Reviews

Everly (2015)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

Last year’s Keanu-Reeves-avenges-his-puppy’s-death action flick John Wick earned a lot of attention for being a return to form for the shoot ‘em up genre. Its above-average fight choreography, underground crime ring aesthetic, and relentless violence made it a crowd favorite, the thinking man’s mindless action flick. It turns out I’m not much of a thinking man. I liked John Wick well enough, but found it hard to match a lot of its audience’s enthusiasm. It was a decent throwback action flick, for sure, but felt more like a throwback to the late 90s than any other era, far from my favorite era of popular art.

Everly, on the other hand, has none of John Wick’s technical sophistication or cultural cachet. It shares its basic beautiful-person-kills-a-heap-of-faceless-strangers premise, but none of its finesse. I still enjoyed Everly more. I can’t help my trashy self. In Everly, a scantily clad prostitute played by Salma Hayek attempts to reunite with her family and escape a life of indentured servitude through an onslaught of gun violence. Cornered in a condo, Hayek’s Everly has to shoot her way through an army of Japanese gangsters, bumbling bodyguards, and fellow prostitutes to achieve freedom. If this sounds stupid & gratuitous, it’s because it most definitely is. Everly isn’t a film where any themes or ideas are explored in new or interesting ways and the violence is a mere exclamation point. It’s a film where violence is the entire point. It’s a film where a gun-wielding Salma Hayek in a negligee defiantly tells cartoonisly violent gangsters, “Lick my balls.” It’s a stupid film, but it’s also an awesome one.

I don’t mean to pull up any comparisons between Everly & John Wick to say one is objectively better than the other. It’s actually highly likely that fans of one would enjoy the other. I’m more drawing the comparison to point out something about my own tastes. Both Everly & John Wick put familiar, beautiful faces in a trashy cult movie scenario, asking their respective stars to shoot their way out of it; but while John Wick aims for greatness, Everly knows exactly what kind of trash it is at heart and searches for greatness in the gutter. That kind of deliberate simplemindedness isn’t going to go too far with certain audiences, but it does go a long way with me. Again, I can’t help my trashy self.

Side note: It surprised me that the film was set during Christmas. If you’re looking for some campy, violent counter-programming this holiday season, I highly recommend giving this one a spin.

-Brandon Ledet

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

/ swampflix / 24 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

So, I’m a little late to the table with my review for George Miller’s 30-years-late-to-the-table Mad Max sequel Fury Road. There are a few various reasons for this delay. Before I went to the cinema, I wanted to contextualize the film in the grand scheme of Miller’s bizarrely disparate catalog, so I watched everything he’s directed so far. During this time, I got to revisit some all-time favorites like The Road Warrior & The Witches of Eastwick, discover some new bizarre worlds like in Babe: Pig in the City, and experience the excruciating, frozen depths of Hell thanks to the Happy Feet franchise. It was a confusing time. By the time I made it to the theater for Fury Road, the excitement surrounding the film had reached a fever pitch among a dedicated few who had already seen the film many times over. It’s crazy to think that with the amount of buzz this film has earned it’s never reached the number one spot at the box office, losing out to films critics have been understandably less enthusiastic about: San Andreas, Tomorrowland, and Pitch Perfect 2. This dichotomy of ignored-by-many, obsessively-loved-by-few pretty much sealed Fury Road’s fate as instant cult classic, one that will surely be remembered for far longer than San Andreas or Tomorrowland, before I even got a taste of its ridiculous charms.

