brandon ledet

Last Night (1999)’s Studio Comedy Equivalent in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

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The Y2K scare in the late 90s lead to a brief cinema trend of End of the World features, but there weren’t many out there quite like our December Movie of the Month, Last Night. The Don McKellar-helmed black comedy strayed from the alarmist thriller beats of titles like Armageddon, Deep Impact, and End of Days to chase a much more realistic, resigned Gen-X vibe of sullen gloom & gallows humor in the face the Apocalypse. Much more recently, End of the World cinema trended once again, this time likely inspired by the supposed end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. Among the traditional alarmist thrillers this time around (like the appropriately titled 2012) there were actually a good number of mainstream comedies on the topic: This Is the End, The World’s End, It’s a Disaster, etc. Only one of these Armageddon comedies of the 2010s managed to match the weirdly subdued in a time of crisis vibe of Last Night. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a much more minor & less stylistically focused work than Last Night, but it still makes for an interesting companion piece for McKellar’s Canadian cult classic. It not only reflects the way humor & pop culture attitude had shifted in the decade or so between their releases, but also points to how Hollywood convention could’ve made McKellar’s piece a much less interesting work if it weren’t a dirt cheap indie.

Both Last Night & Seeking a Friend for the End of the World center their tales of a world unraveling on a neurotic male protagonist who faces dying alone after the recent departure of his romantic partner & the impending doom of an inevitable Apocalypse. Unlike Patrick’s wife in Last Night, who died before the announcement of the world’s end, Steve Carell’s protagonist in Seeking a Friend loses his own wife to infidelity and she bolts from their marriage in the opening scene. In both features, the leads are neurotic men who can’t will themselves to join in the orgiastic parties surrounding them as they wrestle with their grief, but instead take unexpected comfort in newly-formed intimacies with total strangers (Sandra Oh in Last Night, Kiera Knightly in Seeking a Friend). News broadcasts continue to the bitter end in both films; insurance & gas companies continue to function; riots overtake the cities; characters obsess over curating their life-ending soundtracks, including off-screen radio DJs. What really ties the films together outside of their narrative details, however, is their general search for an authentic response to a world-ending crisis. Once the initial shock of a Doomsday scenario fades, what does worldwide grief look like and how can it be reflected in the personal response of a lone protagonist? Last Night and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World stand out from their temporal peers & reflect each other’s unique tones through this pursuit of a believable, down tempo Apocalypse.

As much as I enjoy Seeking a Friend as a down tempo comedy, however, I don’t think it quite measures up to the significance of Last Night as a unique work. Last Night is an odd little duck. It may feature a Gen-X 90s tone in its humor (along with a unfortunate influence from Woody Allen neuroticism), but it does carve out a very specific space that’s indicative of Don McKellar’s authorial voice. Seeking a Friend, by contrast, feels very conventional for a major studio comedy, a project by committee. Where Last Night finds small moments of shared, nonverbal intimacy, Seeking a Friend filters its entire plot into a familiar romcom formula. It also trades in Last Night‘s everything-is-connected ensemble cast structure for a more traditionally linear road trip narrative and unfortunately allows its female lead slip into something of a manic pixie dream girl cliché, which is far from the devastating performance Sandra Oh gives in her role. Most tellingly, Last Night never feels the need to explain how or why the world is ending because it doesn’t necessarily inform its characters’ behavior, but Seeking a Friend feels the need to spell it out in the very first scene. You can readily see exact gags that reflect each other in both works. The brilliant “Taking Care of Business” guitar jam gag in Last Night is reflected in Seeking a Friend’s End of the World Awareness Concert & its radio DJ promising “a countdown to the End of Days along with all of your classic rock favorites.” Craig from Last Night‘s pursuit of bucket list sexual experiences is represented in Seeking a Friend by a family restaurant called Friendly’s that’s devolved into a nonstop pansexual orgy. The movies do share a lot of content in their smaller details. However, Last Night employs them for a much more unique effect than the cookie cutter comedy beats of Seeking a Friend (as funny as they can be).

I think what’s most interesting here is just how normalized the idea of a low stakes response to the end of the world had become between 1999 & 2012. Don McKellar’s Apocalypse comedy is a dirt cheap production with a small cast & limited scope. Seeking a Friend, by contrast, features two recognizable stars (along with a long list of the time’s comedic up & comers: Patton Oswalt, Rob Corddry, Rob Huebel, Amy Schumer, Gillian Jacobs, TJ Miller, I’m out of breath) and spreads its story out over a wide range of road trip-driven set pieces. It’s far from a summer blockbuster in terms of scale, but it still boasts the generic feel of a studio-funded romantic comedy, however dark. When Don McKellar made Last Night in 1999, concluding an ensemble cast black comedy with a bright light signifying the Apocalypse was weird fodder for an off-kilter, low budget indie production. By 2012, it was familiar enough territory for a major studio romcom starring two household names. That’s a fairly quick turnaround on pop culture sensibilities, all things considered.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003)

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fourstar

Director Guy Maddin is a weird little cookie. Admittedly I’ve only seen a small sampling of his work, but I’ve yet to fall in love with another one of his features quite as hard as I did with his beer-themed black comedy The Saddest Music in the World. His films are always interesting, though, if a little exhausting. Last year’s The Forbidden Room was a beautiful set of interconnected, humorous vignettes that worked really well for me as isolated short films, kind of like high art sketch comedy, but were especially tiring as a full-length collection. Looking a little further into Maddin’s catalog, though, the director has plenty of full-length experiments dedicated to a single idea; his ballet horror Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, for instance, is a much more focused & disciplined effort that matches his trademark visual aesthetic to its most logical genre structure. By fully committing to a single narrative & matching Maddin’s deliberately aged visuals to a silent horror era aesthetic, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary proves to be a much more digestible exhibition of the director’s peculiar talents than any of his vignette-structured works. This is a film with extremely limited commercial appeal and it’s one that might take the full context of his career to fully appreciate what he’s doing with the material, but it’s just as beautiful and amusing and flippantly high brow as anything he’s ever accomplished. I love seeing him indulge a single idea at a feature’s length and Pages from a Virgin’s Diary exemplifies exactly why that kind of extended focus is ideal for his directorial style, even when the main conceit is so narrowly minded.

Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is not a ballet-themed horror so much as a horror-themed ballet. The film finds Maddin shooting a straightforward ballet production of the Dracula story in a cinematic context. Instead of hanging back to display the dancers’ full bodies & artistry, he cuts the frame in very tightly and adds silent film era intertitles to advance the plot instead of conveying story entirely through dance. The playing-to-the-back-row stage play expressiveness of the ballet works really well in tandem with Maddin’s style, though, which requires a broad physical performance to recall the vaudevillian days of early cinema. Often, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary plays like a high art horror comedy. It makes a weird joke out of the details of Dracula lore: drowning the frame in cartoonishly large piles of garlic, mirroring Love & Friendship‘s character introduction gags with details like “Eater of Bugs,” playing the bumbling hubris of men for humor (like when Van Helsing performs the most inefficient & smugly disgusted gynecological exam of all time on Dracula’s prime victim). Maddin’s sly humor is contrasted with the dead babies, decapitations, and sexual violence of the source material to make for a truly horrifying, but strikingly flippant viewing experience, one that’s sex jokes & vampire kills are made oddly delicate by its very nature as a ballet. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary might be the kind of high faulting art film pretension that rolls eyes & changes channels at first glance, but it’s also playfully subversive in its prankster humor & genuine horror thrills, making for a very worthy entry in the director’s catalog, despite its deceptively slight premise.

