail to connect with and although the definitions of what falls under that umbrella are intangible, Deadpool is firmly Nerd Culture™-friendly in a way that feels authentic even when it’s not funny or enjoyable or especially well-made. It’d be difficult to boil the film’s Nerd™ aesthetic down to a specific image or two, but I can at least point to its insistence that the meme-ification of unicorns & Ugly Christmas Sweaters is still verifiable as comedy gold. The thing is that unicorns & Ugly Christmas Sweaters are the exact kind of quirk you’d find crawling all over Facebook timelines or Target store fashion racks, so they’re not nearly as “weird” or “subversive” as Nerds™ believe them to be. Deadpool is a film that broke all kinds of box-office records for an R-rated property’s opening weekend, so the Nerdy™ gatekeeping that usually accompanies products like this is more than a little silly considering how many people loved what the movie was selling. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that this movie was a widely-loved Nerd Culture™ property that made tons of money (I just spent most of the last two months singing The Force Awakens’ praises after all). I just got the distinct feeling that I was on the outside looking in with this film, which is fine. There were a lot more people in on the joke than I expected and I’m glad they had a good time where I failed to.

Side note: One thing that struck me as odd about this film’s sense of humor is that it felt compelled to repeat minor jokes as if they were callbacks to gut-busting one-liners. Off the top of my head, there were references to unicorns, shit-stained pants, and Agent Smith from The Matrix that were repeated twice apiece with little to no effect or change in their second occurrence. If they had occurred more often they might’ve played like a running gag, but just hitting the same note twice felt awkward at best, hopelessly lazy at worst.

-Brandon Ledet

Daisies (1966)

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fourstar

I’ve been fascinated by isolated frames from the 1966 art house comedy Daisies for years, but never actually gave the film a chance until recently. Despite the intense, psychedelic cinematography that makes each scene so vivid in isolation, I was surprised to find that as a whole Daisies is for the most part an irreverent comedy. Adopting the same absurdist & humorous expressions of political unrest as the Dadaist movement during WWI, Daisies is a tonal protest against post-WWII Czech communism that combats the devastating emotional toll of war & totalitarian rule with sublime silliness. Director Vera Chytilová was years ahead of the curve on this absurdist comedy. Often cited as a cornerstone of the Czech New Wave and experimenting with visual trickery that still feels vivid & fresh five decades later (not to to mention predicting a lot of flower child hippie fashion), Daisies is an incredibly important work for something so wrapped up in absurdism & frivolity.

View Daisies in the wrong light & it might just play like a damning example of pretentious art cinema at its worst. Its disjointed, nonsensical dialogue about living as a “doll”, being “spoiled”, and “girls, girls, girls, girls” often feels like the more cringe-worthy aspects of performance art & slam poetry. The strange sound cues & alternating color filters often feel arbitrary at best, playing directly into the art-for-art’s-sake vibes of the film’s dialogue. Daisies is atonal & arhythmic in a way that’s sure to frustrate those who aren’t used to films that don’t aim to answer questions or satisfy genre requirements. Daisies is a provocation, a sort of a highbrow prank, and it’s too easy to see how that could be a turnoff for those who aren’t prepared for its obfuscation & deliberately nonsensical nature.

However, if you remove the intense cinematography, the ludicrous sound design, and the war imagery that opens & closes the film, you’d have what is at heart a remarkably silly comedy. Daisies follows two teenage pranksters (both ostensibly named Marie) as they leave behind a widespread trail of low-level mischief. Their worst crimes amount to leading along older men in order to eat lavish meals, disrupting night club acts, and some light pickpocketing. Daisies is just as girlish as it is disjointed & psychedelic. It’s hard to imagine exactly why the film got its director banned from working in her homeland for a decade for “depicting the wanton.” The film does depict its fair share of drunkeness & sexuality, but it mostly amounts to two teen girls (literally) swinging from the chandelier & cutting neckties like Harpo Marx. There certainly is a political tone to the film that suggests unrest & discontent, but just like everything else at play it’s mostly detectable as a prankish goof.

I think what I enjoyed most about watching Daisies was pinpointing where its influence has trickled down into modern media. Its absurdism & girlish pranks posit the film as an art house Broad City. The butterfly-heavy still image montages recall the hyperspecific beauty of (my favorite film from last year) The Duke of Burgundy. Its myriad of color filters & bizarre editing choices have been passed down through so many different films & television series over the decades that it would almost feel cliche if it weren’t for the date of its release. The giant scissors cutting up phallic symbols (sausages, bananas, pickles) in an intimate bedroom/art studio reminded me a great deal of Felt, a film I’ve been championing a lot lately. As much as these individual elements are recognizable in modern cinema in television, Daisies is still an idiosyncratic work. Its collage-covered bedrooms, classical surrealism (including a nod to Magritte’s green apple), still image montages, and maniacal giggling are all remarkably vivid & unique. Similarly, its Cubist approach to editing isn’t entirely impossible to find in other works (Hausu comes to mind), but it does still feel fresh & idiosyncratic.

