addiction

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

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The #1 rule when attending someone else’s wedding is that you are not, under any circumstances, to make the day about yourself. It’s okay to be a little overly playful, helpful, sentimental, or even chaotic, as long as you avoid becoming the main character on someone else’s Big Special Day. I say that to explain why Jonathan Demme’s 2008 family drama Rachel Getting Married is excruciatingly stressful from start to end despite its setting at what appears to be an overall successfully fun, pleasant party. Anne Hathaway’s recovering-addict antiheroine breaks the #1 wedding rule even more frequently & thoroughly than Julia Roberts’s psychopathic pond-scum romcom lead in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The titular Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt) may be getting married, but her prodigal sister Kym (Hathaway) is pathologically incapable of ceding the spotlight to her for the occasion, since every day of their lives since Kym’s years as a teenage pillhead have been about Kym’s catastrophic, life-ruining fuckups, one after another. The trick of the movie, then, is in Demme’s humanist approach to characterization, leaving you with an equally loving feeling for both sisters, despite one of them obviously being in the deep end of the moral wrong. Every minute of the movie is hell, and yet you walk away feeling like you just met dozens of new friends at a fabulous party, wishing them all the best.

We meet Kym as she’s chainsmoking outside of rehab, hiding behind inch-thick mascara, shaking off the sugary aftertaste of earlier Hathaway breakouts like The Princess Diaries & The Devil Wears Prada. She returns to her family home under intense scrutiny, raising the hairs on every neck in every room she walks into. It isn’t until a periodic NA meeting halfway into the film that it’s fully explained why her presence has that chilling effect. It’s because when she was a pilled-out teenager, she crashed the family car with her younger brother inside, killing him by accident. Her sister (DeWitt) & father (Bill Irwin) still love her, of course, but every day of their lives since that accident has been a reaction to and recovery from the biggest mistake she ever made — the reckless killing of the family’s most vulnerable member. So, when Rachel begs for her wedding to finally be one day that’s about her and not her sister, it’s not the megalomaniacal ramblings of a Bridezilla gone mad; it’s a desperate plea from a caring family member who just needs a break. Kym can’t give her that one day, though, because she hasn’t fully healed yet, and so Rachel getting married has no effect on yet another family gathering becoming another 24/7 marathon episode of The Kym Show, all Kym all the time. Even the sisters’ long-suffering father can’t help but direct his attention to that wayward lamb, even though her mere presence breaks his heart by reminding him of what he’s already lost.

Jonathan Demme manages to stage all of that small, intimate familial melodrama within a large, sprawling party that spreads out for days across rehearsals, nuptials, and goodbyes. As many Hollywood Studio auteurs found themselves doing in the aughts, Demme challenged himself by stripping back the grand-scale production of his more typical work to instead rely on direct, handheld digi cinematography. Under a self-imposed adherence to the rules & principles of Dogme 95, he shot Rachel Getting Married more like a wedding video than a proper feature film. An insanely stacked cast of party guests like rapper Fab Five Freddy, Soft Boys singer Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche, and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (as the mostly silent groom) fill the event space, often sharing their various musical talents to entertain each other as the main cast works out their familial issues in the foreground. It’s such a crowded cast of talented people that Demme’s early mentor Roger Corman is listed in the opening credits, but you only catch a single glimpse of him working a digicam during the ceremonial vows. It’s as if Jonathan Demme took the Gene Siskel Test of “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” as a kind of challenge by instead asking “Why can’t it be both?” There’s a very real, infectiously fun party going on during Rachel’s wedding that makes the manufactured melodrama that threatens to unravel it all the more stressful.

It’s no small miracle that amongst all that chaotic, freeform partying—effectively shot in real time—Demme still managed to leave space for moments of quiet intimacy. There are countless personalities bouncing around this family home threatening to distract from Kym’s many, many ongoing crises, and Demme carefully takes the time to listen to them with great interest — whether they’re sharing hardships during NA meetings, embarrassing themselves during rehearsal dinner toasts, or jamming out with the wedding band. The single most miraculous scene involves a competitive loading & unloading of the house’s dishwasher: a moment that starts as a small jest between Bill Irwin & Tunde Adebimpe as newly united family members, then escalates into a party-wide bloodsport, and inevitably crashes down into heartbreak once Kym inserts herself into the fray once again. It’s a scene so perfectly conceived that it acts as its own proof-of-concept short film that encapsulates everything about the family & party dynamics that an outsider would need to know, and it’s just as instantly iconic as anything Demme achieved in bigger-scale projects like Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, or Silence of the Lambs. It also speaks well to him that he didn’t allow Kym to become just as much of an iconic villain as his version of Hannibal Lecter was, working with Hathaway to make sure that she’s another beloved member of that party even though she’s the sole source of all its teeth-grinding tension.

