Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Avengers – Age of Ultron (2015)

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: Do you need a history of the Avengers sequel here? The first movie cast such a shadow that it was impossible to escape this film, even if you wanted to (and most people didn’t). Even when it was unclear whether or not director Joss Whedon would return to helm the second film, there were no other potential directors announced before he eventually acquiesced. By the time this movie came out, virtually every blog that is created and consumed by humans had talked about the upcoming film in extreme detail. Next time, when we talk about Ant-Man, there’ll be a lot of production history to discuss, as that film had a long and troubled road from inception to release, but not Age of Ultron. Let’s just get to it, shall we?

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threehalfstar

Brandon: When I first reviewed Age of Ultron last summer I had kinda marked it off as a breaking point for the MCU. I enjoyed the film very much as a loud, chaotic action film, but felt like it was stretching itself a little thin trying to please both people like me who (at the time) only casually checked in on the Marvel films every now & then and hardcore fans who had consumed all ten films, three television shows, several DVD-exclusive shorts, and untold amount of tie-in comic books worth of content that preceded it. Age of Ultron was enjoyable to an outsider, but it had to labor fairly heavily to get there & I felt like at some point the franchise would have to leave me behind if it wanted to keep already-established fans engaged in future films. In the past year I’ve since caught up with all of the preceding MCU films & a few of the comic books and it turns out Age of Ultron still feels a little overstuffed & compromised now that I’m somewhat in the know. It’s a sluggish, sprawling mess of an action film that stresses itself out trying to provide significant character beats for each of its many larger than life heroes while also juggling with the introduction of several new supervillains for them to thwart. In a lot of ways Age of Ultron repeats a lot of the highlights and downfalls of the first Avengers films. It’s fun & inspired in moments both big (a stunning slug-it-out fight between Iron Man & The Hulk) & small (the repeated gag with who can/cannot lift Thor’s hammer), but also labored in a way that’s impossible to ignore, especially in its overlong, stop & start exposition.

However, there is a new spark of inspiration at work in Age of Ultron that gives me great hope for where the MCU is headed as a franchise. Now that the individual introductions & character quirks for each Avenger member are out of the way, the series has made a little room for itself to go into unexplored territory beyond the basic novelty of seeing all of these superheroes function as a unit. This development comes twofold. The first & flashiest change afoot here is the breathing space the film allows for its eccentric villainy. James Spader is a total hoot as the titular Ultron, just devouring the scenery at every opportunity he gets (even as soon as his introduction as a disembodied voice). The second development is the very nature of Ultron as a form of artificial intelligence. Thus far, MCU movies have centered on very traditional superhero plots: origin stories, tales of revenge, moral crises over the very nature of heroism, etc. Captain America: The Winter Soldier & Thor 2: The Dark World both promised new lines of narrative with their respective experiments in political thriller & space epic plot lines, but Age of Ultron takes this adventurous genre play a step further. The film’s pedigree as modern A.I. sci-fi makes it surprisingly satisfying & unique as a modern superhero work (and as a result it ranked fairly high on our recent list of the best A.I. sci-fi titles of the 2010s). Age of Ultron may be a little messy in its attempts to juggle so many varied larger-than-life personalities & sidebar plot lines, but James Spader’s over-the-top performance as the central villain & the resulting A.I. sci-fi plot that surrounds him make the film at the very least an interesting, entertaining mess. It’s at least as good as the first Avengers film & promises that there’s even better work to come in the near future (I’m starting to get really stoked about Captain America: Civil War‘s imminent release, as I’m sure most people are).

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three star

Boomer: I’m never really sure where to start when talking about this one. Age of Ultron isn’t a bad movie. In actuality, it’s a pretty decent outing for a group of characters that people were losing their minds over the first time we saw them unite. I’d dare say it’s good, if not great. The cinematography is clean, the pacing moves swiftly and cleanly, and the likable characters are terribly likable while the unlikable characters are not.

Buuuuuuuut…. this movie bores me? Maybe “bores” is the wrong word; it’s more that the film just fails to really grab me? Although there are some tonal inconsistencies and narrative problems throughout, the same could be said of Avengers, and I still found that movie enjoyable in spite of its flaws. I’d even go so far as to say that this film might be technically better, but I don’t get the same thrill from it that I still get from the first one. Admittedly, it would have been virtually impossible to capture a second lightning bolt in this particular Marvel-shaped bottle regardless, but I still feel underwhelmed with each viewing. This was my third watch of the film (after seeing it in theatres and then again at Christmas), and this was probably the most rewarding watching experience, but does an Avengers flick need to be the kind of movie that takes multiple rewatches to be fully enjoyed? This isn’t Jacob’s Ladder or Primer that I’m talking about; it’s the eleventh movie in a franchise that walks the thin line between “media made for children” and “media aimed at adults,” a direct sequel to a movie that was so much fun we all willingly ignored the fact that its plot is pretty threadbare and that the villain’s motivations were utterly inexplicable. So how did a follow-up with more explicit character motivation and expanded personal stories for many of the heroes end up being so… blasé?

When Whedon finally announced that he would return to direct Age of Ultron, he said that it was because he “actually started to consider it [and] it became so clear that [he] desperately wanted to say more about these characters.” This is most evident in Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, which is ironic given that the actor couldn’t stop putting his foot in his mouth during the press tour. Overall, the film garnered a mixed response among new media outlets: many people interpreted Black Widow’s line about being a monster, a declaration that came on the heels of the revelation that she was sterilized as part of her espionage training, to mean that she considered herself less than a woman because she could not have children (I don’t personally subscribe to this inference, but the placement of that line is unquestionably insensitive and poorly timed). And it’s no real surprise that Whedon got burnt out from working on the film, considering that he was trying to grow the mythology while also being beholden to the Marvel franchise at large. This was a pretty big contributing factor to his eventual departure from social media, which was solidified when people reacted angrily to his accusation that Chris Pratt’s character in the then-upcoming Jurassic World smacked of “seventies-era sexism” (an observation that turned out to be absolutely correct, for anyone keeping score at home).