Of course, as with all Guy Maddin projects, the flashiest aspect of Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is the director’s dedication to visual craft. Deliberately degraded film, tinted color changes, a screen segmented into tight parallel lines: Maddin seems to be working in a digital medium here, but his trademark throwback to ancient cinema past matches the material exceedingly well, making me desperately curious about what a high budget version of this movie would look like. The ballet aspect of the film is the only dynamic that distinguishes it from a genuine silent horror, but that aspect does feed into Maddin’s aesthetic as a traditionalist. I also had great appreciation for the way he played with the film’s pacing, speeding up comedic bits to a movie trailer tempo for greater humorous effect and slowing down certain ballet flourishes for moments of lyrical contrast. You won’t find many horror comedies this visually interesting or poetically minded, with giant pipe organs spewing green gas & perverted sex demons filling the frame between subtle gags about modesty & desire. Even if it isn’t his best film, you also won’t find a much more concise argument for Maddin’s distinct talents as a director, as he transforms traditional mediums like ballet, silent film, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula into something entirely new & oddly fresh. I’d love to dig up more of his features that are dedicated to exploring a single concept for the entirety of their runtimes. He seems like a director who has too many ideas at once and too little time or funding to follow them all at length, so I should probably be exceedingly grateful for the times such as this, when he finds inspiration to break out of his usual short film format and follow one spectacularly weird idea (say, a traditional ballet shot as a high art horror comedy) to a feature length. It’s his best self.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)

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fourhalfstar

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I’m not sure how much of my ecstatic reaction to the 1960 Italian horror cheapie The Vampire and the Ballerina had to do with my pitifully low expectations going in, but the film bowled me over. Where I expected lazy, thoughtless schlock, I happened to find something deliriously strange and carefully made. The Vampire and the Ballerina resembles so much cheaply made cult classic trash of its era, from the burlesque horror of Cat Women of the Moon to the vampiric kills & stock footage reliance of Plan 9 from Outer Space to the rubber mask monsters of The Brainiac. And yet, for a film so silly & so rooted in the context of its time, this throwaway horror title paradoxically feels ahead of the crowd in terms of where horror was going to go in the future. Hammer House horror, style over substance giallo, and, especially, over-sexed European vampire films of the 60s & 70s all feel somewhat indebted to the weirdly off-kilter shocks, scares, and titillation lurking in this strange little genre film. This is the exact kind of rare gem I’m looking for when I’m digging through piles of trash cinema and, as usual, I found it in a place I least expected it.

A group of young, attractive, scantily clad dancers are “preparing a ballet” while guests at a wealthy man’s estate near a remote village. There are several mysterious murders coinciding with their stay, explained by local superstitions to be the work of a vampire. The film’s rules adhere to traditional vampire lore: deadly sunlight, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses, the whole deal. It only adds the caveat of the monsters needing to feed under a full moon to that dynamic, a little flavor borrowed from werewolf pictures. At first, the girls’ wealthy host (who wears capes & seems to know an awful lot about vampire history) or one of their macho beaus seem like prime suspects for these murders, but this film is anything but a murder mystery. As soon as the vampires appear onscreen, posing as gracious hosts of a crypt-like castle, you know for a fact that they’re the perpetrators. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina (a title that really should be pluralized) gets weird is in the strange revelation of how the two vampires’ relationship works. It’s a bizarre glimpse into one of cinema’s most toxic codependent relationships, a weirdly unromantic back & forth that’s far more satisfying than any who’s-the-undead-killer mystery could have possibly been.

The film’s thematic weirdness is only amplified by its strikingly thoughtful (although cheaply produced) cinematography. Images of silhouettes growing on cave walls, passing sky & falling dirt seen from the POV of a freshly bit victim being buried “alive,” and the vampire’s legitimately upsetting rubber mask & plaster visage all combine to make for a much more striking visual experience than you’d typically expect from this kind of work. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina shines best, though, is when it combines this visual thoughtfulness with the tawdry horniness that drives its most base thrills. The movie makes no excuse for oggling at the dancers as they lounge around in flimsy underwear and perform in revealing tights.The shameless butt shots in the dance scenes, which fuse ballet with world music & burlesque, crowd the screen in a leering cacophony of hip shaking, leg flashing filth. This combines in other scenes with the film’s more lyrical ambitions to make for some truly strange, sexually charged imagery: a victim shot from between her killer’s legs (a la Slumber Party Massacre), stock footage trees thrashing in the wind as hypnotized women writhe in sexual frustration, a woman sunbathing on a rock as a background waterfall flows the frame’s attention directly to her crotch. The Vampire and the Ballerina is in every way cheap, artful filth and I’m in awe of how much memorable imagery it was able to generate in spite of being such a slack jawed work of horror-minded eroticism.

I don’t want to make this sound as if it’s some long lost masterpiece that could rival the heights of a Bava or a Corman-Cycle Poe. It’s a deeply silly movie, one that features several nonsensical minutes of women chasing each other through the woods to big band music for reasons I couldn’t explain if I tried. I do, however, believe that The Vampire and the Ballerina has some strong, untapped cult classic potential. Cynically made as a cash grab in the wake of Christopher Lee’s Dracula finding popularity in Italy, this is a deliberately over-sexed work that anyone under the age of 16 was banned from watching at the theater. You can feel those trashy origins in every frame of The Vampire and the Ballerina, but the film still manages to be a surprisingly artful experience for me. Anyone who regularly enjoys a slice of cheap black & white schlock should get a kick out of the film’s creature designs & shameless, theremin-scored burlesque. What’ll really stick with you if you’re on that wavelength, though, is the strange relationship dynamics between its vampiric killers & the artfully odd images the film manages to pull out of a seemingly nonexistent budget. If you watch enough of these kinds of horror titles, they start to blend together and everything begins to feel monotonous; The Vampire and the Ballerina is an exciting reminder that there’s still weirdo outliers out there waiting to be discovered. There’s still gems lurking in cinema’s discarded trash.

-Brandon Ledet

Mad Moana: Fury Cove

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Disney’s Moana (2016) was a jarringly alienating experience for me in a way I haven’t felt since venturing to the theater to watch John Waters’s brief cameo in Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip (although the raucous laughter at my screening of the brutally unfunny Deadpool ranks as a close second). I just had no business being there, to the point where I have no business rating or reviewing the film in any traditional way. I’ve had positive experiences going out of my comfort zone to watch highly-praised Disney productions this year, namely Zootopia and The Jungle Book, but with Moana I was way out of my league. The buffoonish sidekicks, the uncanny valley CGI, the constant indulgences in  *cringe* musical theater: Moana was mostly just a reminder that Disney’s princess mode, no matter how highly praised, is just not for me. Brave, Mulan, Frozen, and so on have all alienated me in the same way (with The Little Mermaid being a rare exception to the rule) and not even song & dance numbers from the likes of a pro wrestler (The Rock), a Flight of the Conchords vet (Jemaine Clement), and a Godzilla cameo could turn me around on an experience that was so uncomfortably foreign to every fiber of my being. Moana did feature one isolated gag that spoke directly to me, though, an extended homage to Immortan Joe & the War Boys, just about the last influence I expected to find in a Polynesian Disney Princess action adventure.