-Brandon Ledet

Stigmata (1991)

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One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.

The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.

Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

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In the opening scene of the Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the legendary fine-art photographer is leading a flash-mob protest at a modern art museum, demonstrating against their acceptance of donation money from The Sackler Family.  She lays down on the museum floor, pretending to be a corpse alongside dozens of collaborators, and the camera catches glimpse of a “SILENCE = DEATH” tote bag commemorating ACT UP protests of decades past.  Later in the film, similar archival footage from the ACT UP era shows Goldin decrying Reaganite Evangelical indifference to the AIDS epidemic, platforming fellow activist artists like David Wojnarowicz to combat institutional cruelty in an art gallery setting.  Both protests are personal to Goldin, who has recently become addicted to the Sacklers’ profit-over-people product Oxycontin and has historically lost countless loved ones to the Reagan administration’s deliberate mishandling of AIDS.  Both protests earn their screentime thematically, but only one is compelling to look at, having earned a fascinating vintage texture through the technological passage of time.  The modern smartphone footage at an overlit Metropolitan Museum exhibit just can’t compete, since it’s near-indistinguishable from disposable one-glance content on a social media feed.

That textural difference between past & present footage weighs heavily on the film throughout.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is half a career-spanning slideshow from Nan Goldin’s legacy as a fine art photography rock star and half a document of her current mission to deflate The Sackler Family’s tires, at least in the art world.  The career-retrospective half can’t help but be more compelling than the current political activism half, since her archives are dense with the most stunning, intimate images of Authentic City Living ever captured.  Her personal history in those images and her recent struggles with addiction more than earn her the platform to be heard about whatever she wants to say here, though, especially since the evil pharmaceutical empire she’s most pissed at has trespassed on her home turf.  The protest group Goldin helps organize, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, specifically aims to have the Sackler name and donations removed from fine art museums, attacking the family’s cultural prestige since it is improbable to dismantle their personal wealth.  P.A.I.N.’s protests in the film only target museums that feature Goldin’s work in their permanent collection, leveraging her cultural clout in the art world to do as much practical damage to the Sackler name as they can.  The only problem is that documentation of these efforts only amounts to Good Politics, not Good Art, which is an unignorable fault in a film that proves it’s possible to achieve both.

Documentarian Laura Poitras was likely excited to make a movie about Nan Goldin precisely because of those modern-day P.A.I.N. protests, since amplifying Goldin’s personal war on the Sacklers fits in so snugly with her past modern-politics documentaries about WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the NSA.  I’m grateful she took interest, no matter what her reason, since it’s the closest I’ll ever get to being in the audience for one of Goldin’s classic Ballad of Sexual Dependency slide shows.  Setting up a rack of six slide projectors like a guitarist’s Marshall stack, Goldin’s slideshows register as more of a D.I.Y. punk act than a gallery exhibit.  Here, she recalls her journey from developing her early drag bar photos at the local pharmacy to earning enough art-world clout that she can convince museums to turn down 7-figure donations from prestige-hungry, life-destroying benefactors.  I’m used to seeing Goldin’s photos in isolation, collected as single images among her No-Wave NYC contemporaries’ similarly unpretentious, self-documentary imagery.  It’s a treat to be immersed in her work at length here, learning the names & personalities of the recurring “characters” in her photos and getting a better sense of her iconoclastic presence in the larger world of fine art.  So, of course, the modern protest footage that presumably drew Poitras to the project often frustrates in its distraction from what drew me to watch it.  Goldin’s artwork is hardly a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, though; it’s just more potent, tastier medicine.

Laura Poitras is not using Nan Goldin’s life story as an excuse to score political hits against Purdue Pharma & The Sackler family.  If anything, this documentary feels like a fluid collaboration between the two artists, and Poitras is only there to give Goldin as much space as she wants to rant about how the Sacklers have turned fine art galleries into “temples of greed.”  If Goldin wanted to tell the story of her life’s work separately from the story of her recent protests, I’m sure she could’ve found an obliging collaborator to film her self-narrated slideshows.  She even could have made that movie on her own, since her control over the rhythm, scoring, and storytelling of her slideshows is in itself a kind of improvised filmmaking, a skill she’s been honing for decades.  It’s reasonable to assume that the decision to give her modern crusade against the Sacklers equal weight as her bottomless catalog of breathtaking city-life portraits was partly—if not entirely—Goldin’s own.  It’s a politically respectable choice, of course, but it’s also an artistically limiting one.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Arrebato (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the recently restored cult curio Arrebato (1979), a trippy not-quite-horror picture about addiction to movies & heroin.