But those are all things that aren’t specific to the film itself; so, what about the movie? Well… clocking in at 2.5 hours, there are still too many stories that feel unresolved. In my review of Batman v Superman, I mentioned the scene wherein Lois Lane has to retrieve a Kryptonite spear from a flooded building after throwing the damn thing into the water in the first place; both I and the friend with whom I saw the movie immediately referred to this as the “Riker Fights a Monster” moment, referencing RedLetterMedia’s Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Nemesis. In that film, there is a scene in which Jonathan Frakes’s character goes down into the bowels of the ship to fight Ron Perlman’s Nosferatu-esque Reman character for no other reason than to give Riker an irrelevant plot point; as “Harry Plinkett” points out, making a main character run off to engage in hand to hand combat with a monster simply to give that character something to do is a demonstration of utter failure to properly craft a story. The same thing happens here with Thor, who takes off from the Barton farm halfway through the movie to go submerge himself in some magic waters and have a mystical vision, for the sole purpose of getting him out of the way for a little while and providing Thor with the information needed to provide exposition about how the MacGuffins of the MCU are interconnected, even though we kind of already got that explanation from The Collector in Guardians. Because the film has to introduce three new Avengers but Thor is still on the team, he has to be sent off on an irrelevant side quest just to give him something to do.

I didn’t read any books written by men in 2015. The biggest reason for this is that, while I was reading Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe last January, I realized I was reading the fifth novel in a row that was about a relationship between fathers and sons, specifically one that was estranged. Like a lot of writers, I also have a strained relationship with my Pops, but I’m sick to death of having to see that narrative device in every piece of media that I consume. It’s been a central thematic element of most of the Marvel films, with Stark having to face off against his surrogate father in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 revolving around him having to finish his father’s work (with bonus daddy issues coming from a parallel story about Whiplash’s own dead father). Thor could have been subtitled “Odin is kind of a bad dad,” and the plot of Thor 2 is basically “Loki has daddy issues some more, and also there are evil elves.” Guardians of the Galaxy has both Nebula and Gamora rebelling against their “father” Thanos, and Star Lord’s father is mentioned several times, setting up more dad-focused shenanigans further down the line. The Incredible Hulk didn’t focus on the patriarch of the Banner family (although Ang Lee’s non-MCU Hulk certainly did), but it did milk drama from the relationship between Betty and General Ross. Even Ant-Man, which I really enjoyed, wrung most of its pathos from the parallel father-daughter relationships between the two Ant-Men and their respective offspring. The only movies that don’t have bad father-child relationships as a central element were the Captain America films. And, hey, I get that, I really do. Assuming that your parents were present in your life, the relationship that you have with them is the first and most formative relationship that you have; further, especially in God-haunted America, the relationship between fatherhood and the divine takes on such familial and social importance that one’s father is often one’s model for how they conceive God. I’m just saying that this is a metaphorical well that has been visited by storytellers so often that they’re hauling up buckets of dust at this point and trying to get us to drink it.

Age of Ultron takes this idea and cranks it up as high as it will go. Wanda and Pietro turned to Baron von Strucker and his experiments as a way of getting back at Stark for the death of their parents. The Barton family farm gives every character the opportunity to reflect on their own place in the world and whether or not that precludes them from starting families of their own: Banner and Widow have a heart-to-heart about how neither of them is biologically capable of starting a family (the idea of adopting, as is so often the case, never crosses anyone’s mind); Stark talks about building Pepper a farm, implying that he is thinking about continuing the Stark lineage (legitimately). Cap’s is a little more subtle, as we see him dreaming about the end of the war and being able to finally dance (and, by implication, settle down) with Peggy, a dream that can never be realized. Even Thor becomes a kind of father by the end, as his lightning gives life to Vision. But, of course, all of this pales in comparison to Ultron and his hatred for his “father,” Tony Stark. It’s thematically connected but ultimately feels hollow.

Where do I even begin with Ultron? For one thing, his design is terrible. The effects team did some excellent work making him look as good as he does, but he still doesn’t quite fit. The Iron Man suits are almost always CGI, but they work for me because they don’t have as many distracting details on them and they aren’t required to imitate real facial expressions; Ultron, on the other hand, has a stupid cartoon face that laughs and speaks and looks absurd. Combined with James Spader’s disarmingly likeable dialogue, this doesn’t work for me at all. I understand that Ultron wants to become more human (even if the film fails to properly explain why this is a goal for him), but he would have been more unsettling if his jokes and attempts to seem more affable had come from a less expressive face. When Ultron first interrupts the after-party at Avengers tower and gives his “I’m alive, father” speech to the gang while inhabiting a broken Iron Legion bot, he’s much more menacing in that moment than he is at any point later in the film, and that’s a problem; a villain should become more frightening as he goes from party-crasher to world-destroyer, but Ultron gets less creepy as the film goes on. If they weren’t going to keep him in a broken robot suit the whole time, the least that could be done would have been to make his face immobile to ramp up the uncanny valley factor.

On top of that, the film sells itself short by having Ultron move into full-blown extinction-event villainy almost immediately. Remember the scene from The Fifth Element in which Leeloo discovers the concept of “War” and briefly has a psychic break before returning to her mission with a renewed vigor? Age of Ultron would have benefited from downplaying Ultron’s maliciousness at the outset. For instance, he could have worked alongside Jarvis for a scene or two, maybe even helping to design the anti-Hulk “Veronica” system, which would have foreshadowed that Ultron would eventually work against the team. Then have him come to the conclusion (after having a Leeloo-like epiphany but with the opposite result) that the world would be better off without humans in general and the Avengers specifically, so that he goes rogue, kills Jarvis, and sets out on his own to unmake life as we know it. This would raise the emotional and thematic stakes without changing the plot all that much, while also making Stark look less foolish by having his “son” turn to evil eventually rather than instantaneously.