The filmmakers behind Moana (an extensive team that has included names as significant as Hamilton‘s king nerd Lin Manuel Miranda & comedic genius Taika Waititi at some point in its production) have acknowledged in interviews that the film’s homage to Mad Max: Fury Road was indeed intentional, so I’m not just grasping at straws for something to enjoy here. The homage is brief, however, and although the film was not nearly as much of an obnoxiously undignified experience as Road Chip, it did remind me of mining the entirety of that work for a pitifully minuscule glimpse at the Pope of Trash. While on their quest to restore order in the world via a pebble-sized MacGuffin, Moana & [The Rock] are at one point pursued by a tribal army of Kakamora, a fiendish crew of mythical spirits who take the physical form of coconut War Boys, complete with their own coconut Immortan Joe. The Kakamora approach Moana’s puny-by-comparison boat in massive warships, attempting to board her ship & rob her of her all-important MacGuffin Pebble. Moana doesn’t directly reference Fury Road with any specific visual cues; it instead tries to mimic the feel & the scale of George Miller’s massive accomplishment in a more general way. The Kakamora appear in ocean mist the way the War Boys appear in the kicked-up dust of desert sands. They tether their ships to their target vessel as a means to both board it and slow it’d progress. Most tellingly, they play themselves into battle with a live music soundtrack of tribal drums. All that’s missing from the scene is a blind little Kakamora threateningly riffing on a coconut guitar.

If history has proven anything it’s that I’ll continue to shell out money for any new theatrical version of Fury Road that achieves distribution: 2D, 3D, (most absurdly) black & white. I doubt I’ll ever stop returning to that well and, alongside its stellar reviews from those more in tune with the merits of the Disney Princess™ brand, just the mere mention of a Fury Road homage was enough to drag me to the theater for a CG cartoon musical I had no business watching in the first place. In some ways it’s tempting to read into how Moana & Fury Road communicate plot-wise. Both films center on a female badass trying to welcome back Nature to a crumbling society  by employing a storied male warrior sidekick & the restorative help of water to defeat an evil presence and convert a longtime patriarchy to a matriarchal structure. In both instances, success also hinges on a race to a narrow physical passage that seems impossible to reach in time. These shared sentiments are likely entirely coincidental, though. Borrowing a little of Immortan Joe’s War Boy mayhem for its coconut pirates was simply a means to an end. Besides being a delightful nod to a property you wouldn’t expect to be referenced in this context, it also affords a key action sequence the sense of scale & visual specificity that makes George Miller one of the greatest visual minds of the genre. So much of Moana was Not For Me (which is obviously my fault and not the movie’s), so it was kinda nice in those few fleeting minutes to mentally return to a property that is a continuous source of personal pleasure. Moana was smart to borrow some scale & adrenaline from Fury Road in a scene that desperately needed the excitement (despite the Kakamora never registering as at all significant to the overall plot). Honestly, though, I was just glad to have the film’s more alienating musical theater & CGI sidekick buffoonery broken up by something familiar & genuinely badass that offered me a moment of escape from what was a personally misguided ticket purchase.

-Brandon Ledet

The Best of NOFF 2016 Ranked & Reviewed

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It already felt a little odd last year to post my Belated NOFF 2015 Report a whole month after the festival had concluded. Having attended more than twice the amount of films I caught at last year’s New Orleans Film Fest this time around, it took me even longer to publish a review for everything I saw. Here we are almost two months since the fest had passed and I’m finally gathering all of those titles in one spot. This better late than never round-up is going to be a little more bare bones & listicle-esque than last year’s, since there isn’t much of a worthwhile story to tell about how I caught this year’s screenings. CC & I recorded a more fleshed out recap of our festival experience on Episode #17 of the podcast in case you’re interested in hearing about the weird goings-on at the NOFF headquarters of the Ace Hotel or the surreal experience of watching a grotesque body horror screened at the mostly empty Aquarium IMAX theater. This list is more of a simplistic ranking of the titles I managed to catch at this year’s festival than that kind of a review.

Here’s a ranking of every film I’ve seen that screened at the New Orleans Film Fest in 2016. Each title includes a link to a corresponding review. I obviously did not have the opportunity to see everything that interested me at the festival (missing out on Manchester by the Sea, Contemporary Color, and Hara Kiri were particular disappointments). I also had to catch up with a couple titles after the fact, specifically Moonlight & Daughters of the Dust, due to scheduling conflicts. Again, there’s more context for these kinds of programming notes in our podcast episode on the festival. However, I do think it’s worth mentioning here that although (the strangely wonderful & sadly underrated) Girl Asleep was scheduled to screen at NOFF, it was pulled at the last minute and that, with the exception of White Girl, I enjoyed everything I managed to see to varying degrees, which made for an overall positive festival experience. Without further ado, here’s everything I watched at the 27th annual New Orleans Film Fest ranked & reviewed.

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1. Multiple Maniacs – “It’s impossible to divorce the context from the content in this case, because John Waters is such a highly specific stylist & works so closely with a steady cast of nontraditional ‘actors,’ but even if the director had never made another feature in his life I believe the world would still be talking about Multiple Maniacs all these decades later. Horror films this weird & this grotesquely fun are rarely left behind or forgotten and, given the devotion of Waters’s more dedicated fans, I’m honestly surprised it took this long for this one to get its proper due.”

2. Moonlight (winner of the NOFF Audience Award for Spotlight Film: Narrative) – “In Moonlight, Barry Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make a meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively.”

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3. The Handmaiden – “As a lesbian erotic thriller with meticulous dedication to craft & a Tarantino-esque celebration of crime & revenge narratives, the film plays like an unholy combination of the flashier aspects of Bound & The Duke of Burgundy, if you could believe such a thing was possible. It’s a gleefully tawdry art piece that takes great delight in its own narrative cleverness, but also constructs a strong enough visual foundation for its flashy storytelling style to shine instead of annoy. If The Handmaiden were a little uglier or if its bigger reveals were held until its final moments, its tonal balancing act might have crumbled disastrously. As is, it’s too fun & too beautiful to resist.”

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4. Are We Not Cats? – “For all its dirty Detroit soul & doom metal sound cues, colorful Quintron-esque musical contraptions, and horrific flashes of skincrawl gore, Are We Not Cats is a film ultimately about intimacy & mutual addiction. As memorable as its grotesque, psychedelic freak-outs can be, their impact is equaled if not bested by the tender melancholy of lines like ‘When was the last memory you have of not being truly alone?’ The details of the romance that ends that loneliness construct a body horror nightmare of open sores & swallowed hair, but still play as oddly sweet in a minor, intimate way that underlines the film’s viscerally memorable strengths & forgives a lot of its more overly-familiar narrative impulses.”