Still, I find myself going back to the still frames of the two Maries’ bedroom/art space for what makes Daisies feel special as a singular work. It really is a remarkably beautiful space, like life-sized shadow box or an art instillation piece. I didn’t expect the film that accompanied that set to be as silly or as politically storied as Daisies ended up being, but that was mostly lagniappe for a film that could survive solely on the strength of its imagery. I’m getting wistful just browsing through those images right now.

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-Brandon Ledet

The History of Future Folk (2013)

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fourhalfstar

Once upon a time on a planet named Hondo a well-respected war general was asked to save his home planet from certain destruction via comet by finding a new, inhabitable world & destroying its current resident population with a flesh eating virus to make room for the Hondonian people. The general crash landed on Earth, but decided not to mass-murder the 7 billion people who inhabit it because it’s on this new world that he heard music for the first time. Now desperate to save Earth from the Hondonians, he attempted to alert his home world of the wonders of music via satellite transmissions, all while living a double life as a family man & a dive bar folk musician. The question is would he be able to get his message across before Hondonian assassins ended his traitorous life. This is, more or less, the history of Future Folk.

Future Folk is a duo of novelty musicians from Brooklyn, New York (Nils d’Aulaire & Jay Klaitz) who’ve been writing & performing songs around the above premise for more than a decade. If they hadn’t been toiling away at their shtick since the early 2000s it’d be pretty easy to accuse them of being derivative of similar, but more successful acts like Flight of the Conchords or Tenacious D, but the truth is they’re more contemporaries than copycats. And just like the two acts just mentioned, their transition from concert hall sketch comedy to television/film is an impressively smooth one. Their visual & narrative backstory feels well explored & intricately detailed, but more importantly their screen presence & dedication to the act feels entirely sincere. As a film The History of Future Folk is somewhere between a quirky indie comedy & a low-stakes sci-fi fantasy epic. As a contribution to the comedy landscape at large, the film is a priceless document of a finely-tuned two-person act that doesn’t have any other way to reach an audience outside the Brooklynites who’ve seen them perform it live.

The most amusing aspect of the Future Folk’s Hondonian backstory is the way it’s played with straight-faced deadpan. It’s first introduced as a bedtime story for a little girl who treats it like an awe-inspiring myth of the ages. The same exact story is later treated like comedy gold by the far less sincere hipster bar patrons who accept the threat of intergalactic war & flesh-eating viruses as an ironic joke. In both instances the misplaced Hondonian general speaks in total, unembellished honesty. What people do with the truth is largely dependent on the audience in question. This stripped down earnestness pairs nicely with the film’s complete absence of a budget. Many shots feel candid, as if they were stolen without a permit, but its cheapness never feels like a detriment. It only adds to the Future Folk’s brand of earnest charm.

I guess it takes a certain tolerance of twee preciousness to get on The History of Future Folk‘s wavelength, but like I said, its much more in line with the subdued humor of acts like Flight of the Conchords than it is with heart-on-the-sleeve indies like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The History of Future Folk works best as intricate, feature length sketch comedy. Its limited budget & dedicated-to-the-joke leads leave little room for vanity or pretension. There’s an endearing sense of heart & earnestness that adds to the film’s charm, but it’s most mostly remarkable for its ability to earn belly laughs through such unlikely sources as department store Muzak & red plastic buckets. The History of Future Folk is an easily-lovable, genuinely hilarious work of modern sketch comedy. It’s about as much of a crowd-pleaser as a quirky, low-budget indie comedy could possibly be, twee vibes be damned.

-Brandon Ledet

Body Puzzle (1992)

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threehalfstar

Body Puzzle is a 1992 giallo film directed by Lamberto Bava, the son of legendary Italian horror maestro Mario Bava and frequent collaborator of Dario Argento (having, among other things, been the assistant director of both Inferno and Tenebrae). The film follows the story of Tracy, a widowed manuscript editor who begins receiving body parts wrapped in wax paper following the revelation that her late husband’s body has been disinterred. Although the film as poorly received in its time, it holds up as a kind of last gasp of true giallo, even if the mystery of the film relies on a twist that doesn’t quite work.