All that having been said, do I hate this movie? Not really. I actually enjoyed its mindless summer action flick elements, and I continued to laud the fact that the MCU heroes really are heroic in that they focus their attentions on saving people as much as they do on defeating villains. Compared to the mindless ultraviolence of, for instance, Man of Steel (and the petulantly sarcastic “good thing this island we’re utterly destroying is uninhabited” violence of follow-up BvS), Age of Ultron truly reflects the superheroic ideal in a way that other franchises fail to understand. The trailer for Civil War even shows that there were fewer than 200 casualties in this film, which is mind-boggling, given that an entire city is obliterated in the climax. The action scenes are fun, even if there are so many that the excitement is diluted and diminished (the Iron Man versus Hulk fight is narratively justified but could have been excised with few changes). I also like that the film takes the time to remind us that Tony Stark is a real asshole, and that the character growth he’s experienced over the course of the franchise hasn’t absolved him of the guilt of his past (as evidenced by his recognition of a notable black market arms dealer and the fact that the Maximoffs were orphaned as a result of his company’s war profiteering) or of his pathological egomania (as seen in his accidental creation of what is essentially Skynet and his willful refusal to destroy the experiment that would become Vision, despite all available evidence at the time indicating that this was the best course of action).

Still, the spectacle doesn’t make up for the looseness of the plot this time around, and the film’s thematic focus on progeny and responsibility is neither as strong nor as clever as it tries to be. It’s the quintessential example of a sequel that reduces its narrative world rather than enriches it. It’s a recommended watch, but not a required one.

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Brandon: I’m giving a lot of credit to the character of Ultron here for what makes this film so entertaining as a work of superhero-themed A.I. sci-fi, but Ultron’s philosophical counterpoint Vision is just as fascinating. I know both Ultron & Vision are both inorganic lifeforms entirely dedicated to their respective good & evil plots to “save” the world (Ultron’s Murder Everyone policy is particularly inventive in that regard), but what strikes me most about these two characters is their off-putting sexuality. James Spader has always been something of a creepy sex symbol throughout his career & even though he appears here mostly as a voice, his work as Ultron is no different, so no surprise there, really. What’s really off-putting is the sex vibes I get from his heroic opposite Vision. Vision is creepily sexual in a way that a subtly flirtatious yoga instructor or an enigmatic cult leader would be and it makes me simultaneously super fascinated & super uncomfortable watching him at work. It’s highly probable that this is all in my head, but I still think it was a reaction worth mentioning.

Boomer: As much as I cited the problematic over reliance upon father-child relationship clichés, it is worth pointing out that this is, to my knowledge, the first and only time that anything created by Joss Whedon has a good father archetype. From Buffy (in which literally every single character’s father was either not present, abusive, or both) to Toy Story (in which Andy’s father is notably absent), Joss Whedon has a the same hard-on for bad fathers that Jonathan Safran Foer has for fatherhood in general. Arguably, Fred’s dad on Angel was decent, but Hawkeye is the first good, relevant father that we have ever had in a Whedonverse product.

On a more random note, non-comics character Helen Cho feels like an attempt to fix the comics-to-screen adaptation of Kavita Rao, who was created by Whedon during his Astonishing X-Men run and who was unfortunately ruined by her appearance in Fox’s X-Men: The Last Stand.

I’d also like to point out that I really like Vision. He’s a favorite character of mine from the comics because he’s just such a total weirdo. For those who don’t read the comics, Vision’s neural patterns were based on those of fellow Avenger Wonder Man (who has no analog in the MCU, possibly because he was excised from The Ultimates); when Coulson was killed in the first Avengers film, my theory was that they would bring him back by using his mind as the basis for Vision. I’m not saying that my idea was better, but… okay, I am saying that. Still, I appreciate that the MCU has brought on such a bizarre comic character and I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do with him. I also like that they slyly alluded to his comic-book relationship with Scarlet Witch, with Ultron saying early in the film that she needs something different from/more than a man, and with Elizabeth Olson’s reaction to seeing Vision for the first time (her face basically says “Oh, my, yes”).

Of course, even more than Vision, I love Wanda. She’s a notoriously difficult character to get right, and even though the movie makes some changes for the worse (divesting both Pietro and Wanda of their Roma heritage and instead making them generically Eastern European is unnecessary and insulting, especially considering that you can count the number of Roma comics characters on one hand), her characterization is pretty neat. The Ultimates version of the twins was awful, and the dumbed-down nature of X-Men Evolution meant that she was turned into a pretty generic goth girl with issues, a la Nancy in The Craft. My favorite non-comics version of her is probably from the all-too-brief Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon from five or so years ago; pairing her off on adventures with Nightcrawler made sense thematically (given both character’s connections to the Roma) and making her an ambassador for Genosha allowed her to be involved without making her a part of the team.

As for how this film fits into the wider MCU, we haven’t quite gotten to see the ramifications of these events inform the growth of the franchise in quite the same way as, for instance, the events of Winter Soldier did. When that film was released, it had an immediate and apparent impact on other films, taking away the S.H.I.E.L.D. support system that the characters and the audience had come to rely upon and making Hydra a real threat in the present. This had an obvious and instantaneous effect on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., finally refining that program into something worth watching. How does Ultron tie into the program this time around? An off-the-books project is referenced many times throughout the second season, a project so secret that it causes dissension in the ranks (when Ming Na’s Agent May finds out what it is, a few weeks before the audience does, she seems pretty pissed). The big surprise is that this secret project is actually the new helicarrier that is used to rescue the fleeing Sokovians at the end of Ultron, which doesn’t make sense given what Agents showed us and is completely irrelevant to viewers who only follow the films and don’t care about the shows. Ignoring that, it looks like the events of this film will be important in the upcoming Civil War, so that’s something to look forward to. And, of course, we can expect to see more of Andy Serkis’s character when the Black Panther finally gets involved.

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 Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

three star

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

The Boss (2016)

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three star

My expectations may have been a little too high for The Boss. I geeked out pretty hard last year when I finally caught up with Melissa McCarthy’s first feature film team-up with her husband Ben Falcone, Tammy, which I called in my review “the culmination of what McCarthy has been building towards since her long line of hot mess characters began in 2011.” That’s a lot for a sophomore follow-up to live up to, so it was unlikely that I was ever going to enjoy the McCarthy-Falcone production The Boss quite as much as I did Tammy. It’s a funny, serviceable, occasionally absurd comedy that McCarthy & Falcone obviously had a great time bringing to the screen, but it’s difficult to get too excited about the film because I’ve already seen them do so much better. There’s a darkness & go-for-broke inanity to Tammy that I feel is somewhat lacking in the much more restrained The Boss and the resulting film feels a little generic in its absence.

