brandon ledet

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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twohalfstar

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My biggest fear when I learned that Paul WS Anderson had returned to the director’s chair for the fourth Resident Evil film is that he would completely undo what that entry’s predecessor had accomplished. Russell Mulcahy’s Resident Evil: Extinction elevated the franchise’s production value & traded in its overgrown nu mental tone for a goofy Mad Max vibe, making for the best entry in the series to date. My fears were confirmed; Anderson did indeed slide the franchise back into its The Matrix But With Zombies creative rut, even daring to include gratuitous shots of “bullet time” effects to drive the point home. Luckily for Afterlife, I liked the goofy nu metal technofuturism of the first two Resident Evil films, so it’s not like the territory it returned to was all boredom & despair. I’d just be lying if I didn’t find the Original Recipe Resident Evil flavor a little bland after Extinction had spiced it up.

The film opens with a slow pan up a Japanese punk’s leather costume as she solemnly contemplates something mysterious before turning full zombie & igniting a breakout that consumes Tokyo. MIlla Jovovich, the franchise’s anchor, then narrates a plot summary of the first three films in the series, the first time Anderson found that kind of housekeeping necessary for his convoluted, yet video game-thin cyberpunk zombie yarn. We then join Alice (Jovovich) as she raids one of the Umbrella Corporation’s seemingly endless supply of underground bunkers, sporting her latest film-defining costume change: a sleek black ninja outfit complete with swords & throwing stars. A couple decapitations & some telepathic nonsense later and she’s immediately killed, revealing that she was a clone the whole time and that there are plenty more Alices where that came from (a repeat of Extinction’s opening, in a way). Some Agent Smith-looking motherfucker stabs her in the neck with a serum that takes away her ass-kicking superpowers and she spends the rest of the plot hunting him down while collecting any of the world’s straggling uninfected she can on the way.

This is easily the most low-energy, self-serious entry of the Resident Evil franchise so far. There are so many shots of Jovovich flying a small airplane, searching out the window for a purpose to be onscreen, when Afterlife could’ve just as easily held onto the army of Jovovich clones it blew up in the first scene instead and made a much more interesting picture. Besides a few zombies with some octopus mouths and a mutated giant swinging a CG axe, there just isn’t much Afterlife has to offer that you couldn’t get from the three franchise entries that precede it. The film seemingly has three directives: to openly riff on The Matrix, to make gratuitous use of the then-recent Avatar 3D technology, and to promote the A Perfect Circle single that plays multiple times throughout. Afterlife indulges in frequent enough goofy action sequences to feel occasionally worthwhile, but after the series heights of Extinction I had come to expect more than that. As a director, Anderson feels a little limp here, stuck in an outdated mode of nu metal cinema like a slightly more endearing (and significantly less funded) Zack Snyder. I’m still willing to afford the final two entries into the franchise an open mind, but the bland diminished returns of Afterlife has significantly dampened my expectations.

-Brandon Ledet

I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

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fourstar

“The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”

It would be an easy feat to find a better-realized or more academically thorough documentary than I Am Not Your Negro among recent releases, given the medium’s current creativity boom, but it’d be unlikely to find one more philosophically resonant in today’s political climate. In its better moments, this critical essay by late author & political thinker James Baldwin (directed by Raoul Peck & narrated by an unusually restrained Samuel L. Jackson) feels downright necessary. It seems inevitable that I Am Not Your Negro will be employed as a classroom tool to convey the political climate of the radicalized, Civil Rights-minded 1960s, but the form-defiant documentary is something much stranger than that future purpose would imply. Through Baldwin’s intimate, loosely structured essay, the film attempts to pinpoint the exact nature of the US’s inherent racism, particularly its roots in xenophobic Fear of the Other and in the ways it unintentionally expresses itself through pop culture media. These are not easily defined topics with clear, linear narratives and your appreciation of I Am Not Your Negro might largely depend upon how much you enjoy watching the film reach, not upon what it can firmly grasp. As the film contextualizes its questions & arguments in a 2010s setting by incorporating Ferguson protest footage & surveillance videos of recent police abuses in contemporary black communities, it makes this line of philosophical probing feel essential for modern survival, even if the individual results can be frustratingly incomplete.

The incomplete, scattered nature of I Am Not Your Negro is, in many ways, unavoidable. Peck constructs this documentary around an unfinished manuscript Baldwin did not see to completion before his death in the 1980s. The initial concept of the manuscript sounds fairly straightforward: a portrait of the Civil Rights 60s told through a triptych of profiles on Baldwin’s personal and professional acquaintances Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Medgar Evers. I’ll admit up front that I’m barely, if at all familiar with Evers as a public figure and the movie does little to profile him in any significant way other than to point out that he was the first of the three men to be assassinated by angered white segregationists. Baldwin himself largely becomes the third corner of this triptych as he reflects on his own political positions of the time, mostly in how he was a perpetual outsider. Trying to find a personal balance between the indignant radicalization of Malcolm X and the measured reason of Dr. King, Baldwin would ultimately feel little more than isolation & deep resentment for the world at large. He felt alienated both by the NAACP and the Black Panthers; he recalls Malcolm X calling Dr. King an Uncle Tom on national television long before the two found their own ideological middle ground; he explores conflicted urges to both move far away from America and to maintain a connection with his community. In many ways I Am Not Your Negro stops being about King, X, and Evers at all, instead focusing entirely on Baldwin’s inner psyche (like the way Heart of a Dog is more about Laurie Anderson than it is about dogs). He recounts his lifelong troubled relationship with America by reflecting on the way its racism bubbles to the surface in its advertising, its cinema, its televised broadcasts. Baldwin himself frequently appears on television and in filmed college lectures, reaching to express something intangible, but deeply grotesque about modern race relations. He draws a line between active racism & uncaring ignorance, making a case that both are cancerous to the nation’s spiritual health. None of this is allowed to play out onscreen in a strictly historical context, despite the manuscript’s original intent. The issue is explained to be as relevant & distressing now as it’s ever been, a problem without a solution.

If I Am Not Your Negro has an Achilles heel, it’s that its subject is often more fascinating than its form. A couple cheesy Chicago blues soundtrack choices, some cheap-looking typewriter text, and Jackson’s overly gritty narration can occasionally distract from the film’s main attraction: Baldwin’s personal philosophies & political ideology. Baldwin expresses disgust & exhaustion with American racism in a deeply personal mode of cultural criticism that somehow cuts to the heart of the problem in a way that an academic history lesson on Civil Rights protest & educational desegregation never could. Peck has some interesting ideas of his own that support these explorations through post-modern montage. Images of the Space Race, Black Lives Matter protests, 1930s cinema, reality television, and Martin Luther King Jr bobbleheads all mix together in a disorienting gestalt that matches the uncertain, incomplete nature of Baldwin’s central text. Not every gamble pays off, but the documentary is often fascinating in its looseness and its attempts to reach beyond its means. If no other good came from I Am Not Your Negro than raising the public profile of someone who was obviously an immensely talented writer & profound political thinker, then the film would still be a worthwhile effort. It’s in reaching beyond that basic, biographic artist profile formula to apply James Baldwin’s theories & anxieties to a modern context where the documentary becomes something more, something truly special. It’s a work that tries to make sense of the modern world by looking back to the criticism of the past, only to take disgust in the realization that not much has changed in the decades since. It’s not a pretty story or even a complete one, but it’s one that needs to be told.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Society (1992)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Alli, Boomer, and Britnee watch Society (1992).