The film opens on an unnamed man (François Montagut) who is seen playing the piano before his practice is interrupted by the memory of an evening in which he engaged in a car chase with a motorcycle rider, an apparent friend who he repeatedly demanded slow down; the chase ends with the biker crashing and dying. This same man then murders a confectionary shopkeeper, which brings Detective Michele (Tomas Arana, of La chiesa) into the fray, where he and his partner Gigli (Matteo Gazzolo) discuss the fact that ghastly murderers always seem to take a trophy from their victims. Elsewhere, Tracy (Joanna Pacula) plans to visit the grave of her husband, but is shocked to discover that his body has been dug up. She returns home to discover an ear wrapped in wax paper in her fridge, and Michele realizes that the serial killer on the loose has been keeping pieces of his victims not for himself but to give them to Tracy, who is understandable unnerved by this. As she and Michele grow closer, he realizes that all of the victims share one thing in common: they were the recipients of organs from Tracy’s dead husband, Abe; further, it seems Abe may not have been all he seemed on the surface when he was alive. The murderer may, in fact, be a former lover of Abe’s, driven to madness by the fact that he was responsible for the latter’s death.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but this is a fun little giallo thriller, with delightful cinematography and a plot that works, for the most part. The tension builds slowly as it becomes apparent that there is no safe place for Tracy no matter where she goes, and the final reveal is foreshadowed in a manner that is utterly unexpected but fits all the clues that we have seen so far, minus a red herring that I am certain made most contemporary reviewers rather pissed, given the film’s overall low aggregate rating. The terror of the killer’s victims is palpable, and there are some great set pieces that permeate the run time: the multiple reflections of the killer’s visage as he stalks a woman in a mall before cornering her in a bathroom and amputating her hand is quite powerful, although it pales in comparison to the murder of a teacher in front of a classroom full of blind students, who have no idea what is happening. The film’s cinematography and planning is not perfect, however, and it’s a surprise how many amateurish mistakes slipped through in the film considering how long Bava had been directing at this point. There are reflections of camera operators in vehicle windows, which happens, but the final chase sequence uses undercranked footage to give the illusion of high speed but the movements of the actors and the scenery betray this attempted cinematic sleight of hand. Still, these imperfections don’t ruin the film, and it’s definitely worth watching if you get the opportunity.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Stung (2015)

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three star

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A lot of people were harsh on last year’s winking-at-the-camera B-picture Zombeavers for being a little too try-hard & calculated. Personally, I’m a little more forgiving on silly, made-for-cult-audiences trifles than most, so I enjoyed its SyFy Channel-type camp well enough. What saved the picture for me more than anything was the handmade beaver puppets. The film’s dialogue was never quite as amusing as it wanted to be, but the slightest appearance of a zombie beaver puppet could have me howling.

Toeing the exact same line between terrible dialogue/acting & delightful special effects is the recent horror comedy Stung. The directorial debut of German special effects artist Benni Diez, Stung is a fairly basic creature feature about mutant wasps that brutally disrupt a stuffy garden party. Much of the film is bland & sloppily slapped together, but a few bonkers plot twists in the third act & a refreshing focus on handmade practical effects save it from feeling like another hopeless CGI-heavy cheapie like a Lavalantula! or a Sharknado 3. If you have little to no interest in monster movie creature effects, you’re likely to spend most of the film bored & frustrated in the wait for bodies to drop & the credits to roll. The only attraction featured here is the giant mutant wasps themselves.

Remove the mutant wasps from Stung & you basically have the world’s worst episode of Party Down. A small catering company handles a quirkily pathetic garden party while experimenting with a will-they-won’t-they romance that no one could possibly care about. The lead is a painfully unfunny physical comedian with a whiny “But I’m a Nice Guy”/friendzoned approach to romance. His love interest is a Type A Bitch™ we’re supposed to deride for caring more about her flailing small business & personal survival than getting laid by a bartender/clown/employee. The best bet for finding a worthwhile character is among the party guests, since the leads are such dull wastes of time. My vote for MVP (or maybe Only Valuable Player in this case) goes to genre film veteran Lance Henriksen as a drunken small town mayor.At the very least he gets a couple decent one-liners out, like when he quips “This party needs an autopsy” (before the killings start) and when he responds to the correction, “Those are not bees, those are wasps” with “Who gives a shit?” Even Henriksen’s world-weary irreverence does little to liven up the proceedings, though, and most of the film’s time that’s not filled by killer wasp mayhem feels like a huge waste of effort.

It’s a good thing, then, that there’s so much killer wasp gore to (excuse the expression) chew on here. Stung‘s gigantic mutant wasps click & screech like insectoid pterodactyls. When they sting their prey they use the victim as a flesh vessel to incubate even larger wasps. These transformations are massive, wet, disgusting, and above all else entertaining. The mayhem gets even more gnarly from there, especially in the film’s go-for-broke third act stupidity. Gigantic nests, wasp-controlled human drones, wriggling larvae, and flaming monsters all make for a wickedly amusing good time as long as you pay more attention to what the creatures are up to than anything said or done by their entirely-forgettable victims. Stung is to be enjoyed for its Them!-style monster puppets & 80’s Peter Jackson gore, not for its sense of narrative or tonal nuance. About the only thing that qualifies as a successful joke in the film is when one character carries around a can of bug spray as an in-vain mode of protection, but even that gag qualifies as a triumph of the costume department. Stung is all about its puppets & gore and nothing else. That just happened to be enough to make it worthwhile for me.

-Brandon Ledet