00:00 New Orleans Abortion Fund

07:05 The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
09:05 Scream (1996)
14:55 Movie of the Month
18:05 Intermission
25:15 The Batman (2022)
32:45 Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)
38:45 Raising Arizona (1987)
46:00 Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2022)

49:50 Arrebato (1979)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Her Smell (2019)

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There are few narrative templates as a familiar to American audiences as the rockstar addiction story, in which booze & illicit chemicals tear down celebrity gods from powerful highs to pitiful rock-bottoms. Hell, in the last year alone we’ve already seen this exact story play out in Vox Lux, Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Dirt, and yet another A Star is Born remake in a longstanding, haggard tradition. On a plot outline level, Her Smell makes no attempt to jazz up the melody of this narrative template. It’s well aware that this is a story we’ve seen too many times before, both in the tabloids and on the big screen. If anything, everyone in the film seems well past exasperated & fed up with watching the tired rock star addiction cliché play out spectacularly around them; they’re just helpless to stop it. As faithful to & disdainful of that cliché as the film appears to be, though, it still manages to feel like a fresh, unholy terror through the virtues of its execution, which does its best to rattle the audience to the point where we’re numb, drained, and begging for release.

A large part of what distinguishes Her Smell in this crowded field is the specificity of its setting. These tortured artist addiction narratives are typically reserved for machismo-driven cock rockers like Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin, and whatever Americana archetype Bradley Coopers was aiming for in last year’s Oscar run. By contrast, this film is a pastiche of the rock ’n roll excess stories that seeped out of the femme 90s punk bands of the riot grrrl & grunge era. The most obvious 1:1 comparison for its fictional rock ‘n roller Becky Something would be Courtney Love on her worst behavior, but the film pulls from plenty other bands’ onstage personae & backstage drama for inspiration: The Breeders, Throwing Muses, L7 , Babes in Toyland, etc., etc., etc. We see the fictional band Something She at the height of their 90s heyday only in brief interstitials of backstage videocorder footage between much lengthier, more contemporary scenes of their post-fame bickering. It’s a hyper-specific yet undeniably iconic music scene that we rarely get to see depicted in feature films, which usually do little to challenge rock ‘n roll’s outdated reputation as a boys’ club. If we’re going to watch a familiar story of drugs wrecking a rock star’s life & career play out yet again, we might as well use it as an opportunity to see something that’s a much rarer treat in filmmaking of any era: women behaving badly.

Besides the specificity of the setting, Her Smell is also elevated above its potential genre tedium by the provocateur sensibilities of its director, Alex Ross Perry. Perry brings his usual thirst for pitch-black despair & total sensory overload to this Queen of Earth follow-up, content to violently shake his audience by the shoulders for as long as anyone could possible stand it. The major evolution to his usual mode here is a newfound sense of patience. Her Smell is well over two hours long. It’s structured like a stage play, with act-length scenes stretching on for torturous eternities as its addict antagonist torments everyone unfortunate enough to be lured into her orbit. Perry at least has the decency to release some steam from the pressure cooker for a rare moment of calm halfway through the runtime that effectively serves as an intermission, but for the most part he offers very little relief from the anxiety & hurt addiction wreaks on this once vibrant, now decaying music scene. His camera offers a dizzying, unflinching tour through the backstage labyrinth hellscapes behind the concerts that justify this vile behavior, with muffled far-off crowds screaming for more like the demons of Hell. That thunderous applause mixes with subtly unnerving synth flourishes to continually disorient viewers as we’re forced to endure nightmare drug parties long after the good vibes have soured. It’s exhausting, but impressively effective.

All this preamble is really just burying the lede of what truly makes Her Smell a must-see spectacle: Elizabeth Moss. Recalling the maddening whirlwind performances of legendary actors before her like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence or Faye Dunaway in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Moss plays the tragic rock ‘n roller Betty Something more as a rabid animal or a natural disaster than a human woman. Usually these madwoman breakdown dramas are sympathetic portraits of someone who’s cracked under the pressures of mental illness & impossible Patriarchal ideals. Here, Moss is simply allowed to be total, unforgivable nightmare – bursting into rooms backstage like a flood that wipes out all her friends, family, and colleagues along with her. She curses professional rivals with mysterious black-magic hexes, plays with her small child like a dog temporarily excited by a new chew toy, and feeds off the adoration of her audience as an enabling signifier that she can do no wrong. We never see Moss ingest drugs onscreen, but you can read each speck of the junk on her dazed, ghoulish face. It’s an intensely physical performance that expresses all the subtlety & nuance necessary to make this somewhat generic story specific to her character, so that all Perry has to do (besides write the damn thing) is stay out of her of way and allow it to play out in its full, rabid spectacle. It’s a mesmerizing feat of a performance from one of our greatest living actors.