Brandon: In the post-apocalyptic eternity since the presidential election of Donald Trump there’s been bountiful articles explaining why such & such movie, say Bob Roberts or Children of Men or even Rogue One, are now more relevant than ever in our current political climate. The truth is more likely that these films never lost their political relevance in the first place. Although this country has seen a somewhat progressive swing in the last eight years, the same systemic class inequality & civil rights issues that have always plagued it haven’t budged an inch. Most political art made in the last century, particularly art that addresses our deceptively rigid class system & the often brutal ways its boundaries are enforced, is always likely to retain its significance as our presidents change, since the system they helm doesn’t change along with them. That’s why I don’t want to pose the rich-feeding-off-the-poor terrors of Brian Yuzna’s cult classic body horror Society as being more relevant than ever in the face of a Donald Trump regime, as tempting as it may be. More accurately put, Society is very much a product of its Reagan-era times that, when viewed through a modern context, can be a harrowing (and amusingly absurdist) reminder that nothing ever really changes, least of all the status quo.

For all of its continued political relevance in its hamfisted approach to satirizing rigid class structures, Society is admittedly a deeply silly film. High school senior Bill Whitney feels out of step with his Beverly Hills yuppie community, including his own family. Despite his privileged life of manicured mansions, cheerleader girlfriends, and popularity contest high school elections, Bill is intensely uncomfortable in his environment, suffering a growing unease he discusses at length with his therapist. This discomfort amounts to a spiritually crushing paranoia in which Bill hallucinates grotesque body contortions in his Reaganite peers and becomes convinced that his parents & sister are attending incestuous, murder-fueled orgies among a secret sect of Society he simply doesn’t have access to. Of course, Bill’s dead right. He doesn’t fit in with his Beverly Hills social group because he was born an entirely different species, a Poor. The wealthy members of the film’s self-described “Society” are an inhuman race who run the world by literally feeding off the poor. Bill was merely adopted into their ranks as an unworthy outsider & eventual sacrifice. The final half hour of the film is a Cronenbergian mess of melded bodies, unimaginable cruelty, and sexual taboo that exposes the heartless & wealthy ruling class for the monsters they truly are. It’s a bewildering special effects showcase from gore wizard Screaming Mad George that nearly wipes away all memory of the mostly standard horror film that precedes it by putting an outrageously grotesque face on systemic inequality in modern class politics.

What I love most about Society is its complete lack of subtlety & nuance. Once its world’s rules are revealed in its infamous “shunting” sequence in the final act, the film’s themes are spelled out in the plainest of terms. Bill is collared & walked around like a wild dog for public ridicule (before he’s subjected to a more supernatural torment). Wealthy men explain to him that their superiority comes from “good breeding” and that, since he was adopted from a non-wealthy family, “You’re a different race from us, a different species, a different class.” They even explicitly connect their evildoings to a historical tradition of class inequality, bragging that “The rich have always sucked off low class shit like you.” Society was largely panned in its time for this disinterest in thematic subtlety, struggling for three years after its initial release in 1989 to earn a proper US distribution deal. Treating its class politics as a flimsy excuse for the disturbing practical effects orgy in its final act seems like a mistake to me, though, and I’m delighted that the film has been reassessed as a cult classic in the decades since its humble beginnings. The way it explores class divisions in the most literal & grotesque terms possible is highly amusing to me in an almost cathartic way. This is especially true of these earliest days in a Donald Trump presidency, where poking fun at the inhuman cruelty of the wealthy oligarchy feels almost necessary for survival, even if their status as the ruling class hasn’t at all changed since this film’s initial release.

Boomer, do you agree that Society is well-served by its blatant class warfare themes, particularly in the cruelly grotesque way the 1% are characterized in its sledgehammer dialogue & nightmarish gore, or do you think the film would have fared better with an occasional adherence to subtlety & restraint?

Boomer: Honestly, yes and no, as I am of two minds when it comes to film’s mixed relationship with subtlety. Though the plot becomes more traditionally horrific as it plays out, the outpouring of nauseating imagery and sound that constitutes the film’s finale is a huge tonal shift from the relatively grounded story that seems to be playing out in the first act. As much as I love grue, I also love the conceit of the unreliable narrator, especially one who doubts his own mind. Take, for instance, Bill’s first scene with his therapist, in which he takes a bite of an apple only to realize it’s full of worms; he looks away, then back, and the apple is totally normal. This is a fairly obvious metaphor for the way that the presumed normalcy of Bill’s world is merely a thin facade covering inconceivable monsters beneath the surface, but it also implies that Bill’s less-than-objective interpretation of events may be the result of a diseased mind. At least until the shunting begins, anyway.

Of course, that was just my reading of the scene based on viewing the film cold. Many of the early oddities, like the squirming apple, the apparently inhuman body structure of Bill’s sister, and the changes to the audiotape, could easily be interpreted either way: as hallucinations or a They Live-style peek behind the veil of our ordered existence. Instead, of course, we learn that these are just moments in which members of the titular Society are gaslighting (another important term that has seen a resurgence in usage and discussion since the Trump ascendancy) poor Bill. Luckily, for the sake of goreheads and fans of unsubtle social satire everywhere, Society quickly descends into stomach-churning “after dark” madness.

After my viewing, I watched the trailer and looked at posters for the film, and I can only imagine that filmgoers of 1992 would have been highly disappointed if “the minds behind Re-Animator” and the gore wizard “who brought you Nightmare on Elm Street IV (um) and Predator (oh, ok)” had turned out a film about a rich Beverly Hills kid who thought his world was being turned upside-down only to learn that he was merely losing his mind. Still, I think I would like to see a film that plays out more subtly, wherein Bill becomes all-too-aware of how privileged his easy, moneyed life is and begins seeing his 1% peers as the inhuman monsters they are on the inside, without making that metaphor so literal. The film would have been a bit more nuanced if it took that road, but that doesn’t mean Society doesn’t work in the form that it does take.

What the film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with its overt depiction of the grotesqueries of American pomp and lavishness. When the film shreds the guise of humanity to reveal its, uh, true form, the film doesn’t suffer for its straightforwardness. The rich are fundamentally different from you and me, and it is, from their point of view, a matter of class and breeding. This isn’t even arcane knowedge that I’m talking about, it’s all out there to be seen by anyone who opens their eyes. I never saw a full episode of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, but I did see plenty of clips on the dearly departed (and sorely missed) The Soup, and have seen enough “Rich Kids of Instagram” compilations scattered around the internet to know that a life of wealth and privilege makes people rotten to their cores. A dear friend used to be a frequent babysitter for the four-year-old daughter of a rich Baton Rouge lawyer; one day, the little girl was so cruel to my friend that she cried, causing the brat to tell her that she didn’t have to be nice because she was pretty. When my friend told the parents about this incident that evening, the father didn’t apologize or even inspect the way that he was raising his child to be a monster; he just looked at my friend and said, “Well, she’s right, you know. She doesn’t have to be nice; she’s pretty.”