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5. Cheerleader – “Cheerleader is a surprisingly dark comedy that repurposes the subversive bubblegum pop of 90s teen movies for a quietly surreal fantasy piece. The film exists in a cartoon reality of its own outside time & logic and uses familiar teen comedy beats to establish a darkly surreal mood and a tender mode of complete emotional devastation. It’s subtly brilliant, quietly intricate, and deserves the mass attention of wide distribution, especially considering the way it evokes an era of currently bankable nostalgia by reimagining instead of merely mimicking.”

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6. Ovarian Psycos – “There’s a lesson to be learned in the way Ovarian Psycos broadcasts its profile of the titular feminist biking crew without pushing for disingenuous story beats. It may open itself to accusations of being narratively slight or thematically thin, but the truth is witnessing this group of women simply existing out there in the world is more than enough to justify the film’s existence. Anything more would be dishonest.”

7. Daughters of the Dust – “Julie Dash’s film is a sometimes impenetrable, but often beautiful evocation of a mood & a spirit. It may first appear from the outside to be a historical work about the Gullah people on the precipice of the modern world, but Daughters of the Dust strives to be something much grander & harder to pinpoint than that reductive description suggests and it’s near-impossible not to admire the film’s ambitions even when its individual moments aren’t wholly successful.”

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8. My First Kiss and the People Involved (winner of the NOFF Audience Award for Narrative Feature) – “My First Kiss and the People Involved traffics in the standard indie drama empathy inherent to small scale films about systemic mental health care. However, it also mirrors the helplessness & delusion of its disenfranchised subjects by veering into the unexpected territory of a psychological horror. At times, the film’s tense paranoia & dread of sudden violence plays like the silent horror classic A Page of Madness by way of a classic Hitchcock thriller, which is not at all the expectation or precedent it sets in its more tender, but familiar first act.”

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9. Check It– “Check It works best when it shows the kids chowing on fast food, discussing their Instagram aesthetics, and listening to artists like Cakes da Killa or Dominique Young Unique. It loses a little credibility in its celebratory air when it asks queer kids to change themselves to survive, especially since they had managed to survive on their own despite the overwhelming odds for long enough to make a name for themselves and attract this attention in the first place. If they ever find a way to inspire internal inspiration for change & progress within their own ranks they’ll be unstoppable. It’ll also make for a much less compromised documentary.”

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10. White Girl – “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.”

-Brandon Ledet

Hush (2016)

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threehalfstar

There’s still a few weeks of breathing room left for 2016 to surprise us with a year-defining trend, but barring an unexpected radical shift, I think it’s safe to call it The Year of the Confined Space Thriller. Between Green Room, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Invitation, Emelie, and Don’t Breathe, the year had already delivered enough efficient, violent thrillers with cramped locales to earn that distinction, but with this genre entry from horror director Mike Flanagan, 2016’s fate has essentially already been sealed. Like with Flanagan’s other modest budget genre works Oculus & Ouija: Origin of Evil, his confined space thriller Hush turns a straightforward, familiar formula into an exciting exercise in suspense-building & tone. Although it’s the only feature in that trio not to earn a proper theatrical release (Hush was distributed by Netflix), it’s just as enjoyable as anything else I’ve seen from the director. The worst you could say about Hush is that in a year crammed with excellent confined space thrillers this one is merely very good while being far from the best. It’s unfair to ding Flanagan for submitting a worthy entry into a flooded market, but we are certainly on the edge of being oversaturated with this particular genre this year, which makes it difficult for any films that traffics in that territory to stand out.

As far as standing out from its genre peers goes, Hush doesn’t do itself any favors in terms of plot. A home invasion thriller about a lone woman fighting off a mysterious male assailant, Hush resembles too many movies to count. Even its distinguishing details feel overly familiar. Our woman in peril protagonist is a novelist who writes the very same kind of plots she falls victim to; she even has Stephen King books lining her shelves & winking at the audience. The movie’s main conceit is that she is especially vulnerable to her attacker because she is deaf & mute, as hinted at in the film’s title. This is a slight deviation from films like See No Evil, Wait Until Dark, and Don’t Breathe, as blindness is typically the preferred handicap in this kind of genre territory, but it doesn’t stray too far from the usual blueprint, all things considered. There’s no real twists or surprises to the way Hush plays out; this is not coming from the same place as the much more experimental You’re Next. Instead, Hush survives on the strengths of its details. Because it’s a dialogue-light affair that frequently communicates through body & sign language, its muted soundscape sets a unique tone. The endangered novelist uses her talent for plotting to help decipher a possible way out of her plight. The slight smile on its killer’s fixed, stoic mask is a subtle nightmare. The film uses very brutal, but highly specific tools in its sudden bursts of intense violence: a kitchen knife, a hammer, a crossbow, a slammed door. 

Nothing in Hush is especially surprising once you get a handle on what kind of story it wants to tell, but the film still impresses in its competence & efficiency. Considering the familiar ghost story territory of both Oculus & Origin of Evil, that competence seems to be Flanagan’s speciality. I’ve yet to fall madly in love with a single one of his films, but they’re all memorably enjoyable & well crafted. If someone were asking for examples of the greatest home invasion thrillers of all time, it’s doubtful that Hush would make many lists. If, however, someone were merely looking for a list of recent thrillers that were particularly well made, this one might deserve a nod. The only problem is that it happens to have a lot of company this year, maybe even too much for a crossbow or a creepy mask to give it a fighting chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Knock Knock (2015)

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threehalfstar

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I’ve never bothered watching an Eli Roth movie before, mostly because I associate him with the mid 00s torture porn aesthetic that I generally try to avoid in my horror binges. Roth has a way of sneaking into other projects I’m interested in, though, and I’ve started to notice over the years that he seems to have a sense of humor to his work that I had missed out on from the outside looking in. If you judge Roth solely by his fake Thanksgiving trailer for the Grindhouse project, his performance as “The Bear Jew” in Inglourious Basterds, and his production work on the campy body horror Clown, he comes off as much less misanthropic than his usual reputation would suggest. As sick as his sense of humor seems to be, I’ve come to think of Roth as something of a prankster. If you need a brief glimpse of what I’m getting at, look to the trailer for Roth’s recent home invasion piece Knock Knock. Everything from Keanu Reeves’s strange line deliveries to the film’s cheap digital look to its winking title suggests that it’s supposed to play like a joke. I’m not sure that I have enough context to settle that question of Roth’s tonal intent on my own, but I can say that if Knock Knock was indeed meant to be a setup for a joke, the punchline was constantly amusing, making for a decent entry point into a career I’ve been too grossed out to approach for more than a decade now.