The final achievement that makes Her Smell an exceptional specimen of its ilk is in the quiet release of its final moments, something I wouldn’t dare spell out here even if I thought it was possible. After two full hours of being terrorized by Elizabeth Moss’s feral showboating, everyone involved is exhausted on a molecular level, allowing for a rare moment of quiet grace I can’t recall ever seeing before in this Tragic Rock ‘n Roll Addict genre. I was genuinely, emotionally moved by the final lines of Her Smell, which was something I hadn’t expected given the familiarity of this thematic material. It shames me to admit that I had much stronger feelings overall for the superficially similar swing-for-the-fences mess of Vox Lux last year. Still, it’s undeniable that Moss & Perry broke through to something truly resonant & powerful by the time this film reaches it’s closing moments of denouement – whether through the specificity of character & setting, the willingness to dwell in intense discomfort, or the perversely cathartic pleasure of watching Women Behaving Badly.

-Brandon Ledet

Holiday Heart (2000)

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The best way to sell the immediate appeal of the film Holiday Heart is likely to announce up front what it is in basic terms: an R-rated, made-for-TV Christmas movie starring Ving Rhames as a street tough drag queen. By now you’ve already decided if you’d ever be interested in watching such a thing, which gives me the freedom to admit that the film is unfortunately not as riotously fun as it could be, considering the potential of its premise. For all of the visual excitement of such a large, muscular man as Rhames playing far against type as a booming-voiced drag queen, Holdiay Heart goes out of its way to normalize & de-sex his character. Off-stage, Holiday Heart is a gay man, but his lover dies before the film begins and only exists in photographs, so the film’s intended Christian audience never has to actually see him expressing queer desire. He’s also introduced as a musician dedicated to worship at his local church before we ever see him perform under his drag persona, reassuring the audience up front that he is a deeply Christrian man and his sexual orientation does not define his relationship with God. Rhames makes for a fascinating appearance as a lumbering brute delicately holding telephones with his fingertips so as not to break a nail, but as a character his titular drag queen protagonist has no inner life outside faith in God and an emotionally vulnerable readiness to cry at the drop of a hat. He has all of the character nuance of Barney the Dinosaur and functions in the film mostly as a Magical Gay Man who can fix straight Christians’ problems through his (literally & figuratively) giant heart. The movie is still enjoyable as a novelty melodrama & Rhames’s few drag performances are aces, but that (lack of) characterization is such a bummer.

Holiday Heart is not just any lumbering, muscular drag queen; she’s the most popular one in town. Making a name for herself by lip-syncing to Supremes hits in a pageant queen tradition, Holiday is nightclub royalty, but still feels rawly empty after the loss of a long-term life partner. This family-sized hole in his heart is filled when he stumbles into a father figure role for the daughter of a near-destitute drug addict. The setup is awkward & messy, but Holiday essentially takes in a mother-daughter duo from the streets to protect them from the domestic abuse & homelessness that threatens their lives. The film is a strict melodrama from there (even name-checking Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life several times throughout to clue you into its tone), with many repetitive fallouts between Holiday & the mother he chooses to shelter as she slips in & out of relapses and flings homophobic slurs in his face to hurt his feelings (which is surprisingly easy). The fate of the little girl they’re both reluctantly tasked to raise hangs in the balance as they struggle between selfishness & self-preservation and The Christian Thing to Do. Obviously, this setup does not lead to a nonstop laugh riot, but the melodrama can often be over-the-top enough to elicit a chuckle or two. The earliest drug relapse is a depraved lighting of a microscopic roach found at the bottom of the mother’s purse. A flashback shows Holiday being shunned at his romantic partner’s funeral while weeping & singing “Baby Love” in full widow drag. A mild hip-hop beat plays over three cliché dramatic orchestral music that scores its more self-serious moments. And then, of course, the whole thing swerves at the last second to justify its pun title by staging its emotional climax on Christmas, a holiday that otherwise plays no part in the plot.