During the initial you-gotta-see-this frenzy surrounding the film, I missed a lot of opportunity to find new things to say about it. All I can really do at this point is echo the praise. Yes, it’s one of the best action films released in years. Yes, it has surprisingly satisfying feminist bent for something so thoroughly violent. Yes, it’s an incredible technical feat stuffed to the gills with impressive practical stunts & confident art design. In a time where a lot of movies, such as Zombeavers & WolfCop, intentionally aim for a cult film aesthetic, it’s refreshing when something as authentically bizarre as Fury Road comes along and earns its rabid, isolated fan base naturally. Although the movie is less than a month old, it’s already gathered a cult following so strong that I doubt that there’s any praise I can throw at the film that hasn’t already been bested elsewhere. I loved the film. I thought it was fantastic, wonderfully distinct, up there with The Road Warrior, The Witches of Eastwick, and Pig in the City as one of the best things Miller has ever released onto the world. I still feel like that’s merely faint praise when compared to some of the more hyperbolic reactions out there. Because it’s not my favorite movie of all time, or even my favorite of the year so far, it might be best if I back off a bit from saying anything even vaguely critical and just say it’s great & I’m glad so many people love it.

That only leaves room for a couple details that I feel haven’t been addressed loudly enough. Firstly, it’s been said that because Miller filmed Fury Road in 2D and the 3D release was created in post-production, the 2D release is the superior viewing choice. Having now seen the film in both formats (another reason for the delayed review), I’d advise you to ignore that common wisdom. I enjoyed the 3D version of Fury Road immensely. It not only highlighted in the impressive depth of the chase scenes’ bizarre imagery, but also added a classic drive-in aesthetic layer to the film’s cult movie vibe. I think it’s worthwhile to see the film in 3D while it’s still an option, since it’s less likely you’ll be able to once it leaves the theaters. Another aspect of the film that’s been somewhat overshadowed is the strength of its central villain. A lot has been said about the badass character design & story arcs of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, Tom Hardy’s Max, Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, and whoever the Hell played that weirdo guitar dude, but not nearly enough ink has been spilled on the central antagonist, Immortan Joe. Joe is a nightmarish brute, truly terrifying in both his abusive actions & basic look. When he gets his eventual comeuppance it’s a thoroughly satisfying moment, a fitful end to an eccentric villain who belongs to be recognized along with names like Darth Vader, Cruella DeVille and Freddy Krueger as one of the greatest of all time. Like a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers in their respective franchises, Immortan Joe is a large part of what makes Fury Road feel so special.

That’s about all I have to add to the already endless Mad Max conversation. I’d urge you to go see the film, but it’s likely that you already have. I’d praise its charms, but there’s little I can say that hasn’t already been hyperbolically topped. I’d pick at its (very few) faults, but there’s no point in deflating any of the air out of the party balloons. It makes me so happy that a film this strange has been exalted this high this quickly, so there’s not much left to do except to bask in its glory and try to get over these Immortan Joe nightmares. Maybe they’ll stop before I get to Valhalla, but probably not. At least I have these cans of silver spray paint to see me through in the mean time.

-Brandon Ledet

Maggie (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twostar

When the basic concept of Maggie was first released in the press, it felt like a godsend. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned to acting (after an infamously shaky stint as a politician), he’s been landing a lot of roles that attempt to revive his action movies heyday, including Terminator & Extendable sequels as well as the surprisingly-fun throwback Last Stand. Maggie promised to be something new for Arnold entirely. A somber drama in which Arnold plays a family man struggling to keep his life together in the wake of a zombie apocalypse felt like an opportunity for the old dog to learn new tricks, to show his fans a side of his talent that they’ve never seen before. We were finally going to see Arnold in a role far outside his normal mode as a murderous, wise-cracking pile of muscles.

Unfortunately, the means by which Arnold attempts to establish acting chops in Maggie is a huge letdown. Borrowing a page from Ryan Gosling’s book, Schwarzenegger attempts to gain respectability mostly through aggressive, pensive silence. This sometimes works in more eccentrically shot films, but Maggie doesn’t have nearly enough going on visually or thematically to fill the void left by the absence of his usual charisma. The story the movie tells is somberly thin, focusing on Arnold’s caretaking of his teenage daughter as she slowly turns into a flesh-eating zombie. There’s some metaphors at work there about the real life scenario of a parent cairng for their child during a life-ending illness, but that’s about it. The movie grimly coasts along on scenario alone, without much else to say or get excited about along the way.