Anecdotal though that is, it bespeaks a systemic inhumanity on the part of the American aristocracy, and that inhumanity is on full frontal display in Society, just as it is in society. To hide that behind a veil of subtlety is to do a grave disservice to the truth of our existence. I would even go so far as to argue that the exaggeration of that idea is more important now than it was 30 years ago. After all, our society has degenerated into such frothing madness that satire can hardly find a foothold; so unable are we to discern extreme parodies of absurd political ideation from the actual extremist views held by fringe mentally ill people (whose voices are amplified by the proliferation of the internet) that there’s a plausible argument being made that “fake news” swung the election. If Jonathan Swift were to publish “A Modest Proposal” in the New York Times tomorrow morning, there would be commenters at Breitbart and TeaParty.org putting on their “All Lives Matter” aprons and getting ready to light the grill to barbecue up some Irish babies by mid-afternoon. The finale of Society may be just over-the-top enough to penetrate even the thickest skulls (and Klan hoods).

Let’s back off of that for a second though, before I work myself up too much. For me, the weakest link in the film has nothing to do with the story or the direction but with Billy Warlock’s performance. I’m sure part of my less-than-hospitable attitude towards the actor is the result of Allison Pregler’s delightful abridged series project Baywatching, but I still found Bill to be a thoroughly disinteresting lead, with no power in Warlock’s portrayal to save the character. Hell, if anything, Milo is the hero of this story, not Bill. What do you think, Britnee? Were you distracted by Billy Warlock’s lackluster presence, or was it suitable for the film? What change would you make to strengthen the film: recasting, or rewriting the character?

Britnee: I’m in agreement that Billy Warlock’s performance in Society was pretty terrible. With such an interesting last name, who would’ve guessed he’d be such a letdown? Even though his acting was shit, he didn’t really have that much of a negative impact on the movie, though. Society was absolutely insane from the opening scene to the disturbingly haunting ending, so, if anything, Warlock contributed to the insanity that made this movie such a success in the cult film community. Imagine how off-balanced the movie would be if someone decent played the role of Bill. I couldn’t even imagine such a thing.

If I could change anything about Bill’s character, I would want him to take all the strange occurrences happening around him more seriously. It was irritating to watch him be so willingly blind to what was happening around him, and it was even more annoying to know that he didn’t start questioning his place in his weird family until he was in his late teens. I’m assuming that he was adopted by the Whitney family when he was a baby since he didn’t know he was adopted, so he probably noticed their strange behavior way before he started to question it. Maybe I’m being too harsh because he was raised in that environment his entire life and probably thought it was normal, but it’s still hard to believe.

The biggest question that I have from Society (and I have many) is why did the Whitney’s adopt Bill and raise him for so long with the intention of eventually “shunting” him? They didn’t have to groom him for so long just to shunt him in the end because they shunted Blanchard, who was pretty much just an average guy. They could lure or capture any lower class individual to shunt, but I don’t understand why they put so much effort into shunting Bill.

Alli, what do you think about the Whitney’s adopting of Bill to just shunt him in the end? Would you have liked more of a background story of their motivation to adopt and raise Bill? If you could create the story for Bill’s adoption, would would it be?

Alli: I think their cruelty and extravagance has made them bored, so they need increasingly sick diversions. I’m imagining some sort of extremely twisted My Fair Lady, where they found this poor family with a child they can’t afford and just for kicks decide to groom a lower class “poor” into a false sense of security just to see the terror and confusion. It also kind of brings to mind “The Most Dangerous Game.” My main question is why now? Have any of them thought of keeping “shuntable” pets before? It’s such a hyperbole of the idea of the poor as sheep for the rich to herd and take advantage of. It’s amazing that they’re applauded and congratulated on their great achievement, because in a way this makes the Whitney’s farmers, and I imagine farmers are some sort of unimaginably lower rank.

But something more mysterious to me than any of that is Mrs. Carlyn (Pamela Matheson). I didn’t ever really figure her character out. Her doe-eyed, empty stare and tricophagia aren’t really explained. Very early on the cheerleader types reference her in disgust when talking about Bill’s infatuation with Clarissa Carlyn (Devin DeVasquez), “Have you seen her mom?!” After mentioning Clarissa’s turning tricks, I assumed her mom would be some sort of scandalous gold digger, but she’s the opposite. Instead, she’s a semi-catatonic wanderer with wild hair. She’s harmless enough as a member of Society goes, but I guess I don’t really understand why they keep her around.  The most I can make of it is that this Society even has outcasts and those who don’t fit in. They sweep them under the rug and ignore them, but is Mrs. Carlyn anymore messed up than any of the rest of them?

Brandon, what do you think about Mrs. Carlyn’s place in Society?

Brandon: I’m really glad that came up, because Mrs. Carlyn & her hot to trot daughter were the first thing that came to mind when Boomer & Britnee called out Bill for being a lackluster presence in the film. Mrs. Carlyn in particular is a sore thumb. She plays Society‘s already broad comedy a tad too far into a cartoonish territory that spoils the winking camp a little for me, recalling a Laurie Beth Denberg character from a long-forgotten All That sketch. This is more a fault of the filmmakers’ than the actor’s, though. They don’t give her much to do outside tired fatty-fall-down-make-boom lines of humor and excuses to mug crazy-eyed for the camera when she tries to eat unsuspecting victims’ hair. (In a typifying punchline, she’s confused when she attempts to eat a toupee.) If I had to justify her inclusion in the plot, I could argue, as Alli suggests, that she’s a comedic take on the way wealthy families always seem to have that one black sheep weirdo that doesn’t quite fit in, usually due to mental illness. Mrs. Carlyn & her oversexed daughter are essentially this Society’s version of Grey Gardens, their outcast mutant lives existing as a sort of bane on the more respectable slug-eating mutants of Society proper. That’s giving the film more credit than it probably deserves, though, especially since nothing else in its themes is treated with any semblance of subtlety. For a film willing to beat you over the head with lines like, “There are people who make the rules and people who follow them. You’re born into it,” and the often-repeated “You’re going to make a wonderful contribution to Society,” I think a little acknowledged justification for the Carlyns’ existence as outsiders, even as a source of embarrassment, would’ve improved the script. I also could’ve done without Mrs. Carlyn’s character entirely, to be honest.