Part of the problem might be that The Boss takes a little too long to get rolling. The titular pure id monster Tammy is entirely recognizable as a complete character almost as soon as she’s introduced. The Boss‘s Michelle Darnell (a character McCarthy developed many years back in The Groundlings), on the other hand, requires a little groundwork. A product of group homes & orphanages, Darnell is a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps cliche that became a wealthy, deeply strange cocktail of Nancy Grace, Paula Dean, Martha Stewart and any self-motivation guru you could think of who would write a book titled Money Talks Bullshit Walks through sheer gumption & will. You have to wait for her to get to the top, get knocked off her throne (by some well-deserved insider trading charges), and then find a second life as an entrepreneur helming a Girl Scouts knockoff that sells treats for profits instead of charity (in blatant violation of child labor laws) before the film really gets rolling. There’s a good fifteen, twenty minutes of labored exposition required to get Darnell in full swing and once she gets there the quiet moments between her sadistically self-absorbed, petty line of dark humor soften the film’s punch & pace more than I’d like. There’s a movie just as subversively dark & self-deprecating as Tammy hiding somewhere in The Boss, but it’s noticeably bogged down & muddled in a way its predecessor wasn’t.

McCarthy is still funny here whenever she’s allowed fully misbehave & indulge in oversexed, money-obsessed misanthropy. The Boss also has a great back-up crew of small role supporting actors in Peter Dinklage, Cecily Strong, Kathy Bates, Kristen Schaal, and Neptune, Caifornia’s own Kristen Bell. Reno 911‘s Cedric Yardbrough has a wonderfully absurd, one-note bit role as a surreally agreeable yes-man named Tito that nearly steals the show, but isn’t given enough screen time to fully commit (there’s a moment at the climax where I was pretty bummed that Tito didn’t swoop back in on a helicopter to save the day despite the fact that it would’ve made very little sense narratively). Besides the talent on deck, The Boss also has a great central message about the value of camaraderie among women & the unexpected ways make-shift families can form around even the most undeserving. I like it okay as a generic comedy with a talented lead & a wickedly petty mean streak, but Tammy felt like a much more special moment in McCarthy’s career (not that it did any better with mainstream outlets & audiences critically-speaking). I like to think that this film was wish-fulfillment for McCarthy & Falcone, who obviously were proud to bring Darnell to such a wide audience, but that they have much more subversive, sadistic comedy work still ahead of them. I’ve seen them pull it off before.

-Brandon Ledet

Why Wasn’t My Demon Lover (1987) Directed by Ate de Jong?

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There’s something a little off about My Demon Lover director Charlie Loventhal’s filmography as listed on IMDb. Loventhal seems to have a small string of slightly-edgy rom-coms that fit in with half of My Demon Lover‘s basic appeal but what about the magical, demonic half that makes My Demon Lover unique within that genre? There’s no element of fantasy or mysticism immediately detectable in the rest of Loventhal’s work, which makes My Demon Lover feel like something of an outlier in his catalog. I feel like I have encountered a director before who was working well withing My Demon Lover’s wheelhouse, though, and oddly enough it was someone we’ve covered here for a previous Movie of the Month.

Last summer Britnee presented the straight-to-VHS action fantasy Highway to Hell as a Movie of the Month selection. Everything about Highway to Hell, from the creature design to the sex obsession to the cartoon humor to the general sense of where it belongs in the VHS era, fits right in line with My Demon Lover‘s lighthearted approach to demonic black magic. The only thing missing from the film’s formula is Bugs Bunny charm of My Demon Lover‘s titular heartthrob Beelzebub, Kaz (played by Family Ties‘s Scott Valentine). However, the same year he released Highway to Hell, director Ate de Jong also unleashed his most noteworthy contribution to cult cinema: Drop Dead Fred. In Drop Dead Fred deceased funnyman Rik Mayall plays a child’s obnoxious imaginary friend that’s downright demonic in his pure id sense of humor & anarchy, a perfect mirror to My Demon Lover‘s Kaz, right down to the oversized blazer. There’s even a rom-com structure to Drop Dead Fred not too dissimilar to the schleppy lady protagonist Denny’s in My Demon Lover. In Loventhal’s catalog My Demon Lover feels almost entirely out of place. Among Ate de Jong’s releases in just the year of 1991, it fits just like a glove.

I’m not sure exactly how to think about this connection. It’s tempting to assume that because My Demon Lover was released a few years ahead of its Ate de Jong counterparts that the film served as some sort of inspiration for what was to follow. That feels unlikely, though. My Demon Lover, Highway to Hell, and Drop Dead Fred all feel like the kinds of films made purely for their supposed marketability, not necessarily with any specific artistic merit in mind. These are not the works of highfalutin auteurs. What I can say for sure, though, is if you enjoyed My Demon Lover & are searching for similar works centered on the same kind of VHS-specific, goofy demonic aesthetic, looking to director Loventhal’s other titles is a step in the wrong direction. I’d suggest instead that you start with de Jong’s 1991 output in Drop Dead Fred & Highway to Hell. If you had told me de Jong directed My Demon Lover I would’ve shrugged  & said “Duh.” based on those two films alone. Together as a trio, they seem to complete a picture crafted by a single artistic mind (in the trashiest sense of that phrase), even though they truthfully have very little to do with one another.

For more on April’s Movie of the Month, the 1987 romantic horror comedy My Demon Lover, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #5 of The Swampflix Podcast: Alligator People (1959) & New City (2015)’s Max Cusimano

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #5 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our fifth episode, we decided to go with a Louisiana theme. James & Brandon discuss the locally-set 1959 monster movie Alligator People. Also, Brandon interviews local filmmaker Max Cusimano about his 2015 post-Katrina documentary New City. Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were provided by the long-defunct band Trash Trash Trash.