A nasty exploitation thriller that resembles a direct-to-DVD knockoff of Funny Games, it’s tempting to view Knock Knock in the same light as more typifying Eli Roth ventures like Hostel or Green Inferno. Whereas those titles have a pointed central message (usually about cultural tourism & American entitlement) & a dedication to gut-wrenching gore, however, Knock Knock is much more deliberately ditzy. Keanu Reeves plays a doting husband who’s alone for the weekend in his beautiful home when two young women knock on his door soaked & shivering in the rain. He’s initially kind to the girls, but far from predatory; things eventually get too steamy for him to resist, though, as the girls flirtatiously pressure him into cheating on his wife over the course of a night lifted straight out of a letter to Penthouse. Of course, as soon as he cheats his doom is sealed and the girls immediately switch from sexual fantasy to violent nightmare. They destroy his home, yip like wild dogs, tie him up, sexually assault him, and stab him with food utensils. You could search for meaning or a sense of morality in their gleeful chaos, maybe something about the gender reversal of predatory sexuality or about how all men are liars & cheats under the surface, but the film feels far too deliberately empty-headed for any of those themes to register. Instead, all that shines through is a Daisies-esque dedication to pointless, childlike abandon (except without the political context or attention to visual craft). Knock Knock is much more of a nihilist comedy than a pointed satire of gender politics and the psyche of the modern American husband/father.

One of the reasons it’s difficult to tell if the comedy was entirely intentional here is that it largely comes across in the performances. Keanu Reeves has a bewildering way of balancing between overacting & underacting, with no measured sense of middle ground, that plays so damn weird when he’s given enough space to chew scenery. In Knock Knock, he reaches Nic Cage levels of distracting performance, a one man camp spectacle that often feels as if he’s making fun of his own lines instead of trying to sell them. There’s an obvious humor to his delivery of lines like, “Wowww, chocolate with sprinkles!,” “Do you kids want to live in a box?,” and “It was free pizza!,” but they’re far from Keanu’s only amusing line readings. Something about the way he says things like, “What’s the point of this?!,” “I’m a good person. I made a mistake,” and “I’m an architect, so I believe that things happen by your own design,” points directly back to how hacky & corny the script is on a fundamental level, to the point where the film plays more like sketch comedy than erotic thriller. Actors Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo have an obvious blast playing Reeves’s seductors/tormentors, but even their over-the-top, childlike exuberance somehow can’t match the strangely inhuman way he quietly delivers his lines. Knock Knock truly is Reeves’s Wicker Man (2006) or his Vampire’s Kiss. It’s just waiting to be picked apart and cut down to YouTube memery.

The only question I have is exactly how much Roth was participating in the humor of this film. Knock Knock features a female-on-male rape, raises questions about childhood sexual abuse & incest, and indulges in the exact modes of life-threatening violence you’d expect from a self-serious home invasion exploitation piece, so it’s tempting to believe the director meant for his audience to take the film at face value. However, there’s just as much evidence to the contrary onscreen. Besides Roth’s prankster past & the joke plainly hinted at in Knock Knock‘s title, there’s a visual play to the movie that matched Reeves’s weirdo comedy energy, particularly in the way the frame lingers on details like the Hollywood sign & strategically-placed portraits of its protagonist’s family. If Knock Knock were meant to play as a straightforward thriller about predatory sexuality & the dangers of infidelity, I’d say it was a thorough misfire. As a nasty comedy overflowing with pointless nihilism & memorably campy performances, however, the film resonates a consistent success. I may not know enough about Eli Roth to decidedly say where this film falls on that divide, but I can honestly report that it amused me for the entirety of its runtime, which was a lot more payoff than what I expected to take away from this one.

-Brandon Ledet

In the Candyman Sequels Atmosphere Isn’t Evoked, It’s Appropriated

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Director Bernard Rose started his career off strong with a couple of deeply creepy works that evoke most of their strange horror thrills from a mood & a tone rather than explicit bursts of violence. Rose’s debut film Paperhouse, which we recently covered as a Movie of the Month feature, was especially striking in this regard, chilling me to the bone with its sparse dreamworld sets & Hans Zimmer score, despite its story more or less framing the film as a kids’ fantasy piece. I was so struck by Paperhouse that I immediately sought out Rose’s most recognizable work, Candyman (1992), to see how effective that same chilling  atmosphere could be when applied to a legitimate horror film. Candyman did not disappoint in that regard, deploying a lot of Paperhouse‘s same spooky sounds (now provided by Phillip Glass) & dreamworld settings to a bloody supernatural slasher about a murdered slave’s ghost with a hook for a hand who exists in a mirror dimension and is comprised entirely of bees. It was fascinating, one of the stranger horror films I’ve seen all year. It was so fascinating, in fact, that I was compelled to watch both of the film’s less-than-stellar sequels over the course of that same weekend, despite their dire adherence to the law of diminishing returns. Without Rose’s guiding hand the Candyman sequels tended to rely more on shocking violence and false alarm jump scares than genuine mood to evoke their genre thrills, which I suppose is to be expected. A trend they followed that did surprise me, though, was the way they continued to attempt the specificity of Rose’s atmospheric horror not through imagination in the screenplay process, but through borrowing from cultures that already had a mood-evoking atmosphere ready to go.

In the case of the first sequel, I found the atmosphere appropriation to be hilarious, because it happened to be set amidst a culture I live with daily. Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995) is set entirely in New Orleans, the French Quarter specifically, and it bends over backwards to remind you of that setting every chance it gets. References to gumbo, chicory, voodoo, and hurricanes color every line of dialogue that can make room for them. A Dr. John-esque radio DJ archetype narrates the film with local turns of phrase absolutely no one will identify with like, “The banks of the mighty Mississippi are ready to spill their seed” in reference to potential flooding, and (I swear this is true) taunts the titular killer with the line, “This goes out to the man with the hook. Man, chill. Relax. Have some gumbo or something.” The film also can’t resist staging its slashings during Mardi Gras, of course, providing a colorful backdrop of weirdos in costumes to heighten the atmosphere of its bee-filled mirror realm killer’s less than seemly past time. As I tried to explain in my review of Les Blank’s wonderful documentary Always for Pleasure, the spirit of Mardi Gras is an elusive beast, one that’s frustratingly difficult to accurately capture on film. Much to my surprise, Farewell to the Flesh didn’t do all that bad of a job capturing Carnival, at least not as bad as I’ve seen it done in the past. Yes, the whole thing feels very sound-stagey and the festivities are set mostly at night instead of the daylight, which are common mistakes, but the film at the very least captures some of the puke-splattered grotesqueness & disoriented debauchery of the world’s best holiday in fleeting moments, so I’m willing to give it a pass there. What really makes me laugh about its New Orleans themed cultural markers is in the non-Mardi Gras details. For instance, the protagonist & Candyman’s blonde victim du jour at one point visits a snowball stand (which are typically housed in dirt cheap roadside shacks for those unfamiliar) that’s located blocks away from the St. Louis Cathedral in one of the most expensive-looking buildings in the Quarter. And, of course, behind a fake wall in this snowball stand, its apparent billionaire proprietor stocks a bunch of voodoo paraphernalia and information on the Candyman (who is revealed to be a local) that conveniently expands his backstory between the increasingly violent kills. It’s this kind of reliance on and misunderstanding of local color that provides atmosphere in Bernard Rose’s absence in these damned things that make the Candyman sequels such a misguided hoot.