Her daughter Clarissa is another strange outlier in the story. Clarissa seems to at first be horny for Bill in a nefarious way, as if she’s playing with her food or further trapping him in his predetermined downfall, but that attraction is later revealed to be genuine. This could possibly be a result of her identifying with his fellow outsider status as a Poor, thanks to her family’s position as the Grey Gardens black sheep. Again, the script doesn’t give us much to work with there. Clarissa’s affection for Bill honestly wouldn’t distract me too much, though, if it weren’t used as a deus ex machina (along with her mother’s trichophagia) to rescue him just before his turn to be shunted. Bill’s escape at the end & ultimate survival makes for an interesting gender-swapped version of the Final Girl trope (something telegraphed in the red herring slasher film opening), but I was honestly rooting for a much more pessimistic conclusion to the story. As far as screenwriting tradition goes, a gore-soaked Canadian horror indie just might be one of the few times when you can get away with a triumphless, dispiriting ending without gripes from producers or test audiences and it just seems weird that Society would allow its protagonist to walk away without more than a few scratches. If all these wealthy families conspired for nearly two decades to shunt Bill, why would they so easily allow their science project to escape once he’s learned all of their horrific secrets? I guess you could argue that they’re in a vulnerable, physically soft state during the shunting that would inhibit his capture, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse. Having Bill suffer the shunting and the wealthy secure an inescapable victory over their born-poor protagonist might’ve better served the film’s central metaphor and it seems as if the only reason he’s allowed to escape is to set up a sequel that never came, a lame cop-out if there ever was one. And since Clarissa’s entire existence in the plot is the machination of that escape I have to question her validity in the script just as much as I do her mother’s.

What do you think, Boomer? Would a pessimistic ending have better driven home Society’s central metaphor? Would it have been a better film if Bill had fallen victim to the shunting he was groomed for all his life?

Boomer: That’s an interesting question. More than the relative positivity/negativity of the ending, I was struck by how abrupt it was, and how odd that conclusion felt in a film that spent much of its runtime letting the story breathe. To use a comparison that is accessible for many, consider the ending of Terminator: imagine that, after Sarah Connor destroys the T-800, the film cut to black and the end credits immediately started rolling, without the follow-up scene in which she drives off into the desert as the distant thunder of a gathering storm rumbles ominously. That’s how you end this kind of movie: the hero vanquishes (or escapes) the clutches of evil, and the audience is treated to an epilogue that allows us to digest the climactic finale and imagine a future for the character or characters in whom, if the film is successful in its presentation, we have become invested. It doesn’t have to be completely optimistic or pessimistic; in fact, Terminator‘s final moments are all the more poignant for their ambiguity. James Cameron’s film is perhaps the best example of how to make this work, given that it could so easily have been yet another generic action film like so many of that era, but rose above the milieu to become iconic through strong performances, impressive VFX work, and attention to detail.

I have a feeling that director Brian Yuzna may have even thought he was endowing the ending of Society with this same feeling of bittersweet uncertainty: Billy escapes, but a member of the Beverly Hills shunt calmly tells a cohort that there is another Society… in Washington (dun dun DUN). But instead of giving the ending room to breathe, the end credits start to roll seemingly out of nowhere, without even a perfunctory denouement in which Billy, Milo, and Clarissa drive into the night as the first fingers of the sun grab at the horizon. On the other hand, I might just be making this connection between the two movies because both Sarah Connor and Bill drive sweet Jeeps; that’s for the reader to decide.

In the end, however, I think that the film’s “happy” ending is difficult to parse as either a function of its time of creation and its creative genesis. Although Yuzna was born in the Philippines, the film can be read as a clear product of anxieties about the rich that are not unique to American wealth distribution but specifically reflect that culture. As such, my initial assumption was that the optimistic ending was a result of the need to represent the hope of escaping the clutches of wealthy evil, metaphorically. As obvious as that may seem, interviews with the director indicate that the film was originally about religious cultists out to sacrifice Billy, but that this plot point was altered following discussions between Yuzna and Screaming Mad George during the pre-production process. The “shunting” was conceived by George and the plot reworked backward from there, meaning that any discussion of the relative “happiness” of the ending presupposes a premise that is supported by the text itself, but appears unintentional.

Roland Barthes would argue that this is irrelevant, however, so in the interest of not limiting the text, I declare the author dead and put forth this explanation: the ending must be optimistic in order to give the audience hope of escaping the wealth-positive cronyism of Ronald Reagan. An ending in which Billy dies at the hands (?) of the Society would be reflective of the way that this generally works in the real world (for instance, with the recent repeal of the ACA damning many Americans to a slow and painful death without affordable medical care in order to support the malevolent and uncharitable greed of a few), but wouldn’t make for very good entertainment, so a happy ending is called for.

To go back to the Terminator reference above, how would you see a potential film franchise for Society playing out, Britnee? Do you think there would be any value in confronting other Societies? Would those be better served by taking on the more pessimistic (perhaps even deterministic) tone that the Terminator franchise did?

Britnee: I would absolutely love a Society franchise! I recently read an interview that Yuzna had with Horror Channel back in 2013, and he mentions that he was actively working on a sequel to Society. I haven’t seen anything else that mentions the status of Society sequel, but I hope that it’s still in the works. Having a sequel come out over 20 years after the original film was released sounds insane, but I think that it would be great to get a modern day dose of Society while we’re living in Trump’s America. There’s actually loads of potential for a Society franchise. Think of all the Societies around the world that the films could focus on: the British royal family, Russian oligarchs, Indian billionaires, etc. Could you imagine how amazing it would be to see Queen Elizabeth II lead a shunting with Prince Charles? There’s just so much to work with, and by exploring “Societies” in other countries, viewers could be more aware of the endless supply of greedy jerks all over the world.

Honestly, it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve seen any of the Terminator films, so I only vaguely remember them. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them, I just haven’t revisited them in a while. If there was a Society franchise, I think the films should have a more pessimistic tone. I would’ve liked to have seen Bill shunted to death and Milo as the only one who was able to escape. Then Milo would go on to be the protagonist in the sequel, where he gets a little team together to destroy all the Societies in the world. In each subsequent film, part of the team would get shunted while the others barely make it out alive (covered in that nasty shunting lubricant). Having the films take a more pessimistic approach adds so much more to the horror element. When Billy escaped in the end, it made the film so much lighter. But as Boomer mentioned earlier, the ending was so abrupt. If there was just a little two minute scene of Billy being thrown in a mental institution from suffering from some sort of shunting PTSD, the film would’ve been more of a solid horror movie.

One image that I just can’t get out of my head is when Bill’s dad becomes a butt-face and makes fart noises. It’s probably my favorite part in the movie. Alli, what where some of your favorite body morphs in the movie? Is there any body morph that you would’ve liked to have seen?

Alli: Man, all the body morphs were really great, but the ones that really stood out to me were when the story was still ambiguous and we didn’t know whether or not it was still in Bill’s head. One of my favorites is when Clarissa’s body is all twisted around. It just reminded me of some freakish nightmares I’ve had. I don’t think I would have included any more of the subtle ones though, because I think the story benefits from the quick descent into overt madness. I guess what I would have wanted more of is the fact that the Society can body morph being used as an advantage rather than a bizarre sex cult or strange clumsy hindrances. How cool would it have been for just a really long arm to try and snag Bill as he’s getting away? I think that would be a pretty simple way to fix the abrupt ending, anyway.