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn

Hardcore Henry (2016)

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fourstar

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Hardcore Henry is, in essence, a video game come to life. This is either a compliment or a complaint depending on the perspective of the individual members of the audience. Roger Ebert, who had a thing or two to say about video games as a lower tier art form, would likely balk (or perhaps even puke) at this premise. As someone who hasn’t owned a video game console since the Nintendo 64, I’m almost equally an outsider to the medium, but I still found the film to be a blast. Hardcore Henry‘s central gimmick of mirroring the look of 1st person shooters by mounting GoPros to its camera/stuntmen is a lot to handle for 90 minutes of action cinema & the video game-thin plot & villains that accompany it don’t help much either. Audiences have largely rejected the Russian-American co-production outright based on its marketing & the movie has made back only less than half of its budget on its opening weekend. Still, there’s certainly an audience for this pure-adrenaline macho-hedonism out there and I have no doubt Hardcore Henry will endure as something of a cult classic in the long run whether or not the immediate returns are looking optimistic (they’re not).

Besides being a live action, narrative video game of a movie, Hardcore Henry could also be understood as a sci-fi action thriller, even if it’s as a stubbornly vacuous one. Brought to life as a Robocop-esque “cybersoldier”, the titular hero/audience surrogate Henry is half man/half machine (or “half machine/half pussy” as one of his combatants puts it) who must save his scientist wife & the world at large from an evil sorcerer who looks like a bitter cocktail of Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, and Viserys Targaryen. Obviously, the sci-fi plot is mostly present as a delivery system for the film’s true bread & butter of action & gore. Much like in video games, Henry is mostly provided short-term goals & destinations by an in-the-know guide (Sharlto Copley of District 9) that he must achieve by obliterating all human (and inhuman) obstacles in the way with guns, grenades, wine bottles, screwdrivers, windshield wipers, etc. Every now & then the sci-fi element will lead to a hilarious line like “Put down the proto-baby!”, but for the most part this genre marker is pure background filler. Even my favorite aspect of the film, the telekinetic sorcerer video game villain with the terrible hair, is more fantasy than he is sci-fi, so it’s probably best not to think too extensively on why the plot unfolds the way it does. Just try to enjoy it for its own tasteless, disgustingly violent self.

I guess I should be clear about this: there’s far more to hate about Hardcore Henry than just its video game gimmick. Its rampant misogyny, gay panic humor, and constant, gleeful violence & gore are sure to turn off a lot of folks & rightfully so. However, I don’t personally see much of a difference between the misanthropy on display here and the macho-hedonism of any other generic shoot-em-up. Hardcore Henry is loud, obnoxious, one-note, nearly plotless, and entirely over the top in its meat-headed self-indulgence, but so are a lot of my favorite hallmarks of action cinema: Commando, Rambo IV, Invasion U.S.A., etc. I’ll contend that the film’s glaring, perhaps even deplorable faults are all outweighed by its consistently goofy tone (particularly in the scenery-chewing sorcerer villain) & 1st person POV visual experimentation). There are hordes of 13 year olds who’ll latch onto Hardcore Henry‘s naked girls, guns, and cocaine version of masculinity in an unsavory way, I’m sure, but I never really look to my dumb action movies for moral high ground and, truth be told, those kids will grow out of it eventually. Hopefully.

As much as I enjoyed Hardcore Henry as a violently campy good time, a large part of me is somewhat relieved that it’s floundering financially. If the film were a runaway success we might’ve been flooded with an untold number of 1st person shoot-em-up knockoffs for decades, just as The Blair Witch Project spawned a legion of subpar found footage horrors in its wake. Truthfully, I like Hardcore Henry‘s reputation positioned exactly where it is. It’ll be heralded by select fans as an overlooked classic, but never imitated to an extent where the gimmick becomes overbearingly redundant (I hope). I personally enjoyed the film with the same sick fascination a lot of folks have with GoPro videos of Russian teens hanging off of skyscrapers with just one hand & no safety gear (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google it). I was appalled & more than a little concerned,but also undeniably made giddy by the sheer novelty & audacity on display.

-Brandon Ledet

Midnight Special (2016)

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fourhalfstar

“Y’all have no idea what you’re dealing with, do ya?”

Michael Shannon is, without a doubt, my favorite actor working today. There’s an unmatched level of intensity in his screen presence that ranges from hilarious to alarming to terrifying depending on how he wants you to react, but he always gets a reaction. Some directors aren’t entirely sure how to harness this intensity & Shannon is often asked to dial it to eleven in every scene. This is fun to watch, but not necessarily the full extent of what his unique talent can bring to the screen. The madman actor does, however, have one long term collaborator in Jeff Nichols who knows exactly how to put his talent to full use. Jeff Nichols often allows Michael Shannon to play his intensity quietly, providing the actor more room to fully do his thing than any other director I can think of (outside maybe Herzog in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? or the show runners on Boardwalk Empire).

With Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols continues his career pattern of alternating between intimate thrillers & ambitious sci-fi. As far as ambition goes, this marks his riskiest, most far-reaching work to date, drowning out even the widespread mania of his sophomore work (and last sci-fi outing) Take Shelter. Mirroring the best eras of sci-fi cinema giants Steven Spieldberg & John Carpenter, comparison points you wouldn’t want to evoke lightly, Midnight Special is massive enough in its imagination & awe-inspiring mystery to establish Nichols as one of the best young talents in the industry today. Much like folks like Jonathan Glazer & Miranda July, his catalog is modestly small, but each film is a preciously crafted gift well worth waiting for. Nichols & Shannon have been close collaborators on four films in the last decade and Midnight Special easily stands as their most rounded & complete work since their first outing in 2007’s near-perfect Shotgun Stories. It’s also the best example of sci-fi action & supernatural mystery by any filmmaker in recent memory, perhaps going back for years, which is impressive given its pedigree as a mid-budget work from a director who’s still working just outside the Hollywood system.