The problem gets much worse in Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999). As you can likely guess from the direct-to-DVD sequel’s not-so-coy title, the film is set during a Día de Muertos celebration in Los Angeles. Farewell to the Flesh made a conscious effort to tie the Candyman’s lore into New Orleans’s slave trade history to justify its appropriation of Mardi Gras atmosphere. Day of the Dead just makes shit up as it goes along. The young girl from the last scene of the second film ages decades in a four year span and funds her adult artist’s life by collecting the paintings Candyman made while a living slave (paintings that look suspiciously like large department store prints of family portraits) and leasing them to galleries. Moving the story from New Orleans to the L.A. arts scene does little for the story except to provide excuses for setting the murders against a Latino community’s Día de Muertos celebration. The film’s depiction of that celebration looks an awful lot like the sound stage Mardi Gras of Farewell to the Flesh, except with sugar skulls and piñatas substituted for that work’s parade floats & plastic beads. The only attempt to tie it into the Candyman’s established lore is when the holiday is explained to be valuable because it “reminds us that death is sweet,” which is meant to recall the ghost killer’s cryptic catchphrase “Sweets to the sweet.” Otherwise, Day of the Dead‘s titular setting is just a shameless pilfering of atmosphere that it couldn’t create on its own, so it outsourced it from a culture where its story didn’t naturally belong. The local color of Candyman 3 is more or less a background afterthought, setting the stage for the film’s true bread & butter: ludicrous jump scares & gratuitous gore. The film was good for some occasional laughs: the goth gang that kidnaps the pouty supermodel artist protagonist is guilty of some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a film; when slamming back tequila, a Hispanic man shouts, “Oooh chihuahua!”; there’s a sequence where a nameless art groupie slathers her tits with honey as foreplay and is immediately swarmed by the Candyman’s killer bee army. It’s a far cry from the atmospheric horror Rose established in the first film, though, and it’s weird to think they’re at all connected.

Not much stays consistent in the Candyman franchise except Candyman himself. Actor Tony Todd portrays the titular killer in each film (it must be bittersweet to headline your own franchise and then be required to let bees crawl in your mouth every damn movie) and although his backstory expands, he largely remains consistent. By the third film, the spooky sounds of Phillip Glass and stylistic supervision of writer Clive Barker were long gone from the series, given way to soft, bargain bin hip-hop & nu-metal slasher cheapness. The Candyman continues to gaslight his prime victims by framing them for  horrific murders and I guess you could thematically tie them together by saying each entry follows an academic type who’s punished for skeptically investigating cultural superstitions in urban POC communities. Otherwise, the setting-hopping plays like novelty backdrops for the film’s increasing indulgence in shameless gore and an easy distraction from its decreasing interest in atmosphere. Personally, I found the Mardi Gras set shenanigans of Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh to be a campy delight, especially as the film tried to cram as many New Orleans-specific references as it could in dialogue where it most definitely did not belong. You’d have to ask someone who regularly celebrates Día de Muertos in L.A. if Candyman 3′s mishandling of that cultural setting is just as hilariously off (I’d be willing to bet it is), but what’s vividly clear is that both sequels traded the genuine terror of its initial atmosphere, provided by Paperhouse’s Bernard Rose, for the novelty of cultural atmosphere shoehorned into places where its story didn’t really belong. According to the Candyman sequels, when atmosphere can’t be sincerely evoked, it’s best (or at least easiest) to just borrow it from elsewhere.

-Brandon Ledet

Ovarian Psycos (2016)

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I previously complained that the recent documentary Check It stumbled somewhat in its oral history of a disenfranchised “gang” of queer kids, undercutting its celebration of their self-made, survivalist culture by glorifying attempts to “reform” & normalize them through outsider gang counselor influences. A more honest & less self-conflicted version of the story might’ve focused more on the way the kids had already saved their own lives through (admittedly violent) solidarity long before the cameras even showed up. The documentary Ovarian Psycos seems to be that exact idealized version of Check It I was hoping for, just one that covers a wildly different topic from the opposite end of the US.

Instead of documenting a queer gang in Washington DC like Check It, Ovarian Psycos profiles an all women of color bicycle brigade from Los Angeles. Comprised mostly of abuse survivors & DIY punks and inspired by the Chicano social justice movement of the 1970s, Ovarian Psycos attempt to claim public space for women of color by organizing mass bike rides & community fundraising in a self-actualized, unapologetically feminist act of revolution in action. This documentary allows them to tell their own story without influence or judgement, only stepping in to provide historical context when necessary. In a lot of ways it’s the ideally calibrated document of small, marginalized groups like this. It finds a fascinating subject, allows them to talk, and then backs the fuck up, giving them space to be their already wonderful selves. The film will occasionally allow gatekeeping, masculine voices of dissent to enter the conversation as context for how the bicycle collective’s accomplishments are often trivialized, but these moments mostly serve as contrast to a powerful strength in numbers that’s too potent & too obvious to refute. In scenes like when a group of women previously anxious about being in public at night join in a militaristic chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” on a monthly “Luna Ride,” the impact the Ovarian Psycos crew has made on their community doesn’t need to be explained; it just needs to be broadcast to inspire similar change elsewhere.

Besides allowing the impact of its subject speak for itself, one thing Ovarian Psycos truly excels at is intersectionality. The brand of feminism promoted here takes into account issues of race, poverty, gender identity, social justice history, and every other concern that can often be overlooked in more narrow-minded wings of feminism. There’s a fun, playful aesthetic to the crew’s branding is familiar to a lot of flashier feminist forms of protest: ovary & fallopian tube graphics printed on bandanas, calling their recruiters “clit rubbers,” organizing their rides around the phases of the moon, etc. As lighthearted as some of these details can seem, the crew’s need to create a safe space is never downplayed or trivialized. They were raised to believe they lived in a literal warzone where women weren’t safe alone at night without a man’s protection. Biking with Ovarian Psycos is not only exciting for them because it allows them to be surrounded solely by other women; it also empowers them to proudly exist in a space where they were taught to cower. Although they are mostly made of cisgender Latina women from specific neighborhoods in L.A., you can feel them reaching across all cultural, class, race, geographical, and gender identity lines to include more women in that sense of empowerment and the movie does its best to promote that ideology openly & without apology.

There’s an incredible specificity to Ovarian Psycos’s titular subject that helps its political messages ring true & genuine on a more universal scale. There’s even a sort of novelty to the basic concept of a documentary on an all-female bicycle brigade on a fundamental level. The group’s founder is a single mother Latina rapper with a devastatingly dark past & an infectious air of fierce confidence. The young women she’s inspiring to take her reigns are an exciting reminder that D.I.Y. culture will never die as long as there’s another wave of youth waiting on deck. There’s a lesson to be learned in the way Ovarian Psycos broadcasts its profile of the titular feminist biking crew without pushing for disingenuous story beats. It may open itself to accusations of being narratively slight or thematically thin, but the truth is witnessing this group of women simply existing out there in the world is more than enough to justify the film’s existence. Anything more would be dishonest.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Last Night (1999)

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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 Alli made Brandon, Boomer, and Britnee watch Last Night (1999).