The messed up part about my reaction here is that I had the exact opposite one with the recent zombie comedy Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. With Wyrmwood, I found myself asking if the world really needed another straight-forward zombie apocalypse movie. With Maggie, I found myself wishing that we did have another straightforward zombie pic. Some of the movie’s best moments were when Arnold was killing zombies in hand-to-hand combat in a public restroom or confronting creepy undead children in the woods. Some of his interactions with his ailing daughter were interesting in concept, but felt more like a starting point for a journey that the film wasn’t interested in going on instead of a complete work. I’m not saying that Arnold should stick to hamming it up in mindless action flicks for the rest of his career (though I do greatly appreciate those); I just don’t think Maggie gave him nearly enough to do in the way of proving that he can do anything else. In fact, I don’t think Maggie gave anyone much of anything.

-Brandon Ledet

Hyena (2015)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

I’ve been watching a lot of Nicolas Winding Refn movies lately, trying to make sense of the man’s career. Like with a lot of people, my first introduction to the director was the 2011 Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive, a brilliant film I find compulsively re-watchable. It’s basically become the Beatles record of my DVD collection, something I pop in when I have no idea what I want to watch. It was then a disappointment when Refn’s follow-up, Only God Forgives, was just as gorgeous, but twice as empty & hard to love as Drive. I left the theater incredibly cold from that movie and didn’t warm up to it at all in subsequent viewings. Working my way backwards through the much more impressive Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and so on, I feel like I’m just starting to get a grasp on Refn’s violently somber & grandiose vibe, something I’ve been trying to grasp for years now.

It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been trying to get a grasp on Refn’s aesthetic. The recent crime thriller Hyena plays like a love letter to the Danish filmmaker, with only a few updates tweaked here or there. The problem is that it isn’t even half as interesting as Refn’s worst film (that I’ve seen so far, anyway). Opening with a slow-motion drug bust in a neon-soaked nightclub, the requisite eerily sad music playing, Hyena declares its Refn love early & often. It seems like the only innovation the film brought to the format was the question “What if Refn’s movies were told from the POV of crooked cops instead of the criminals?” It’s not a question that, when isolated, leaves a lot of room for new ideas or even a basic reason for existing, and the resulting film feels like an empty shell because of it.

That’s not to say that, although empty, the shell isn’t good-looking. There’s some occasionally gorgeous imagery scattered throughout Hyena that almost rewards the patience required to make it through its runtime. It’s just unfortunate that the film also decided to ape Refn’s glacial pacing as well as his visual style, which results in long stretches of crooked cop drama that’s extremely difficult to care about. If nothing else, it feels like there’s a promise here that Refn’s style could possibly inspire other directors to take action movies into fresh, unexpected directions, but Hyena merely hints at that promise instead of actually fulfilling it. It might be a while until both audiences & filmmakers alike get a grasp on how to pull off the Refn trick, but Hyena isn’t even the closest attempt released this year. That honor belongs to Refn-collaborator Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River.

-Brandon Ledet

Ex Machina (2015)

/ swampflix / 21 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

Sometimes a straight-forward, low-key picture is the exactly correct approach when dealing with larger than life concepts. This can especially be true with sci-fi. I had a lot of fun with the twisty trashiness of this year’s Predestination, which was anything but tasteful, and the ludicrous world-building of last year’s The Zero Theorem, but neither of those examples haunted me quite as much as Alex Garland’s directorial debut Ex Machina. There’s something about Ex Machina’s straight-forward, no nonsense approach to sci-fi storytelling that struck a real chord in me. It’s not likely to win over folks who are looking to be surprised by every single development in its plot, but for those willing to enjoy the movie on its own stripped-down terms there’s a lot of intense visual rewards & interesting thematic explorations of, among other things, masculine romantic possessiveness that can be deeply satisfying. It’s a cold, tightly-controlled film that somehow echoes both the overwhelming psychedelic claustrophobia of Beyond the Black Rainbow & the you’re-in-over-your-head-kid misanthropy of last year’s brilliantly dark Frank without coming off as at all showy in the process. That’s no small feat.