It’s difficult to speak too extensively on Midnight Special‘s plot without ruining what makes the movie, well, special. For so much of the film’s runtime the audience is left in the dark with only brief flashes of game-changing revelations (literally) illuminating exactly what is going on. Just getting an exact handle on who’s involved in the film’s sci-fi chase plot (kidnappers, parents, cultists, federal agents, etc.) and whether their intent is good or malicious can be a lot to process. One thing in the film is clear: there is an 8 year old boy at the center of the chaos who has a mysterious, perhaps supernatural connection to a world beyond ours. The boy, Alton Meyer, is destined to travel to a specific location for  a specific date, but the purpose of that mission & the source of that intel is largely unclear. As one character puts it, “That’s all we have. This date & place is everything.” As an audience member, you’re better off not knowing any more than that yourself. Like the characters surrounding the young, enigmatic Alton Meyer have faith that the child’s very existence serves some higher purpose, you just have to have faith as an audience that Midnight Special will culminate all of these obfuscated, grandiose elements into a worthwhile whole. I am here to witness to the fact that there is indeed a payoff. I’ve seen the light. I am a true believer.

Midnight Special is like a perfectly calibrated feature-length episode of The X-Files, but without the sex appeal. The only thing I can really fault the movie for is not taking the time to develop the emotional impact of its central relationships the way past Jeff Nichols films have. The air of mystery is so oppressively heavy here that I was far more concerned about what would happen next & what small clues might be lurking in the details than I was with the film’s emotional core. This is kind of surprising for a plot centered around a vulnerable child in worlds of trouble and it may very well be the case that its emotional impact will hit me harder in future viewings now that I know where the plot is going. Honestly, though, these concerns feel downright minuscule in light of what the film accomplishes as a mid-budget sci-fi. Jeff Nichols creates an intimidatingly massive world here with the most basic of tools. Slight visual references to comic book staples like X-Men & Superman and real-life doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate & Jonestown carry so much significance in terms of storytelling economy that the world’s most expensive CGI team couldn’t muster with a limitless budget & absence of a deadline. Just look to Alton Meyer’s headgear (plastic ear muffs & swimming goggles) to see how otherworldly the film can make even the most basic elements feel.

Nichols & Shannon have quietly built a concise little catalog of small, intimate stories with massive emotional impact in their collaborations. Midnight Special may be the director’s most ambitious work to date in terms of scale, but he’s smart to keep the individual parts that carry the hefty, supernatural mystery of the narrative just as small & intimate as he has in past familial dramas like Mud & Shotgun Stories. Shannon is similarly subdued & bare bones in his performance, which is a nice change from the long line of explosive roles that ask him to go larger than life with every breath. Together, they’ve delivered an incredible work with a near-limitless scope, but it’s one built an intricately detailed foundation of grounded, believable worldbuilding & old fashioned character work. Midnight Special may allow its ideas to outweigh its emotion in a general sense, but you never lose sight that these are real people struggling with an unreal situation. Honestly, the most difficult thing to believe in this wildly imaginative film is that there are working payphones in rural Texas in 2016. It might not be my favorite collaboration of theirs to date (that’s a bit of a close call), but it’s easily recognizable as their most ambitious & it really ups the ante for where their work is headed & what they could achieve with the right resources.

-Brandon Ledet

Darkman (1990)

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fivestar

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I’ve never been much of a Sam Raimi fan. His Spider-Man films felt like the height of superhero cinema mediocrity to me in their heyday. The Evil Dead series was never really my thing, mostly because of the rapist tree & my contention that Bruce Campbell is a second-rate version of Jim Carrey’s worst tendencies. As far as I knew until recently, Raimi’s greatest contribution to the cultural zeitgeist was as a producer on the television show Xena: Warrior Princess, with his directorial work not mattering much to me in any significant way. I appreciated the over-the-top cartoonishness of his aesthetic, but it never connected with me in the same way that the work of, say, Peter Jackson did. Darkman changed all that.

A comic book-inspired noir riding on the coattails of Tim Burton’s Batman, Darkman is a masterfully goofy work of genre cinema. Its comic book framing, over-the-top performances, and stray Ken Russell-esque freakouts were all perfection in terms of trashy entertainment value, pushing the lowest-common-denominator of trash media into the realm of high art. Darkman is not only the finest Sam Raimi film I’ve ever encountered, it’s also one of the most striking comic book movies ever made . . . which is saying a lot considering that it wasn’t even based off of a comic book. Given our current climate of endless adaptations, remakes, and reboots, it’s bizarre to think that Darkman was made from an original idea of Raimi’s & not from bringing a pre-existing character to the screen. The film’s two superfluous, direct-to-video sequels would fit in just fine with our current trend of endlessly returning to the well, but the original Darkman really went out on a limb with its central idea & it’s a risk that paid off nicely.

Tim Burton’s Batman (a film Raimi had actually once been considered for as a potential director) seems like the most obvious point of reference for Darkman‘s cultural context. Released just one year after Batman‘s release, Darkman was a similarly dark, gritty, noir-inspired comic book landscape that even brought longtime Burton-collaborator Danny Elfman in tow for its score. The original idea for Darkman had nothing to do with the Caped Crusader at all, however. It wasn’t even conceived as an homage to comic books. Raimi had first conceived Darkman in a short story meant to show reverence for Universal Studio’s horror classics of the 1930s. It’s very easy to see the mad scientist ravings of characters that would’ve been played by folks like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff in an earlier era (or both in the case of The Invisible Ray) in Darkman‘s DNA. The outfit the anti-hero uses to hide his face even more than closely resembles that of The Invisible Man. The combination of this monster movie pedigree & the newfound comic book seriousness of Burton’s Batman were a great start for Darkman as a launching pad. Add Sam Raimi’s particular brand of cartoonish camp to the mix & you have a perfect cocktail of violently goofy cinema.

Liam Neeson stars as Darkman‘s titular anti-hero, a brilliant scientist & kindhearted boyfriend working on the secret of creating new body parts for scratch with the world’s first 3-D printer (of organic material, no less). The doctor’s girlfriend, played by Frances McDormand, inadvertently gets him mixed up with some rough mobster types who burn down his lab with the poor man inside it & through some shaky-at-best comic book/monster movie shenanigans, he emerges alive, but forever altered. Horrifically scarred, unable to feel pain, and freakishly strong due to an increase in adrenaline, the doctor emerges as the masked vigilante Darkman & sets out to exact his revenge on the Dick Tracy-esque mobster villains who destroyed his life. His masks alternate from the Invisible Man get-up mentioned above to temporary organic faces contrived from his pre-mutation scientific research & his revenge tactics go beyond basic vigilantism into full-blown, cold-blooded murder. Instead of struggling with the inner conflict a lot of violent superheroes deal with regarding which side of the law & morality they stand on, Darkman truly enjoys exacting revenge on the goons who wronged him in the cruelest ways he can possibly devise.