Alli: Primarily an actor, this is the first feature film Don McKellar directed. When approached by a film project about the Y2K scare, he became inspired to make a movie about the end of the world. Last Night is about the end of the world, but it’s not about explosions, catastrophic earthquakes, super volcanoes, global climate change, or even about the physical mechanism causing it at all. Told in loosely interconnected vignettes, It’s a movie about how people would react to the last moments they have left.

McKellar plays Patrick Wheeler, a sarcastic, neurotic loner, who just wants to enjoy some solitude on his last night, much to the dismay of his parents. As he comes back home from an awkward “Christmas” dinner with his family, he meets Sandra (Sandra Oh), who wants to get home to her husband (David Cronenberg) before the world ends.  In between, Jennifer (Sarah Polley), Patrick’s sister parties in the street, Donna (Tracy Wright) works in an office by herself dancing to the oldies, Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) hooks up with everyone, and Patrick’s family watches home videos. Slowly the movie counts down to midnight when the world will end.

Britnee, did you like the premise of an apocalyptic movie focusing on just the people, or were you missing the cause of it all?

Britnee: The idea of an apocalyptic movie focusing on human life rather than extreme environmental events seems like something that I would really enjoy, but I didn’t have the most pleasurable experience watching Last Night. I was so frustrated with just about every single character throughout the entire movie, especially Sandra. She was such a robot, and although this was more than likely purposefully done, I wanted to pull my hair out watching her unsuccessfully make her journey home to her husband before the world ends. Just watching her choose between two bottles of wine in the looted convenience store drove me crazy! Her last hours of human life were wasted by her lollygagging around the city, and the sad part is that she didn’t even seem as though she was happy or at peace with the fact that the world is ending. The only characters who were not total disappointments were Jennifer and Craig because they made the most out of their last few hours on Earth when compared to everyone else. I get that this film took a more comical approach to the end of the world, and it may seem as though I’m taking the film a bit to seriously, but my nerves were completely shot by the end.

Speaking of the ending, I was really shocked at the way the film concluded. As Patrick and Sandra each have a pistol romantically pressed against each other’s skulls, one would expect their brain juice to be splatter all over the place as the countdown to the world’s end get in the single digits. Of course, a film as unpredictable as Last Night would not end in such an expected way. They both pull the guns away from each other after the countdown is over, and instead of bursting into flames (or whatever is supposed to happen to humans when the world ends), they start making out. It wasn’t a disappointing ending at all, but it just didn’t feel very satisfying. I think I wasn’t satisfied with the ending because I didn’t vibe with Patrick and Sandra’s nonchalant characters.

Boomer, were you satisfied by the not-so-morbid ending of Last Night? Were you bored by Patrick and Sandra’s relationship?

Boomer: Usually, you and I are pretty in-sync when it comes to MotM flicks, Britnee. This time, though, it looks like we had contrary opinions. I loved this movie much more than I expected to, and while I thought that the relationship between Patrick and Sandra was one of the less compelling elements in the larger, more engaging gestalt, it certainly didn’t rub me the wrong way in the way that it seems to have affected you. With regards to the ending, however, I have to admit that I found it more sad than expected (not even counting the death of Cronenberg’s Duncan); for the entire film, I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, for some last minute miracle to fend off the end of the world. The general atmosphere of the nineties hung so low and thick over the ambiance of the film that I kept expecting all the Sturm und Drang about the end of the world to be a lot of sound and fury that signified nothing, much like the Y2K bug (which, to be fair, could have been as disastrous a technological issue as was advertised were it not for the efforts of computer engineers to prevent the “crash”). It wasn’t until sometime around the 10 PM chyron that I realized that night wasn’t falling and began to accept that the end of the world might be legitimate.

I did find Sandra and Patrick to be compelling, although I felt a greater empathy for Sandra, especially as her quiet desperation to die with agency, instead of falling victim to the indifferent vicissitudes of fate, escalated as that agency slipped through her fingers.  Patrick’s initial scenes painted him somewhat unsympathetically; though we later got some insight into his past that informed this behavior, that poor first impression never quite left me. Overall, although we spend most of the film with these two, I was more captivated by the quieter moments that we spent with other characters, and the human condition demonstrated therein. I was particularly captivated by the woman on the trolley whose existential crisis has left her in a state of near catatonia, as well as the silent acceptance of death that played out as Geneviève Bujold’s Mme. Carlton spends her final hour in a mostly empty music hall.

So, here’s the part where I make a confession. I wrote the above paragraph on the day before the night of the election, and today is the day after. There’s a lot of anxiety in the air today, especially among and on behalf of LGBTQIA folk, people of color, and those of non-Christian faiths. The number of hate crimes against the historically disenfranchised has skyrocketed already, and many among us are afraid of what’s to come. Whether or not a societal collapse is inevitable (as it is in this film) or avertable (as Y2K was), Last Night speaks to me more strongly now than it did just a week ago when I first saw it. Will we have an initial outburst of rabblerousing and violence that peaks and dies as we all accept, and perhaps embrace, the end as it comes? Only time will tell.

Brandon, did you find that particular premise, of a society that panics and then accepts its death with dignity (for the most part) believable? As a concept, it mostly exists to set the table for the human drama to unfold in a world that mostly reflects ours, with focus on the subtle apprehension thereof rather than having characters deal with the fallout of a radically different social environment (as is usually the case in films with this subject matter). If it is believable, why? If not, why does it work anyway?

Brandon: I think the major reason Last Night works as well as it does for me might be the very reason it frustrated Britnee. There’s a defeatist resignation to most of the characters that I found fascinating from scene to scene, whether it manifested in strong convictions like Sandra’s determined quest for a romantic suicide or the more delusional avoidance of unpleasant thoughts from folks like Patrick’s nostalgic parents and the woman on the go-nowhere bus. There are no non-believers in this world. Everyone has accepted that The End is nigh, from the mentally deranged, self-appointed town crier to the well-tailored business man with a wealthy homestead. And yet, although there’s no real point for society to continue to carry on, the gas company makes sure their utilities keep flowing, news broadcasts continue to air, sex work still thrives, and so on. I think the major reason this all resonates as realistic to me is that the panic before the calm, much like the exact cause for the impending Apocalypse, occurs two whole months before the film begins. We aren’t privy to the moment when the world accepts its doomed fate. We only witness their mental unraveling once the dust of the initial panic has settled. They’ve had two months to come to terms with their collective ruin and although everything is calm on the surface (like when Sandra is picking out her last bottle of wine in the decimated grocery store), mental anguish finds its own way to disrupt the facade: a nihilistic approach to sexual experimentation, a choreographed romantic suicide, a dissent into meaningless acts of violence & vandalism, etc.