Overall, Holiday Heart is a lot more Christian and a lot less Christmas than it would have to be to satisfy as an over-the-top camp spectacle. The film’s super serious focus on Faith cuts down a lot of its sillier eccentricities and makes the majority of the experience feel more like a bummer than a party. Still, it has the dorky energy of a kids’ movie that just happens to feature a ton of F-bombs & homophobic slurs. It also can’t be over-stated how much the novelty of seeing Ving Rhames in traditional pageant queen drag can carry its less exciting melodrama slumps. The thing about drag, too, is that it’s performative & uncomfortable; most queens can’t wait to de-glamor after a performance, but Holiday lounges around in her stage garb as if it were a comfy bathrobe. He’s not at all coded as transgender, so that bizarre choice just registers as lagniappe opportunities to soak up the Ving-Rhames-as-a-drag-queen novelty, since the lip-sync performances themselves are too few & far between. Much of Holiday Heart registers as goofy & embarrassing, especially in its indulgences in gospel music & erotic slam poetry, but Rhames’s performance as the titular drag queen is genuinely mesmerizing. It’s just a shame they stripped his character of sexual desire & potential for society-disrupting chaos to better mold the film into a Christian-family melodrama about fatherhood. It’s a fun-enough movie as is, but it could have been an all-time with a little more personality.

-Brandon Ledet

Colossal (2017)

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With his intricately-constructed time travel thriller Timecrimes, director Nacho Vigalondo found dark humor in the depths of selfishness in human self-preservation, exposing the ugliness of humanity as a species through the mechanism of a sci-fi fantasy plot. His American language debut, the kaiju-themed black comedy Colossal, shifts its genre & intended targets just slightly, but mostly repeats the trick. Through an outlandish genre film scenario, Colossal gradually strips away the veneer of polite smiles & social niceties that makes human beings appear to be kind, empathetic creatures to reveal the giant monsters lurking underneath. The destructive behavior of alcoholism & pretty selfishness in particular is giving a measurable, kaiju-scale impact of real-world damage. Much like in Timecrimes, the inner lives of Vigalondo’s characters aren’t given nearly as much attention as the implications of their actions within the larger, metaphor-heavy sci-fi plot, but the mystery of how that premise works & what it implies about the ugliness of humanity is enough to leave a lasting emotional bruise on the audience.

Anne Hathaway stars as a New York City socialite whose alcoholism finally crosses the threshold from “fun drunk” to full-on dysfunction, a conscious departure from the A-type personas she’s been saddled with since The Princess Diaries. Kicked out of the apartment she shares with an uptight boyfriend (Dan Stevens in full Matthew Crowley mode), she finds herself with few options but to move back to her small-town childhood home. She’s employed as a barkeep by an egotistically sensitive childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), which affords her way easier access to a steady stream of working-class staples Jack Daniels & PBR than is likely healthy for her. The nightly blackouts that her addiction downturn sparks start to branch out from pure self-destruction to negatively affecting millions of people: namely, the city of Seoul, South Korea. Whenever our drunken anti-hero finds herself wasted in the playground near her childhood home at the crack of dawn, a corresponding kaiju appears in Seoul and mimics her exact, stumbling movements, blindly killing anyone in its path. Once these repeating scenarios become undeniably linked, she must face hungover epiphanies like, “I killed a shitload of people because I was acting like a drunk idiot again.” Getting sober & improving herself isn’t enough to solve the problem entirely, though. As soon as she starts to get her life back together, a second monster appears in Seoul, challenging her sense of control in an increasingly ugly situation.

What’s most fun about the metaphorical sci-fi plots of Vigalondo’s work is that they continue to develop & complicate after their initial reveal. It’s not enough that the connection between the protagonist’s alcoholism and the giant monster terrorizing Seoul is made explicit. The film also pushes through to explore why the playground location & time of day correspond with its appearance, why Seoul in particular is connected to her in the first place, and what is implied by the appearance of the kaiju’s robot challenger. The answers to this mystery are lazily revealed through the device of a decreasingly cloudy repressed memory, but are satisfying enough in their impact to justify the transgression. Complicating the kaiju metaphor detracts tremendously from the energy spent on potential inner conflict & emotional depth, but also expands the film’s themes beyond the selfish destruction of addiction to include crippling jealousy, the cycles of physical abuse, and a myriad of other forms of destructive behavior. By the end of Colossal you have to ask if the bigger monster is the protagonist’s addiction or the poisonous group of self-serving men that populate her life. It’s a testament to how strong the mystery & provoked themes of the central metaphor are that it doesn’t at all matter that the characters remain surface level deep. Vigalondo’s ideas are intricate, plentiful, and mercilessly cruel to the virtues of humanity enough to carry this small-scale kaiju narrative on their own.