It’s not just remarkable to me that Sam Raimi happened to direct a movie I enjoyed. What’s most surprising is the ways that Darkman couldn’t have been made by any other auteur. Raimi’s personal aesthetic is what makes the film work and although he could’ve easily allowed the formula to go off the rails (he really wanted Bruce Campbell in Neeson’s role, which would’ve been a disaster), it’s his own cinematic eye & sadistic sense of humor that makes it such an iconic accomplishment. With Batman, Burton had brought comic book movies out of the dark ages, proving that superhero media wasn’t just the goofy kids’ media of Adam West yesteryear. Raimi combined both those extremes, the gritty & the goofy, in Darkman in an entirely idiosyncratic way (as Burton also would in the similarly masterful Batman Returns). The film indulged in some Batman-esque brooding, especially in its noir lighting & in introspective lines like “The dark, what secrets does it hold?”, but those elements are all so over-the-top in their inherent ridiculousness that there’s never any sense that Raimi is doing anything but having fun.

Although Darkman isn’t technically a comic book adaptation it exudes comic book media in every frame. Darkman‘s onslaught of drastic Dutch angles, 1st person shooter POV, Oingo Boingo circus aesthetic, Alterted States-esque hallucinations, and wild tangents of practical effects gore all feel both like classic comic book imagery & classic Sam Raimi. I can’t speak too decisively on the entirety of Raimi’s catalog since there are more than a few titles I’ve intentionally skipped over, but I can say for sure that the director has at least one certified masterpiece of goofball cinema under his belt: Darkman. It’s a work that not only surprised me by becoming an instant personal favorite, but also by inspiring me to consider giving Raimi’s catalog a closer second look to see if he ever repeated the trick.

-Brandon Ledet

Batkid Begins (2015)

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threehalfstar

While preparing for a recent review of the 90s Franky Muniz/Jack Russell terrier sapfest My Dog Skip, I ran across this Ebert pullquote: “A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.” Ebert might as well have been talking about the recent documentary Batkid Begins in this assessment. Batkid Begins is a document of a six year old leukemia survivor’s Make-a-Wish-fulfilled fantasy in which the entire city of San Fransisco pitched in to help him realize his greatest wish in life, “to be a real Batman”. It’s essentially a feature-length version of a feel-good viral video you might stumble across & skim through on your Facebook feed, but you’d have to be a total monster to not be somewhat touched by the volume & enthusiasm of the generosity on display in the doc. Batkid Begins lays it on thick from the get-go, playing a stripped down choir version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” while the titular superhero tyke is shown realizing his dream of being Batman for a day in slow motion, but none of that emotional manipulation really matters from a critical standpoint. No matter what its tactics are, the movie moves you emotionally.

A son of a fourth generation farmer, young leukemia survivor Miles Scott obviously had no clue that his simple wish “to be a real Batman” would inspire tens of thousands of people to flood San Franciscan streets in a ludicrously large/public display of charity. The Make-a-Wish Foundation representatives who helped dream & orchestrate Miles’s day as a superhero were also overwhelmed by the flood of enthusiastic engagement with their event, which snowballed into a huge, city-wide production. In some ways Batkid Begins is a document of how information is spread from word of mouth to social media to national press, blowing up small, intimate events into worldwide phenomenons. At the center of this chaotic escalation is true life hero & Make-a-Wish coordinator Patricia Wilson, who masterminded much of the Batkid phenomenon from the ground level. She planned Batkid’s entire day, finding a suitable mentor in an adult Batman to lead Miles around (as well as treacherous villains for them to thwart) and engaging city officials like San Francisco’s mayor & chief of police to give the event an air of authenticity in Miles’s imagination. As the event spiraled out of control in terms of scale, Wilson began to think of the necessity to put on a show for the untold thousands of participants & Batkid’s dream ended up becoming something of a public production & a shared fantasy fulfillment. There’s a lot to get emotional about in Batkid Begins, but it’s also interesting on an intellectual level to watch how a small event can become a huge staging through a step by step escalation that the documentary follows in a logical A-B progression. Much of the film is reach-for-your-handkerchief sappiness, but there’s just as much attention payed to the logistics behind the achievement at hand.

Form-wise, Batkid Begins isn’t too flashy in any particular way. Miles’s backstory of heartbreaking cancer recovery through bone marrow biopsies, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions is told through a comic book illustration that sets a tone for the uplifting payoff to come. As the logistics of the event are being mapped out it’s difficult to tell exactly what is being documented as it happens & what is being pieced together after the fact, which is a testament to director Dana Nachman’s visual/editing room sense of storytelling. Miles’s first intro to Batman as a character was through the Adam West television series from the 1960s so the actual stage production of the day is colorful & cheesy enough to meld well with the Hallmark sentimentality on display here. The only thing you can fault the doc for, really, is its emotional provocation. In particular, its  minor`notes piano score & talking head interviews about what superheroes mean to children & adults alike in terms of good vs. evil & bodies vs. illness can both be a little overreaching in their sentimentality. Again, though, it’s difficult to criticize the film too harshly. It exists outside of that language. No matter how many times a stray moment might make you roll your eyes in its mawkishness, there’s no way to fully resist the uplifting nature of the charity on display. Just one gesture of the in-remission Miles flexing his little superhero muscles after stopping the dastardly Riddler or Penguin in their tracks will have you blubbering like a baby. The film might be occasionally saccharine or obvious, but it remains consistently heartwarming throughout.