One thing I’d like to see explain more is Bill’s hallucinations. Is he seeing bugs in his food because the food is made of bugs, or is he seeing bugs in his food because he’s actually losing it? It would be more of an interesting statement if it were the latter. I’d like for a protagonist in a movie to be going a little loony but also be 100% completely right about something else crazy going on. Rather than being an unreliable narrator, he’d become a reliable narrator with some problems, which would be an interesting take on that trope. It’s also believable in a way; anyone would have problems if they were raised by an out-of-touch rich family of grotesque mutants.

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Alli: Britnee mentioned the butt-face morph and I feel like here’s the place to say that I really like the idea of ultra rich people literally talking out of their ass. In a movie totally lacking in subtlety, that might be my favorite in-your-face moment.

Britnee: I don’t really understand why Bill’s mom and dad were checking out slugs with their gardener at the beginning of the movie. Was it supposed the be a hint that they were up to something strange or is that really how rich people prepare to make escargot? I wish there was more explanation for it in the movie because not knowing is really killing me.

Boomer: To go back to the question of Mrs. Carlyn, I think that she represents the way that “good breeding” apparently means some kind of inbreeding here, as was often the case with aristocratic families over the course of history. Since the author is dead, I’ll put in my two cents that I interpreted her place in this group as a kind of blindness to the basics of genetics that must permeate Society, and is indicative of the way that the rich ignore that which doesn’t support their worldview. Mrs. Carlyn can’t be inbred because of how good their breeding is and because they are the elite, even when the counter-evidence is staring them in the face (and trying to eat their hair).

Brandon: I think I’ve come up with a pretty decent Society drinking game: Take a swig every time you see Bill’s Jeep, which Boomer mentioned earlier. The fancy black Jeep Bill drives is featured early on as one of the unsuspecting Final Boy’s hallmarks of privilege. The movie obsessively makes a big deal out of the vehicle long after we get the point, though. If features several scenes of Bill finding vague, prankish threats like lynched Barbies & naked blow-up dolls in the passenger seat and once the plot starts barreling toward a conclusion, the Jeep is repetitively shown as both a literal & a literary vehicle used to get Bill from one horror to the next. It started to remind me of that easy screenwriting device where expository information is dumped over phonecalls instead of cropping up naturally. Anyway, I call the game Jeep Shots. Please play responsibly and avoid operating any Jeeps until long after the credits roll.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Britnee presents What’s Up Doc? (1972)
April: Boomer presents Head Over Heels (2001)
May: Alli presents Europa (1991)

-The Swampflix Crew

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

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fourstar

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Although I found the first two titles in the Resident Evil  series fascinating in a cultural context & entertainingly goofy in select scenes of CG fantasy violence, I failed to fall head over heels for either work as an individual, stand-alone feature film. Watching Milla Jovovich weaponize a motorcycle by launching it through a stained glass church window makes for a fun, dumb action movie moment, but I’ve had a difficult time maintaining that kind of enthusiasm for the entire length of one of these zombie-themed shoot-em-ups. The third film in the franchise changed that for me. Within the first five minutes of Resident Evil: Extinction I felt a huge leap in quality, as if the series had emerged from a direct-to-DVD production value to a legitimate action cinema aesthetic. This is likely a result of hiring Razorback/Highlander director Russell Mulcahy, who cut his teeth directing music videos for 80s acts like The Buggles, The Vapors, and The Human League, to take the reins. Series mastermind Paul WS Anderson still remains a steady hand in the writer’s seat, but Mulcahy brings a slick sense of professionalism to the film’s staging that saves it from the series’ usual idiotic The Matrix But With Zombies formula.

One of the ways Extinction shakes off its stylistic rut is by hitting the reset button, opening with the exact same scenario as the first Resident Evil film. Milla Jovovich’s zombie-slaying protagonist wakes confused & unremembering in the shower, finding her iconic red dress from the franchise’s debut laid out carefully on her bed. As she tries to fight her way out of a military takeover of her home, she’s killed, the scenario is revealed to be a simulation, and her body is dumped on a pile of similarly-dressed clones in a chilling image that recalls the excellent existential horror Triangle. While The Umbrella Corporation’s main stooge (Game of Thrones’s Iian Glen) is literally trying to clone past successes of the franchise with villainous intent, Extinction then blows its derivative, campy treats wide open by shifting from Matrix knockoff to Mad Max knockoff, taking the zombie-infested shit show on the dusty, dusty road. The breakout has spread from Raccoon City to cover the entire globe, making Earth an endless Mad Max hellscape. Just like in the second Resident Evil film, an inconsequential female badass archetype leads a band of anti-Umbrella Corporation rebels until Jovovich arrives to take over. While Glen’s slick-haired corporate jerk is obsessed with cloning her, he also wants to capture & harness the Original Recipe version, which means the small group of desertscape rebels has to fight off the evil corporation in addition to the zombie hordes. Everything that goes down from there is highly stylized, but mostly predictable outside maybe Jovovich’s newfound telepathy abilities, a weaponized murder of crows the rebels fight off with flame throwers, and the casting of R&B singer Ashanti. The movie then doubles back to its origins a second time for another underground showdown with a mutated humanoid beast & some ominous warnings from a creepy child A.I. This is when Jovovich discovers the cloning project, concluding the film on a moment of existential horror.

It’s difficult to convey exactly why Extinction is of a higher quality than its two predecessors. On a writing level, its story is just as scattered & inconsequential as ever and its characters still sport dumb names like Project Alice, White Queen, and (most notably here) K-Mart. There are some new details like a serum that partially domesticates zombies, characters blowing off steam by running over zombie roadkill, and some corporate intrigue nonsense involving hologram boardroom meetings. It’s all very silly, but no more entertaining in and of itself than the silliness of previous franchise entries. I really do think it’s Mulcahy alone who elevates the material by bringing in a strong, stylistic guiding hand that the series desperately needed. He drags Resident Evil out of its nu metal era technophobia into some more timeless (but equally derivative) genre territory. Extinction is a really fun entry in a series so stupidly convoluted in its futuristic zombie mayhem that it doesn’t deserve to be so entertaining this many films in. I’m a little bummed to know that the last three contributions to the franchise all have Anderson returning to the director’s seat, because it seems like the best he can do at this point is knock down what good will Extinction built up in its break from the usual aesthetic. I won’t at all be surprised if this film stands as the best of the bunch and it’s sad to know that the most fun I’ve had with the series is likely already behind me.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

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three star

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When we binged on a small selection of “iconic” video game adaptations for episode #11 of the podcast, I was surprised to see Paul WS Anderson’s name pop up twice in a row as a director of both Mortal Kombat & Resident Evil (2002). Not only is the video game adaptation not a genre you’d typically associate with an auteur’s go-to passion for repeat offerings (outside maybe a stray Uwe Boll-type), but Anderson’s two contributions to our list were actually two of the better films, bested only by 1994’s Super Mario Bros in terms of pure entertainment value. Of his two entries, Resident Evil was the biggest surprise in terms of competency. Mortal Kombat had the narrative upper hand of a ridiculous interdimensional martial arts tournament to boost its camp value (along with a delightfully obnoxious theme song & a scenery-devouring Christopher Lambert). Resident Evil, on the other hand, was a seemingly straightforward zombie picture, so it was downright bizarre that Anderson managed to make it even moderately memorable in the face of a market that’s been overcrowded with similar works for decades. The Milla Jovovich-helmed action vehicle was actually an interesting trifle, however slight, one made novel by a wealth of weird details like A.I. children, genetically mutated beasts, and menacing corporations with dystopian designs on world domination.