-Brandon Ledet

The Chosen (2015)

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Movie night (which is, like, three nights a week) in the Boomer/Boomer’s Roommate household can be a chore sometimes. We are very decisive people when it comes to where and what we want to eat, who is and is not welcome in our apartment, and which Simpsons seasons are worth a damn. Of late, however, we’ve had to make a hard and fast rule: if we want to watch a movie, we have 10 minutes to browse Netflix (et al) and make a decision; if we can’t choose by the end of that time period, we give up and watch either one of our staple programs (The Simpsons, The Soup, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or Next Gen) or whatever TV show we’re currently working our way through (it’s Caprica at the moment, for those of you who are curious, since we binged Battlestar after the election for obvious reasons and needed a break afterward). His particular idiosyncratic desires also make it a challenge, albeit a fun one. Case in point: last night, I wanted to watch a horror comedy along the lines of Housebound (which we both found delightful), but he wanted something that specifically had the twitchy horror effects from The Ring or The Grudge, but not an actual J Horror flick. That’s an impossible thing to search for, but our interest in The Grudge did prompt Netflix to suggest The Chosen, which was more impressive and interesting (and funny, much to my delight) than expected, especially given its nondescript name.

The film follows nineteen year old Cameron, played by distractingly good-looking uberbabe Kian Lawley, who is apparently a YouTube star of some kind, although I’ve never heard of him before (maybe I’m just out of touch)*. He has an odd family situation: he and his mother Eliza (Elizabeth Keener, sister of Catherine) live with her parents. Grandpa is in a persistent vegetative state, and Nanny is in a persistent state of pettiness. Also living in the house are Eliza’s brother Uncle Joey (Chris Gann) and Angie (Mykayla Sohn), Cameron’s niece and Eliza’s granddaughter. Angie’s mother Caitlin (Angelica Chitwood) has been exiled from the house by Eliza while she tries (with mixed success) to break free of her heroin habit, an echo of Eliza’s own alcoholism, although the older woman is twelve years sober.

While Eliza is out of town on a work retreat, Cameron sneaks Angie out of the house for a visit to her mother’s apartment. When he hears thrashing, the cries of a baby, and screaming next door, he investigates over Caitlin’s protests. He discovers that Caitlin’s next-door neighbor Sabrina (Melissa Navia) is in the process of attempting to kill her ex-husband, who escapes, only for the crying baby to be nowhere in sight and Angie to now suddenly appear to be physically ill and behaving strangely. As apparently supernatural evil seems to begin swirling around Angie, Cameron has to try and figure out how to stop the monster that is coming for Angie before it’s too late.

The critical consensus surrounding this film is overwhelmingly negative; there’s not a single review on IMDb that passes the five (out of ten) star mark, and it’s sitting at a 30% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (there are no professional critic reviews, until this one, I guess, for a certain definition of “professional”). I can admit that I certainly see why the masses would be turned off by the film; it’s not very good from a lot of objective viewpoints. I remarked to my roommate during the film that I found Lawley to be a surprisingly good actor for an “unknown” his age (his YouTube stardom was only revealed to me when I looked up the Wikipedia article for the movie after our viewing), and he carries a lot of the film with his performance. Knowledge of his rise as an internet celebrity(?) may have colored the perception of his acting ability for others, but I don’t feel the need to rescind or attenuate or revise my praise for him after the fact.

Non-subjective negatives do abound, however. The special effects vary wildly in quality, from creepy subtlety in smoke and shadow to terrible-looking CGI demons that would look more at home in an Asylum/Syfy original co-production. There’s even a sequence in which Caitlin looks at a picture of infant twins that turn out to be Angie and her now-dead brother Jordan; the CGI on the photograph itself is terrible, and it only gets worse when Caitlin sheds a tear on the image and smudges it while trying to wipe the photo off. Maybe the assumption is that the target audience doesn’t know how physical photographs work (God help us all), but regardless of whether it does (or doesn’t) make sense logically, it’s still just awful to look at.

Other than that, the film’s first big narrative problem comes when Cameron has to revisit Sabrina once Angie starts acting strangely. She reveals all of the details about the movie’s supernatural antagonist, Lilith (yeah, that Lilith). There’s a right way and a wrong way to do exposition scenes, and this one is definitely on the far end of the scale from Raiders or Chinatown, erring very close to poor Frances Conroy’s infodump scene from Catwoman. At the very least, it serves its purpose and then moves along from there, if you can get past the cringe. Cameron’s final scene is also undercut by some notably bad acting, especially in comparison to the impressive subtlety he brought to other scenes; given that he’s supposed to be delivering a badass one-liner to the aforementioned bad CGI monster, it makes sense that a first-time actor would have some trouble pulling it off.