Holding down the Frank end of that formula is incredibly talented Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson (who also starred in Frank, go figure), playing a young computer programmer who is recruited by a villainous half-Steve Jobs/half-Howard Hughes bro-type (played by the also talented Oscar Isaac) to test the consciousness of a just-invented AI robot called Ava. Despite her artificial appearance, Ava is incredibly human and challenges both her creator’s & her observer’s views of who & what she is, calling into question whether her confinement & lack of freedom is a form of abuse. As more is slowly revealed about Isaac’s mad scientist & the depthless intelligence Ava is hiding, the movie takes on a deeply sinister, misanthropic tone in which no one comes across as a good person, but rather all three parties are complicit in attempting to control, mislead, and manipulate, all for their own selfish reasons. In the cold confines of the remote compound where this three-way power struggle unfolds, there’s a deeply unsettling revelation about the worst aspects of human nature at play here, one that is in no way lessened by being able to see where the story is going before it arrives there.

The truly impressive thing about Ex Machina’s calm, controlled style is how striking of a visual effect the movie accomplishes through very simple, straightforward techniques. Throughout the film, there are frequent “power-outs” in the setting’s remote facility that bathe the screen in a threateningly intense red light. When the camera cuts from these images to the contrasting bright greens of nature outside, the movie not only draws a visual comparison between nature & artifice, it also creates a surprisingly psychedelic experience that recalls the futuristic medical facility of Beyond the Black Rainbow. Just like with its acting, story-telling, thematic explorations, tone, and pacing, the visual aesthetic established in Ex Machina is surprisingly effective for something so intentionally simple. It’s an impressive picture in how it makes no grand gestures to impress, relying on its inherent strengths instead of showy gimmickry to establish itself as a unique work. I found the effect of this approach both eerie and refreshing, both disturbing and poignant. In other words, it’s a great film.

-Brandon Ledet

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

/ swampflix / 25 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

At this point in the evolution of the MCU, there are nearly a dozen (!!!) films, three television shows, several DVD-exclusive shorts, and an untold amount of tie-in comic books worth of content. Holy shit, that’s daunting. Honestly, I’m just not the right kind of comic book dork to find that amount of MCU content exciting. If there were a Fantagraphics Cinematic Universe you could bet I’d be at the theater for every new release, but that much Marvel content sounds more like work than play to me. Of the eleven MCU films released so far I’ve seen exactly three: Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. To me, the draw of tuning in for these films was that they felt like a highlight reel instead of having to watch all MCU content, which at this point would take days on end.

This approach worked out fairly well with the first Avengers film, which had only(!!!) five preceding films of build-up, whereas I had felt totally left behind at the beginning of its sequel, Age of Ultron. Starting with an in medias res action sequence in the snow and quickly followed by some sciencey montages & well-needed (I’m guessing) R&R, the Avengers team had now left me, the casual viewer, far behind and was struggled for a near 40-min stretch to me back to the table. It took almost the entire first third of the film for me to get invested in the story while all the loud things were going boom, but once I was brought up to speed, I was just as on-board as any other giddy child in the theater. For what it’s worth, I think the exact moment was sometime around when Iron Man was trying to punch The Hulk to sleep or maybe only a few minutes before.

Once Age of Ultron gets rolling on its own merit, disconnected from its place in the MCU, it’s a fairly exciting action spectacle. Cities are destroyed, superhumans run around doing their superhuman things, good triumphs over evil, etc. I just wish it didn’t take so long to get there. The MVPs of distinguishing this movie from its MCU brethren are the newest characters. Not the genetically modified twins introduced in the opening scenes, but the man-made characters that come later in the film, Vision & Ultron. Especially Ultron. As the title hints, the film doesn’t really stand out on its own until Ultron hijacks the plot from the ten preceding movies. He’s such an arrestingly odd, smarmy villain, expertly voiced by James Spader, that he makes all the work that it took to get to him feel worthwhile.