What’s even more surprising than Anderson managing to make a watchable film out of the Resident Evil video game franchise is that he did not stop at just one film. The 6th (and supposedly final) entry in the series has just reached theaters over a decade later and both Anderson & Jovovich have shared some level of involvement in the series throughout its entire run, which is a much higher level of consistency than you’d expect for a zombie video game franchise. The second film in the series, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (which obviously didn’t follow through on the finality of its title) wasn’t half bad either. It expands the bunker-confined action of the lower budget first film by bringing its zombie breakout above ground. Its world-building details like the exact nature & temporal location of its Raccoon City setting, its menacing (and hilariously named) villain the Umbrella Corporation, and the exact skills & origins (and even name) of its Ripley stand-in (Jovovich), all remain fuzzy to me after two full-length features. All you need to know to make it through a Resident Evil movie is that zombies & capitalists are bad, while women & guns are good. The rest is all shoot-em-up nonsense and militaristic zombie movie mayhem, a triumph of action horror cinema only in that it should be impossible for Anderson to make something so generic so delightful to watch and, yet, he’s done it at least twice.

I think Resident Evil‘s key to surviving as a notable action horror franchise is its dedication to excess. The film couldn’t logically bring in Jovovich’s hero immediately to deal with the above-ground breakout so it created a second badass with a gun cliché (a cop named Valentine, hilariously) to shoot some undead baddies in her initial absence. There’s some first person POV shooting in a police station and found footage shenanigans with a rogue news broadcaster that helpfully treads plot water until Jovovich can burst onto the scene by flying a motorcycle through a church’s stained glass windows and then turning said motorcycle into a makeshift bomb. Once our two badass ladies join teams everything else is an action-packed blur of knives, grenades, rocket launchers, and the undead bursting out of graves like a cover version of the “Thriller” video. New locations play like video game levels. The film’s Final Boss characer is a new genetic mutant called Genesis (who vaguely resembles the version of Bane in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin). Everything is all very loud and violent and impossibly dumb, to the point where the monotone excess becomes its own artform and your options are either to play along with the film’s buffoonery or to feel like your better senses are constantly being assaulted.

I don’t care to learn any more about this series’ mythology than the little I can catch between explosions and bullets. Jared Harris (Lane from Mad Men) pops up here as some kind of smart programmer type who’s constantly hacking into the mainframe or some such nonsense and Iian Glen (Jorah from Game of Thrones) swoops in at the last minute for some Wolverine-type experiments & mumblings about clone technology, but outside of those actors’ before they were C-list stars pedigree, their presence signifies nothing. No one really matters here outside Jovovich & Anderson. Even the newly introduced & oddly omnipresent character of Valentine is mostly just a place holder until Jovovich can arrive above-ground, guns & motorcycle blazing (and the less I say about the film’s wisecracking pimp comic relief, the better). I’m sincerely amazed that a single filmmaker & a single performer have stuck with such an explosively inane series for as long as Jovovich & Anderson have. I also wonder if there are wholeheartedly dedicated fans of the series out there who care deeply about its AI, genetic monsters, and walking dead mythology enough to have been counting the days until the series wrapped up in its final installment. I can’t imagine being at all invested in Resident Evil’s narrative throughline & overarching themes, but I will admit that these films are much louder, dumber, and more entertainingly chaotic than I expected them to be and I’m curious about how they can keep up that stamina for four more installments.

-Brandon Ledet

xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)

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three star

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Grab your cargo shorts and flash art tattoos, folks. Nu metal cinema is back in a big, dumb way. Vin Diesel has briefly stepped away from his long-time role as a Corona-swilling patriarch in the Fast & Furious franchise to resurrect his other embarrassingly dated late 90s action vehicle, xXx. Diesel selflessly returns to his role as Xander Cage, “the rebel the world doesn’t know it needs,” to save the human race with such heroic acts as collecting high-fives while skateboarding downhill, gliding across jungle dirt on snow skis, and bravely bedding entire rooms full of Nameless Babes so that he can turn to the camera and mumble, “The things I do for my country,” like a pilled-out Bugs Bunny. xXx: Return of Xander Cage may not feature a Rammstein concert like its first installment or Family Values Tour ’98 vet Ice Cube like its second, but it is comfortably seated in that same X-treme Attitude nu metal cradle. It’s as if the film acknowledges its status as a far-too-late action sequel by dialing the culture clock all the way back to the early 2000s to accommodate its own wallet chain macho inanity. The results are oddly endearing, even if persistently ugly. Its soundtrack may have been swapped out for dubstep, but Return of Xander Cage still shines as a small scale nu metal miracle, an abrasive rap rock nightmare preserved in the foulest amber.

Does it matter exactly why Xander Cage returned to the international spy game? Actual-talent Toni Collette chews scenery as a menacing G-man/humanoid IKEA monkey who drags Cage back into action by informing him that his former mentor (played by Samuel L. Jackson, naturally) has been murdered via espionage technology that can strategically down orbiting satellites. Cage reluctantly agrees to retrieve this nefarious device, but refuses to do so with the team of untrustworthy supersoldiers Collette’s Evil Bitch government stooge assembles for him. When Cage grills the G.I. Joes about their experiences with X-Treme sports like base-jumping & snowboarding, they retort “We’re soldiers, not slackers.” Wrong response. He nukes the team in what plays like a sincere version of a MacGruber spoof, but decides to forego his past life as a lone wolf, instead borrowing some of his Daddy Dom character’s obsession with “family” in the Fast & Furious franchise to build his own X-treme, rag tag crew of crazed stunt men, EDM DJs, computer geek Millennials, and lesbian snipers. Everything that follows is a loud, dumb blur of shoot-em-up action cinema inanity, with occasional touches like dirt bike/jet ski hybrids and Godsmack-reminiscent nipple tats distinguishing it from any other borderline competent example of its genre. They get the device. They save the day. They put the government in its place and walk away with their collective rebel status intact. There’s even a ludicrous last minute cameo that makes the whole thing feel like a real movie instead of a hazy, bullet-ridden nu metal daydream. It’s all in good fun.