But enough about the negatives! It’s understandable that a film that turns its protagonists into, essentially serial killers (don’t overthink it; it’s not Psycho) wouldn’t have able to land every joke, but the roommate and I were both taken aback and cracked up when some out-of-context characters found their way into the film to stir up even more chaos. We also got a kick out of a slapstick scene of Cameron and his sister dragging a body and hitting every piece of furniture in the house with it, which was a refreshing moment of levity in a pretty dark flick. We also quite enjoyed some of the surprise twists; it’s rare that a movie manages to fool both of us, but this one did more than once.

It’s not going to be every viewer’s cup of tea, and I’d go so far as to say that it may deserve its poor critical score from an objective standpoint. But there’s too much that works in this film for me to give it a poor score. The film dives in immediately and throws the viewer into the unusual family situation with no belabored exposition, it contains too many interesting and funny characters to ignore, and it has surprises galore, including a very realistic depiction of addict behavior, surprises about bloodlines, and a likable lead that you find yourself rooting for even as his behavior becomes more erratic and unhinged. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have this movie. Give it a chance.

*I did check out Lawley’s YouTube channel after watching the movie. It’s terrible; it’s one of those “my buddy and I have a bajillion viewers for no discernible reason, we answer questions and laugh and such” channels. If you want a recommendation for what to watch instead, my favorite channels to which I subscribe are Red Letter Media (love me some Plinkett and Wheel of the Worst), Alison Pregler’s Movie Nights (Baywatching is a delight to me in these dark times), Every Frame a Painting for your film language critical needs, Pop Culture Detective, and Nerd Writer (even though I hate that “tired but overly emotionally invested adjunct” voice that he sometimes uses at the end of his video essays). Of course, the be-all end-all of YouTube brilliance is Lindsay Ellis, who has been an influence on me for years now and who never ceases to be brilliant. She’s basically doing a free class on the different disciplines of film theory through the lens of Michael Bay’s oeuvre right now, and it is a gift.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Don’t Knock Twice (2017)

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I’m not sure it’s always necessary for a horror film to justify the surface pleasures of its scares & thrills by linking them to a dramatic metaphor. However, it can be frustrating when one comes close to achieving that dynamic without fully following through. The recent British ghost story Don’t Knock Twice enters into the modern tradition of horror flicks with clear metaphors specifically centering on the anxieties of motherhood: The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, most of XX, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc. The frustrating thing is that it nearly succeeds in joining those incredible ranks with an entirely​ new angle on motherhood terror its peers had not yet represented, but falls just short of hitting that target. Ultimately, its demonic scares & familial drama hang separately in the spooky air, never joining forces to drive home its significance as an individual work. That kind if strength in metaphor is not entirely necessary for a modern horror film to feel worthwhile, but without it Don’t Knock Twice struggles to feel substantial in any memorable way.

The always welcome Katee Sackhoff (Oculus, Battlestar Galactica) stars as an American sculptor and recovering drug addict who struggles to reconnect with her teenage daughter (Sing Street‘s Lucy “Riddle of the Model” Boynton) who she gave up for adoption in the British foster system. The daughter is reluctant for obvious reasons to welcome her mother, now essentially a stranger, back into her life, but finds herself in dire need of shelter from a supernatural threat. She & a fellow teen disturb a small, haunted shack near an interstate overpass where a witch’s ghost was rumored to live, knocking on the door twice (hence the title) after being told there would be urban legend-style consequences. The legend turns out to be exactly true and the teen girl finds herself haunted by a demonic witch that follows her from home to home to avenge the transgression. The monster itself (an aged, lanky, inhuman variation on the little girl from The Ring) and the film’s flashy over the top camera work make for plenty of effectively creepy moments: the witch climbing out of a kitchen sink, s ghost slitting its own throat, an Unfriended-style murder witnessed on Skype. The question of what the monster represents and how its terror communicates with the ex-addict mother’s suddenly possessive love for her estranged daughter, however, is much less effective.

There’s a distinct, nightmarish terror in this film’s teen victim being told that her parent, who has hurt her before, is now completely rehabilitated & worthy of trusting forgiveness. The vulnerability of welcoming that parent back into her life and not having her reservations for that forgiveness being taken seriously is not unlike being haunted by a literal ghost from the past that no one but she believes exists. If the demonic witch ghost that causes havoc in the film is supposed to somehow represent the mother’s past as an addict, however, Don’t Knock Twice doesn’t do much to help the metaphor along. A couple major plot twists that bring in murder mystery dynamics outside that central mother-daughter relationship suggest a mixed metaphor where the ghost also represents some kind of abusive evil in the foster system or, more likely yet, represents nothing specific at all. It’s not at all fair to burden Don’t Knock Twice with the expectation of a strong metaphor to support the presence of its demon witch antagonist, but the film comes too close to saying something freshly insightful about parental anxiety & the cycles of addiction not often depicted in horror cinema for the frustration in the shortcomings of its metaphorical potential to be ignored. When that aspect of its story doesn’t land, there’s not much left of its familial drama to hold onto and the film ultimately plays like a more visually striking version of mainstream horror titles like Lights Out & The Darkness. There’s nothing especially wrong with that distinction, but Don’t Knock Twice comes very close to being much greater than that limited ambition suggests.