-Brandon Ledet

The Monster Maker (1944)

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three star

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After being remarkably impressed by the ahead-of-its-time meta horror of 1958’s How to Make a Monster I was curious to know if there were any previous films that similarly depicted movie set horror mayhem. Turning to the very similarly titled 1940’s work The Monster Maker turned out to be a complete dead end in that regard. Despite what you might assume given their near-identical monikers, The Monster Maker is less of a precursor to How to Make a Monster than it is a distant echo of the Bela Lugosi classic The Raven. Both The Monster Maker & The Raven feature mad scientist types with Eastern European accents lusting after young women they meet at concerts who happen to closely resemble their long-deceased wives. If there were any doubt that this connection were a mere coincidence, consider that the wicked Dr. Makoff (aka The Monster Maker) is indicated through close-up shots of his eyes to have hypnotic powers (a Lugosi trademark from the horror legend’s Dracula days) & that his deceased wife’s name was Lenore, the same as Lugosi’s in The Raven & the narrator’s in its Poe-penned source material. I went into The Monster Maker expecting a groundbreaking work of meta horror & ended up watching a photocopy of a far superior work I had already seen.

Derivative or not, The Monster Maker gets by just fine as an old school creepshow. The dastardly Dr. Makoff, inevitably spurned by the woman who resembles his wife, hatches a wicked plan to steal her hand in marriage by any means necessary. Namely, he injects the poor girl’s concert pianist father with “Formula x54” (or some such nonsense) that rapidly debilitates him with a glandular disease with horrific disfigurement of the head & hands among its chief symptoms. As Makoff is the sole expert in the field of this particular disease, all medical roads lead the girl’s now visibly-deformed father back to the wicked doctor’s “care” so he can negotiate for her hand in marriage in exchange for an experimental cure. Makoff does his best to accelerate the severity of the situation, explaining “For a professional pianist, it’s fatal . . . that is, for his career I mean,” and only his morally adept assistant has the power to set the record straight and limit his villainous power. It all amounts to a kind of non-starter of a climactic confrontation, but the film’s “monster” make-up & villainous cruelty make for a suitably entertaining example of classic horror spookiness.

I can’t laud The Monster Maker as a “lost classic” or any other kind of hyperbolic praise, but I will way that the film’s 3% score on the Tomatometer is vastly unjust. The film has its campier flourishes, like when a vicious “gorilla” (read: actor in a gorilla suit) attack materializes out of nowhere in the third act or when Makoff is experimenting with very sciency science equipment in his sciency science lab, but for the most part it works as a grim, small cast horror. Critics at the time of its release complained that the film lacked action in its monster mayhem, but I think what’s much more interesting is the abhorrent behavior of the film’s villain rather than the violence of his “creation”. Makoff has a fascinating, horrifically bleak backstory similar to a Don Draper scenario that wonderfully complicates & darkens his quest to reclaim his connection with his deceased wife that really elevates the film above its campier tendencies in certain moments. If The Monster Maker were released today it would undoubtedly face claims of being “problematic” for the way it treats physical deformity & disability as a source of terror, but given the time of its release I believe those sins can be reasonably forgiven. I went into the film expecting an entirely different kind of monster than what the evil Makoff delivered, but I still enjoyed the inhumane cruelty of its central conflict for what it was as a derivative work of genre cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Make a Monster (1958)

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fourstar

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I had previously complained in a recent review that the film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein had moved away so far from the original formula of its predecessor I Was a Teenage Werewolf that the two films had almost no reason to share a title at all (except, of course, for the former to make a quick dollar off the latter’s notoriety). I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a huge financial & cultural success largely due to its first-ever depiction of a teenager transforming into a murderous monster, a basic concept it’s near-impossible to imagine modern horror without. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was then rushed out within five months of that film’s release and, although it boasted an impressively cruel villain & killer monster design, the film featured no actual teenagers to speak of, completely missing the point of its predecessor’s success. The bridge that actually connects these two disparate works wasn’t to come until a year later.

1958’s How to Make a Monster combines the monsters from I Was a Teenage Werewolf & I Was a Teenage Frankenstein into a single picture, but not in the way that you’d expect. Much like how the second film in the series moved away from the Teenage Werewolf original’s formula for success & originality, How to Make a Monster ventured even further out to sea and somehow found its own legs to stand on as a unique work of meta horror. Instead of staging a logical physical altercation of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein from the previous pictures, How to Make a Monster instead depicts a movie production of that altercation. Set on the American International Pictures movie lot, the film centers on the make-up artist who created the look of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein and his mental unraveling during the production of a film where the two monsters meet onscreen. It’s the exact kind of meta horror weirdness I was a huge sucker for in Wes Craven films like New Nightmare (except maybe a little cheaper & a little goofier) and it works like gangbusters.

Much like with the first two films, the only narrative through-line How to Make a Monster holds with its loosely-connected franchise is the idea of a mad scientist exploiting innocent teenagers in their experimental medicine.  Instead of trying to save the world through treacherous experimentation like in the first two pictures, however, this mad scientist is a make-up artist trying to save the monster movie as a genre. Once he discovers that he’s been laid off by the studio due to the decline in monster movie popularity, our dastardly mastermind applies hypnosis through homemade experimental make-up to turn his two latest creations, Teenage Frankenstein & Teenage Werewolf, into literal monsters that “scare” studio heads into changing their minds . . . by murdering them. There’s a lot of industry talk in How to Make a Monster about the artistry of monster movie make-up, the cycles of genre films’ popularity, typecasting among horror actors, and the “therapeutic” qualities of horror films for audiences that all make the movie feel like a love letter to the industry. A lot of the movie works like a pretty standard monster movie genre piece, but the rest holds such a high reverence for cheap horror as a finely-crafted artistry that its reliance on the genre’s basic tropes actually serve the film well.

If you’re going to watch just one film in this franchise I highly recommend sticking with I Was a Teenage Werewolf. It’s a rare example of a cheap drive-in monster flick that actually finds high art in its genre trappings & taps into the subconscious fears that spring from puberty in an oddly authentic way. However, How to Make a Monster does a great job of molding that past success in horror filmmaking into an entirely new format. It’s a standard monster movie in terms of its monstrous thrills, but it repurposes those tropes into a meta, self-reflective work that genuinely surprised me in its genre innovation. The film functions nicely as a connector between the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein flicks that came before it, but it also stands firmly on its own as a unique work in the 50s drive-in horror genre, especially in the way it reflects on what that genre is & what it means to the American movie-going public.

-Brandon Ledet