As much as Return of Xander Cage likes to pretend that its team-building exercise is actually important to the plot, the movie is still largely just a loving prayer at the altar of Xander Cage (and, by extension, Vin Diesel himself). It’s right there in the title. No one else truly matters. Entire villages cheer his presence. Little kids look up to him in awe. He delivers every one-liner with a JCVD-style lethargic drawl, as if he’s so pleasantly relaxed in the role that he’s half asleep. When someone hands him a bomb he mumbles, “Oh boy, here we go again,” rising to twirl in a lazy circle while firing a machine gun, yawning, and literally checking his watch. His entire crew is qualified to save the day, but they’re asked to hang back as his cover. Everyone is visibly horny, but only Xander Cage gets to fuck. It’s super cool and totally worth mentioning that this dumb, spiritually-backwards action film has a mostly POC cast (including an over-qualified Donnie Yen among its ranks) and the only scene dominated by white male faces involves an evil boardroom of business pricks threatening to tear the world down. It’s just also funny that the diversity in the crew is mostly for naught, as they’re ultimately no more significant than any one of Xander Cage’s many Tough Guy clip art tattoos.

It may sound like I’m being a little tough on Return of Xander Cage, but it’s a tough customer; it can take the pressure. This is actually a pretty fun version of what it is: mindless shoot-em-up action cinema with a fetish for X-Games style stunts. It’s just impossible not to poke fun at every leering shot of tight leather mini-skirts, every dumb objective like “Get there fast and take this guy down,” and every stupid one-liner like “It’s like finding a needle in a stack of needles.” At this point in modern taste & decency, X-treme action cinema has no comfortable, legitimate home and the xXx franchise addresses that concern by bullheadedly avoiding giving a shit about taste or decency. It’s a nu metal hangover stuck so far out of time that it had to abandon its angst rock roots for an EDM soundtrack that’s also hopelessly outdated, just by a narrower margin. It’s in this overgrown bro cultural faux pas that Return of Xander Cage emerges as cute & oddly quaint in its ironically mild brand of “X-treme” entertainments.

-Brandon Ledet

20th Century Women (2016)

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“How do you be a good man? What does that even mean nowadays?”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a finer example of why critical Best of the Year lists are absolute bullshit (due to the arbitrary wackiness of release dates) than 20th Century Women. From an official standpoint, Mike Mills’s latest (and greatest) has a December 28, 2016 release date thanks to its limited release screenings in major cities like New York & Los Angeles. It took nearly a month for the film to expand its distribution wide enough to reach cities like New Orleans, though. These Oscar-minded, slow trickle releases usually mean that modest little pleb film bloggers like myself, who don’t have the luxury of festival circuit browsing & For Your Consideration advance screeners, miss a lot of major Best of the Year contenders until weeks after their year-end roundups are published & etched into digital stone. So let me announce right here & now that my personal Top Films of 2016 list is a total sham, a shameful fraud. No disrespect meant to my beloved The Neon Demon, but its crown is made of the flimsiest fool’s gold. The best film of 2016 is, in fact, 20th Century Women.

Just about the last thing I expected when I bought a ticket to this immaculate, miraculous picture was a reach-for-the-fences ambition in narrative structure & visual craft. The advertising leading up to its release did an exceptional job of highlighting its function as an actors’ showcase for its holy trio of talented women: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning. The movie certainly does not disappoint there and I guess on some level it does function as the kind of insular Awards Season drama about alternative family structures & eternally hurt feelings you might expect based on the trailers. That’s only a fraction of the territory writer-director Mike Mills covers here, though. Although 20th Century Women is constructed on the foundation of small, intimate performances, it commands an all-encompassing scope that pulls back to cover topics as wide as punk culture solidarity, what it means to be a “good” man in modern times, the shifts in status of the American woman in the decades since the Great Depression, the 1980s as a tipping point for consumer culture, the history of life on the planet Earth, and our insignificance as a species in the face of the immensity of the Universe. For me, this film was the transcendent, transformative cinematic experience people found in titles like Tree of Life & Boyhood that I never “got.” Although it does succeed as an intimate, character-driven drama & an actors’ showcase, it means so much more than that to me on a downright spiritual level.

It would be incredibly easy to reduce the plot of this semi-autobiographical work down to a sentence or two. Annette Bening stars as a dream mom, an incredibly intelligent & self-confident woman who had her only child at the age of 40. Concerned that she’s not fully equipped to alone raise her son to be a “good” man, she enlists the tenants of her home (played by Billy Crudup & Greta Gerwig) and the boy’s best friend/biggest crush (Elle Fanning) to raise him as a village, the way a commune would, a plan cited to be inspired by her own communal upbringing during the Great Depression. This coming of age narrative could feel painfully over-familiar, even within the hyper-specific context of its late 70s West Coast punk scene setting, especially since the assumed POV of the narrative would center on the 15 year old boy everyone’s helping “raise.” Mills’s narrative structure is far too non-linear for the story to play as Oscar season convention, though (a fact backed up by the film only earning a single nomination, one for Best Original Screenplay). 20th Century Women engages in an internal tug of war between over-explaining & withholding information. It will introduce a character’s persona by telling their entire life’s story from birth to death in the length of a paragraph, only to double back to fill in the details & color between those lines. It will continually threaten to slip into time-spanning montage, only for the in-the-moment immediacy of a specific image to crash to the surface. It will threaten heartbreaking moments of devastating melodrama only to reveal that life is more often defined by smaller, less obviously significant events & conversations. The film almost plays like a feature-length trailer, but without the lack of depth that descriptor implies. It’s cliché to say so, but 20th Century Women is pure cinema, the art of the moving image; and it confidently, abstractly allows its medium to dictate its narrative in a way that a simple, reductive plot synopsis cannot convey. It’s in so many ways more than a sum of its parts.

A large portion of my rapturous appreciation of this film is undeniably hinged on the way it plays directly into my personal pop culture obsessions. The very first needle drop sound cue (a literal needle drop thanks to Greta Gerwig’s young punk tenant character) is my favorite early-career Talking Heads song, “Don’t Worry About the Government.” From there it takes the time to explore punk culture as a philosophy and an ethos, not just name-dropping niche artists like The Raincoats for cool points, but verbalizing what makes their DIY aesthetic life-affirming & interesting to the ear. It explains how the scene can be paradoxically empowering through a sense of community among outsiders and alienating in its bitter, insular rivalries that arise from things as petty as who’s slept with whom and what bands people associate with as a personal philosophy. The movie also indulges in the beauty of its own imagery the way only cinema can, often functioning as an Instagram or Tumblr account in motion. From its opening shots of calm ocean waves & symmetrically framed car fires to its slideshow photographs of punk scene portraits, outer space imagery, and common objects like cigarette packs & birth control pills isolated in an art studio void, 20th Century Women never shies away from the simple pleasure of a well-constructed image, but always finds a way to make each indulgence thematically significant. Its structure is explained in-film through easy metaphors like a mixtape or a self-portrait series made through photographs of possessions (which is described as “beautiful, but a little sad”), but I think those reference points sell short its command of “movie magic.” Each stylistic choice is a natural extension of its 1979 setting, but feels as if it were speaking to me directly on a much deeper level than pure aesthetic.