Despite the shaky start, I eventually found myself giving into Age of Ultron’s ridiculous spectacle and even had a few moments where I completely nerded out (particularly in a well-teased moment involving Thor’s hammer) and felt like part of the participatory audience. I’m just wondering how long Marvel can keep pulling off this trick for the casual viewer. According to their current release schedule, Avengers 3 will have at least sixteen films preceding it. Avengers 4 is likely to have nearly two dozen. If it already takes 40min of exposition to rope the casual viewer into these film’s storylines, I’m wondering if they can even continue to take us along at all or if they’ll (smartly) choose to leave us behind.

-Brandon Ledet

San Andreas (2015)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

There’s really only one reason to see San Andreas and it ain’t to watch The Rock act outside of his comfort zone. If you really wanted to watch Dwayne Johnson push himself as an actor, I highly recommend checking out Southland Tales or Pain & Gain. If you want to watch buildings fall over and crush countless nameless people while The Rock just happens to be there, San Andreas is the movie for you. The Rock is in full Hercules mode here, just sort-of coasting on his natural charisma as a mediocre film crumbles around him. San Andreas may not be the best possible Johnson vehicle, but it does have something Hercules was missing: incredible visual spectacle. As soon as San Andreas leaves the theaters it’s going to be a forgotten by-the-90s-numbers natural disaster pic, but as long as it’s huge & loud on the silver screen it’s got an impressive 3D spectacle to it that I found myself genuinely wowed by when I wasn’t chuckling at the clichéd dialogue that broke it up (like the earthquakes that break the movie’s California coast into pieces).

Since it’s unlikely that you’ll enjoy San Andreas for its storytelling prowess or emotional resonance, I guess I’ll detail what it has going for it in camp value. First of all, its aping of 90s disaster pics like Daylight & Volcano is so accurate that the whole endeavor feels ludicrously old-fashioned. In a lot of ways, it’s only a half-step up from the corny script of last year’s horrendous Left Behind, which is really saying something. Unlike Left Behind, however, San Andreas is consistently dangerous-feeling from the get-go, almost to the point of sadism. Buildings are ripped in half, people wander around bleeding in a daze, floods & fires complicate the rescue missions, etc. San Andreas knows it has little more to offer than sheer spectacle, so it pushes how much constant carnage it can get away with without devolving into a complete cartoon, something it just barely gets away with. As for traces of camp in The Rock’s performance, he does have a pretty great one-liner when he expertly parachutes onto a baseball field with his estranged wife (“It’s been a while since I’ve gotten you to second base”) and it’s pretty amusing how quickly & without inner conflict he abandons his post as a helicopter-rescue pilot to focus on retrieving his own wife & daughter as millions of other earthquake victims suffer. Other than that & a few amusing scenes in which a cowardly business dude pushes people into immediate peril to save his own ass, the movie doesn’t offer much else camp-wise outside the impressive 3D spectacle of a city collapsing.

With a larger budget, San Andreas could have looked even further back than its 90s-disaster-movie roots and assembled one of those sprawling casts from the days of Big Studio disaster films like Towering Inferno & Earthquake. I’m not saying that they should’ve recast The Rock’s helicopter pilot or Paul Giamatti’s befuddled scientist. It’s more that they felt like a small part of an absent larger whole. If San Andreas were a near-three hour epic overstuffed with every Hollywood star imaginable, but with the same level of impressive special effects it could’ve been something really special. As is, it’s going to lose its significance as soon as it hits VOD & home video, so I suggest seeing it in the theater while you can if you have any interest in it at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Hack O’ Lantern (1988)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

campstamp

“But Mom, I like the taste of blood. Grandpa says it’s good for me.”