-Brandon Ledet

White Girl (2016)

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Is White Girl a smartly pointed indictment of white privilege or an exploitative morality tale built around teenage hedonism and unwarranted sexual shaming in which a young woman is blamed for ruining a man’s life with her feminine wiles?  Does it help ease the film’s leering misogyny to know that it was written, directed, and produced by a woman? Are the characters & plot developed enough beyond 2D devices so that answering these questions could lead to anything more than eyerolling boredom? White Girl is such an obvious, clumsy button pusher that I’m mostly just annoyed that I allowed it to push my buttons. Somewhere out there a young college student is about to find their favorite movie in this cheap indie provocation, but I couldn’t get past the fact that it was participating in the very thing it was supposedly condemning. Every generation needs their version of Kids, I guess. The trick is catching yours when you’re still young enough to gasp instead of yawn.

Two white college students move into a predominately POC neighborhood and make fast friends & lovers out of the young, small fry drug dealers who work the corner outside of their apartment. Coming from a world of unpaid internships, liberal arts colleges, and money-filled care packages from naïve parents, they’re ill prepared for the real-life consequences of their actions and treat the lives of the men they fuck like playgrounds, a silly summertime indulgence. Luring their newfound cohorts outside their comfort zones, the girls push them into the dangerous territory of moving large quantities of product in wealthier, whiter circles. They also attract an obnoxious amount of attention to themselves & urge their beaus to start dipping into their own product (mostly cocaine, or, in the movie’s vernacular, “white girl”) instead of sticking to their normal routine of blunts & bong rips. This, of course, leads to a world of legal troubles, addiction, and clashes with bigger fish dealers in much bigger ponds. The film believes the tragedy it inevitably generates is a revelation of the way the white & wealthy are treated differently in a heartless system that targets POC. Mostly it just delivers the exact clichés you’d expect from miles away, revealing nothing that wasn’t already obvious from the start.

The main problem with White Girl is that it gleefully participates in the very evils it intends to expose. The film takes aim at a world of men who have a predatory sexual eye for young women’s bodies, but it leers slack jawed at them in the very same way. It wants to humanize the disenfranchised kid on the corner, but does so by making them the most blatant & ham-fisted dealer with a heart of gold cliché imaginable. It strives so hard to call out wealthy white woman privilege that it slips backwards into an old-fashioned mode of misogyny where women are to blame for men’s downfalls because they’re too sexually desirable to resist. Worse yet, the film often plays directly into the fears of casually racist parents when they send their darling baby girls into the big bad city for college. What if they move into a “sketchy” neighborhood, fall into casual sex & hard drugs routines with older men, and expose their naked bodies in public for easy popularity? Well, I never. White Girl wants to indulge in the sex & drugs & rock n’ roll lifestyle for easy hedonism, condemn the audience for leering along with it, make a point about white women using POC neighborhoods as consequence-free playgrounds, and then use POC narratives as consequence-free playgrounds. In so many ways the film participates in the very same entitlement it aims to indict.

I don’t mean to sound entirely negative here just because I personally had such an adverse reaction to the film’s casual provocations. I’d usually put in an effort to seek out some redeeming value in the film’s visual craft or occasionally effective performances, but the thematic fumbling left me with such a bitter taste that I don’t have the energy. I don’t believe White Girl is a despicable work worthy of any think piece outrage or moral protest. Its intentions in pointing out systemic racism & the harmful naïveté of unchecked privilege seems to be in the right place. It just chose an oddly compromised tone & outsider POV to tell its story, to the point where it tied its own shoelaces together on a screenplay level before it hit the ground stumbling. The film occasionally finds some interesting ideas in its clumsy button pushing, but doesn’t stand strong or confident enough to support its own convictions. If you’re going to get on a soapbox for a Big Message tirade, you should probably get your story straight before your rant begins. Self-contradiction makes for weak politics, especially if you’re using those politics to get away with indulging in a garish good time moments before getting serious.

-Brandon Ledet