It’s a shame I didn’t see 20th Century Women in time to properly cite it as my favorite 2016 release. It’s also a shame that Annette Bening didn’t earn any Academy Awards attention for her deeply endearing role as the film’s matriarch. At the very least, her lines like, “Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to bring depressed,” and “Don’t kiss a woman unless you know what you mean by it,” would’ve made great fodder for an awards show highlight reel. No matter. Long after these end of the year roundups are long forgotten, this film will still be its wonderful, perfect self. Mike Mills has delivered a timeless, masterfully beautiful triumph of humanist filmmaking and no arbitrary release dates or Oscars snubs can delegitimize that accomplishment.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #22 of The Swampflix Podcast: 2016’s Honorable Mentions & Videodrome (1983)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #22 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-second episode, we’re doing a little tidying up. Brandon, CC, and James continue their discussion of the Top Films of 2016 with some Honorable Mentions. Also, Brandon makes CC watch David Cronenberg’s cult classic Videodrome (1983) for the first time, a viewing experience that’s been in the works for years. Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet, CC Chapman, and James Cohn

Evolution (2016)

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threehalfstar

The French sci-fi horror Evolution is too deliberately mysterious & quietly still to appeal to a wide audience. If I had to boil my take on the film down to a single adjective it’d be “stubborn.” Evolution presents a cold, discomforting world in which children are put in danger for a supernatural purpose, a circumstance the film has no interest in explaining, only for the camera to quietly, clinically stare at their unlikely predicament. Anyone who might have complained that the obscured, supernatural terrors of 2016’s flagship horror breakout The Witch were too loosely defined & uneager to entertain would cry themselves to sleep watching what director Lucile Hadžihalilović has carefully constructed here. For anyone with a little patience in the way they approach densely puzzling horror cinema with unconventional payoffs, however, it’s an eerie submersion in a stubbornly confounding nightmare, a rare kind of disorientation that’s entirely unfamiliar to the world we live in.

Evolution is a sort of menacing fairy tale about a small island of adult women caring for & grooming young boys for a mysterious purpose. One of the boys slowly gets wise that this false paradise isn’t what it seems to be on the surface. It’s a conspiracy theory ignited by the discovery of a dead body with a starfish attached to its belly and the growing suspicion that the woman who feeds & houses him isn’t actually his mother. Much like the audience, this young child-in-peril protagonist never gets clear answers on what exactly is happening in this nightmare realm of vague menace. What follows is a dreamlike body horror that touches on pregnancy anxiety, Body Snatchers paranoia, and the psychedelic nature imagery of Phase IV slowed down to a glacial whisper. Evolution‘s poorly lit operation rooms, endless stacks of specimen jars, and religious reverence for starfish imagery amount to a strangely abstracted art piece, one with an unnerving refusal to provide easy answers for the questions its imagery raises.

Outside the weightless underwater voids of the film’s starfish habitats, Evolution is largely an exercise in clinical stillness. The film effortlessly crafts memorably horrifying imagery at every turn, but stubbornly lingers on each visual achievement for an uncomfortably long time. As an art piece it’s begging to be dissected & rearranged for a fan edit music video (a couple on-the-nose suggestions might be a down-tempo cover of Bikini Kill’s “Star Bellied Boy” or a trip hop remix of a song from the animated version of Dr. Suess’s “The Sneetches”). As a film, it’s a strange experience, one that’s consistently fascinating, but also deliberately unsatisfying in a conventional sense. I’m not sure I could heartily recommend Evolution to the world at large, because it requires an open & patient kind of temperament not all audiences can command. If you’re in the right mood for this kind of open-ended obfuscation, though, its low-key pleasures can be downright haunting in a strikingly beautiful way.

-Brandon Ledet

Elle (2016)

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onehalfstar

In all honesty, I’m probably the last person that should be writing this review. Paul Verhoeven’s latest is the exact kind of fearless, subversive button pusher that I typically enjoy from the director’s back catalog of all-time greats. It just happens to be a button pusher that centers its controversial mode of black comedy on rape. Sexual assault is more or less the only taboo in cinema that actually offends me when it’s treated lightly & without proper thematic consequence. It’s likely that I did not “get” Verhoeven’s Elle because of that personal hangup. The film opens with a brutal rape, which is repeated several times in greater detail and subsequently followed by increasingly crueler acts of sexual violence, but asks you to move on and shrug off the trauma as if it were nothing of any significance. Elle vaguely echoes ideas about what it’s like to mentally relive a trauma once it’s “behind you,” having to encounter your abuser in public social settings without acknowledging the transgression, the ineffectiveness of reporting sexual assault to police, and the misogynistic & sexually repressed aspects of modern culture that lead to rape in the first place, but all of those concepts exist in the film as indistinct whispers. Mostly, the rape is treated like a cheap murder mystery, with all of the typical red herrings & idiotic jump scares you’d expect in a whodunit. It’s a paralyzing trauma that has little effect on the story outside the scenes where it’s coldly detailed onscreen and the real shame is that it sours what is otherwise an excellently performed black comedy & character study by leaving very little room for laughter, if any.

Isabelle Huppert stars as the titular character in this glib rape revenge blood-boiler. Michelle is a video game developer who finds herself at a crossroads in her life with every one of her family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Among these faces is an assailant who repeatedly rapes her in her own home while wearing gloves & a ski mask, a transgression made painfully real to the audience as soon as the credits begin. The movie sets up two mysteries in its early machinations: Who is Michelle’s rapist & what crimes did her father commit in the distant past to make her entire family a dysfunctional band of social pariahs? Only the latter mystery is at all interesting, but the former eats up the majority of the runtime, leaving little room for any other narrative to take hold. It’s difficult to get lost in Elle‘s dark, complexly humorous relationships with her mother, her business partners, her employees, her neighbors, and her son when the film keeps drawing your attention back to the constant threat of sexual assault, which is a much less interesting & more overly familiar dynamic. Worse yet, it asks you to chuckle quietly at the calm, blasé way she processes the trauma, a line of humor that’s never close to being amusing, unlike the character-driven comedy the film sacrifices to pursue it. It’s a credit to the cast, Huppert especially, that Elle is even watchable for the entire length of its bloated, coldly harrowing runtime. Everything from Verhoeven’s detached tone to the screenplay’s core concepts alienate me on such a deeply spiritual level that I’m having a difficult time grasping why people find the film entertaining and how it ended up earning so much critical acclaim, including from mainstream outlets like the Golden Globes.

As I said, I’m the exact wrong audience for this film. If tasked with editing & re-shooting Elle, I’d cut it down to a swift black comedy about a publicly disgraced, wealthy family struggling to put their lives back together; imagine an art film version of Arrested Development and you get the picture. That’s obviously not the film Verhoeven & Huppert set out to make, though, and I have as little interest in engaging with their cruelly detached rape revenge comedy/thriller as the film has engaging with its own themes of sexual assault. It’s not that I think rape is a topic wholly off-limits as a cinematic subject. Two of my favorite films from the last couple years, Felt & The Neon Demon, trafficked heavily in themes of threatened sexual assault. I just think that if you’re going to bring it up (and especially if you’re going to depict it several times in brutal detail with a comedic fallout), you owe it to the audience to make sure the trauma is thematically significant. If Elle fulfilled that requirement in any way, it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the film on a fundamental level. I’m totally okay with that being the case.

-Brandon Ledet