The bond between grandfather and grandson is a very special one, especially when the grandfather is the leader of a satanic cult and breeds his grandson to be the son of Satan. Director Jag Mundhra’s Hack O’ Lantern (aka Halloween Night) explores this specific type of grandfather/grandson relationship in one of the greatest “bad” horror films ever created. I knew that this was going to be a bad movie just from the title, but literally everything in the film was terrible. For starters, the main character, Tommy, is an 18 year old played by a balding 32 year old Gregory Cummins (Cliffhanger, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Now, even though Tommy is supposed to be the film’s main character, he’s present for probably less than half of the movie, and he barely has any lines at all. His grandfather is truly the most prominent person in the film, and his character isn’t even given a name. He’s simply referred to as Grandpa. Doesn’t this sound like a gem already?

Out of all the satanic themed horror movies I’ve seen (which is many), this one had the quickest satanic reveal ever. Within the first few minutes of Hack O’ Lantern, it’s known that Grandpa is a full-blown Satanist. After the opening credits, an innocent looking old man (Grandpa) driving a farm truck filled with pumpkins stops to visit his young grandson (Tommy). He gives Tommy a pentagram necklace along with a pumpkin of his choice and a little plastic skeleton. In one of the worst Southern accents I’ve ever heard, he tells Tommy that he’s “very special.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on, and honestly, I was a little disappointed. I personally would’ve liked Grandpa’s character to be more mysterious.

Ten years after receiving the necklace, Tommy turns into a rebellious teen, and he is more than ready to make his satanic confirmation. One of my biggest laugh-out-loud moments was when Tommy and Grandpa shared this super-secret satanic handshake. They both make (incorrect) devil horns with their hands and press them together while straight up mean mugging each other. Shortly after this occurs, a really bad heavy metal music video, starring Tommy, pops out of nowhere. The video is for D.C. La Croix’s “Devil’s Son” and I swear, the song is just as annoyingly catchy as “It’s A Lovely Life” from May’s Movie of the Month, Crimes Of Passion. This was definitely my favorite part of the movie.

About 30 or so minutes into the film, a slasher element is introduced. An unknown killer wearing a horned devil mask and cloak goes on a Halloween killing spree using a pitchfork, shovel, and knife as murder weapons. Of course, no slasher flick would be complete without a couple of nude girls, and I swear, everyone woman in this film had the opportunity to shed their clothes at some point. What I really appreciated was how the film’s slasher element blended in with its satanic roots so well. One did not overshadow the other, and many other films have not been able to balance different themes as well as Mundhra did with this one.

Hack O’ Lantern is a classic 80s slasher flick with a hint of satanic horror metal, basically the perfect formula for a “terrible” movie. It has not been released on DVD, but in November 2014, Massacre Video stated that they have acquired the rights to Hack O’ Lantern and plan on releasing it on Blu-ray later on this year.

-Britnee Lombas

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton (2014)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

Initially pitched to the audience as a history of the underground hip-hop record label Stones Throw, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton actually works a lot more like an in-depth mental profile of the label’s founder, influential DJ Peanut Butter Wolf. That’s because the label’s identity is so closely linked to Wolf’s. The periods of creative excitement & devastating losses that shape Peanut Butter Wolf’s life also shape the history of his record label. Stones Throw is Wolf’s life’s work, so it makes sense that his life would have so much influence over its general sound & direction.

It makes sense then that the story of Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton begins long before the founding of Stones Throw. Providing childhood photos & home videos from Peanut Butter Wolf’s youth, the documentary shows us a young nerdy white dude as he grows in his music tastes from funk & disco to new-wave & punk to hip-hop, where he finds his calling as a taste-maker. Even in his younger days, before the turntables, Wolf is shown making mixtapes & playing curator, a skill that will later prove vital to his legacy. It’s when Wolf begins to collaborate with young rapper Charizma that his music career takes a definite shape and it’s after Charizma’s tragic, far-too-soon death that he becomes determined to make something of it. This is just one of many tragic losses Peanut Butter Wolf would suffer over the years, and it’s not until he gets excited by working with new collaborators that he can truly move on & grow.

The list of Peanut Butter Wolf’s collaborators interviewed in Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is a staggering who’s-who of underground hip-hop & outsider indie music: Madlib, J Dilla, MF Doom, Common, and Anika are only a fraction of voices heard here. The interesting thing about these interviews is that the subjects are all too-smart-for-their-own-good nerds who are super awkward when faced with the scrutiny of a documentary crew. Because its subjects are so soft-spoken & nervous, the film has essentially no choice but to let the work speak for itself. An original score by Madlib (one of the label’s most influential contributors), throwback animation sequences, and rare footage of reclusive acts that don’t normally get a lot of face time all combine to show exactly what makes Stones Throw’s vibe so special. As Peanut Butter Wolf puts it, he sees his label as a stomping ground, a launching pad for people to move on from. The work isn’t always spectacular (to the documentary’s credit it doesn’t look away when Wolf gets into producing some really douchey Los Angeles weirdness), but it’s incredible how much work was made possible by a single man who knows great music when he hears it & knows how to bring out the best in his collaborators. For anyone interested in exactly how everything Peanut Butter Wolf’s put together came to be, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is an essential document. I’m not sure anyone who’s not a hip-hop nerd will be as pleased, but they might find themselves nerding out despite themselves.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

At this point in time, twenty years after his untimely death, Kurt Cobain’s life is a fairly well-documented story. It’s not initially a problem, then, that the documentary Montage of Heck is so dedicated to the “montage” part of its title. Creating an impressionistic image of Cobain as a person instead of a rock idol through a series of almost entirely disconnected sounds & images, Montage of Heck is very light on information & heavy on aesthetic. At first this whirlwind of glimpses into Cobain’s childhood photos, personal journals, anecdotes, and cultural influences is overwhelmingly captivating, feeling like it has the potential to be the best document about a musician since (my personal favorite) The Devil & Daniel Johnston. However, once Cobain’s drug addiction & marriage to Courtney Love hijack the narrative, this lack of substance becomes a much uglier, much less engaging proposition.

Much like with last year’s dark comedy Frank, Montage of Heck is mostly focused on the idea that fame is not always a positive influence for artists, regardless of the quality of their work. Surrounded by far too many ecstatic fans & scrutinizing journalists Cobain shrinks into himself and turns to drug abuse as a coping mechanism. Seemingly completely disinterested in how his music was produced or the cultural climate that surrounded it, Montage of Heck strips Cobain of everything that makes him special, instead just posing him as a normal dude who happened to write some great songs. At first this every-guy approach is fascinating, playing right into punk’s traditional DIY ethos. Once heroin takes over and his music career begins to fade, however, the story becomes much less engaging. It’s a lot more difficult to be interested in an every-guy when he’s babbling & nodding off instead of making art with his friends.

It’s of course possible that this energy shift was entirely intentional. The early kinetic montage of the film looks & sounds absolutely great, like a top notch music video, and is effectively snuffed out by a somber, heroin-induced letdown of a finale. In a lot of ways this mirrors Cobain’s actual life: a burst of creative energy stopped short & made less special by substance abuse. As an anti-drug PSA, Montage of Heck is pretty damn effective, but as a documentary it’s very thin on the information end, so when it loses its momentum to heroin addiction, there’s not much else to hold onto. If it had either kept the same structure, but included more interviews or somehow kept up the impressionistic montage weirdness of its first half, Montage of Heck could’ve easily been one of the most incredible documentaries of all time. As is, it’s pretty good, but feels divided & misshapen, like it desperately needed a push in a more confident direction.

-Brandon Ledet