Like Boomer said, it’s difficult to discuss this particular film this particular week without relating it to the doom & gloom of the disastrous election that’s just behind us. The idea that as inauguration day approaches in the next two months, this End of the World feeling we’re enduring will become normalized & emotionally dulling is a nightmare, but a realistic one. With all national travesties I’ve witnessed in my lifetime (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, recent years’ recordings of consequence-free police brutality/murder, etc.) there’s always an immediate, media-covered mass mania that’s then followed by a more subtle, muted aftereffect that’s far more damaging to the collective psyche, yet typically ignored as complacency sets in. Last Night pictures an entire society (Toronto, to be specific) with a shared PTSD, a collective mental anguish that expresses itself in a variety of quietly dysfunctional ways. This is far more realistic to me than what an End of the World scenario usually looks like in cinema (consider, for instance, Last Night‘s contemporary, Armageddon) and I think beginning & ending the film within that post-acceptance existential crisis was a brilliant move on McKellar’s part. Trying to capture the initial panic might not have rang nearly as true and I’ve only seen a couple films in the years before or since that approach The End in the same way (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World being the most immediate example that comes to mind). It’s feeling especially likely this week that we might get a chance within our own lifetimes to see exactly how realistic that actually is, so maybe time will tell.

The only thing that McKellar didn’t get exactly right for me (and I’m sensing this same complaint coming from both Boomer & Britnee) is his own performance in the lead role. There’s a lot of 90s genre convention in this movie that I’m totally on board with: the laid back Gen-X vibe, the all-in-one-day temporal setting, the everyone-is-connected vignette structure. I just can’t get past parts of McKellar’s performance as Patrick. He seems to believe that the character he wrote for himself is more likable than he really is, as if his 90s-specific cynicism is something to be celebrated in the face of so many deluded phonies who don’t “get it” the way he does. It’s true that Patrick gradually becomes more sympathetic as the film goes on, but a lot of his dialogue felt like the early efforts of a first-time writer-director, while other, better actors in the film did a much more artful job with the material. It reminded me a lot of the sore-thumb performances Tarantino sometimes delivers in his own films, despite the apparent fact that acting really isn’t his forte. Alli, do you think McKellar’s performance is a detriment to his own movie? I find myself wondering if Last Night (which I should stress that I really enjoyed on the whole) might’ve been improved if he were merely a side character, replaced by another actor, or removed completely, but that might just be my personal desire for Cronenberg, Oh, and Polley to grab more of a spotlight clouding my judgement.

Alli: I didn’t expect the timing of us watching this to be so apt. Sorry for being such a downer, everyone. I actually chose it because I think the countdown makes it a good New Year’s Eve movie, which I guess is still being a downer in a different way.

The first time I watched this movie I was definitely uncomfortable with Patrick as a character. At first he’s just rude and unpleasant. After that, he’s detached and sarcastic. I would say that McKellar’s performance in the role is very stiff and awkward. I think he fell less into the Tarantino and more into a Woody Allen trap, playing the “lovable” asshole. “Lovable” here defined as intolerable. I’m glad he doesn’t stay that way for the whole movie, but I think if more of his tragic story could have been revealed earlier on it would have made me more sympathetic.

A movie with more from Duncan (Cronenberg) would be great. I really do want to know how he ended up getting home even though Sandra was having a hell of a time.  Actually I would be really curious to see this movie with any of the other characters having a bigger role. It’s really compelling to have a movie full of characters where all of them, for me anyway, are interesting. They all have their sad goals and just barely hidden animosity for how unfair it all is. I think one of the things this movie does really well is showing all kinds of coping, which basically boils down to what kind of weird jerk are you in a crisis. I think I understand where Britnee is coming from in that they’re all very narcissistic in their own way, with the exception of Jennifer and her boyfriend, who are just along for the ride.  It’s all about their personal expectations at the end, letting themselves down seems like a bigger concern than imminent death.

Speaking of expectations, something really interesting to me about this movie is the soundtrack. It feels so personal to every character and setting. Everyone is concerned with setting just the right atmosphere. There’s a DJ committed to playing his favorite top 500 songs of all time with no requests, which is an eclectic blend of oldies. Patrick’s parents are continuing the Christmas tunes. Craig has his 70’s funk. Patrick himself seems preoccupied with finding the perfect end of the world music debating on various classical composers. It ends on Pete Seeger’s rendition of “Guantanamera“, which when I looked it up was also used in the Godfather Part II in the New Years scene in Havana.  I don’t know if that was an intentional coincidence with the New Year’s imagery or just an exercise of what is the strangest song you could go out on.

Britnee, what do you make of the soundtrack? Is it all just as big of a disappointment as everything else everyone is doing? I think another thing this movie invites is the question of how we would personally choose to spend our last hours. Do you have  a song in mind?

Britnee: I actually thought the soundtrack was pretty entertaining, especially Craig’s sex music. I’m pretty sure that Craig had the same sexy funk song on repeat for each encounter, and I let out a ton of good laughs each time the song came on. Honestly, Craig is probably my favorite character in the movie, and maybe his own personal “soundtrack” has more to do with this than I thought. I also completely forgot about the radio DJ and his personal music countdown until you mentioned it. That guy was living his best life, even though he only had a couple of hours left of the best life he was living. The film’s soundtrack really does play a bigger role in Last Night than in most films because everyone’s own personal soundtrack really represents their personalities. This would explain why Patrick got on my nerves too. He just couldn’t pick a damn song!

If I could have my end of the world song, I would hands down pick “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush. I would need a song that would make me feel as though the end of the world is not truly the end of everything. The lyrics “I just know that something good is going to happen. And I don’t know when, but just saying it could even make it happen” reminds me of having hope in the most dire situations, and I would definitely need that reassurance while waiting for the world to end.

Boomer, If you had to spend your final hours on Earth with just one character from this movie, who would it be and why?

Boomer: Hands down, I would spend my last day with Craig. I was inordinately excited when I saw Callum “Canada’s Brad Pitt” Rennie’s name in the opening crawl, and found myself a little disappointed that Patrick didn’t take him up on his offer. Regardless of sexual orientation, who could turn down an end of days romp in the hay with 1998 vintage Rennie? I certainly couldn’t. On a less shallow note, I think that Donna and I would have a good time together as the curtain fell on our world. Between her unrestrained dancing to the music on the radio (more on that in a moment), her secret drinking (in moderation) and the relative reasonableness of her final desires (knock shit off desks, get plowed), she seems like an agreeable and pleasant person to know, end of the world or not. I also can’t stop thinking about Jessica Booker’s Rose: her restrained indignation about people’s misplaced priorities and her resignation to spending her last hours with a family to which she doesn’t technically belong, watching their home movies. You can be my granny anytime, Rose.

Speaking of music, I appreciate this discussion pointing out how each person approaches the preparation of a soundtrack for the end of the world; what should be a relatively effortless task is treated by various characters with varying degrees of solemnity and gravitas. It’s a lot easier to make a playlist that suits your mood and activities in 2016 than it was in 1998, but I don’t think that I’d find it any easier to choose the musical arrangement of my transcendence to oblivion with Spotify or Grooveshark than it would be with a stack of CDs or records (other than to say I would definitely not be in attendance at Menzies’s show). I find myself in disagreement with Britnee again, however (why is this movie tearing us apart?!); I didn’t care for the soundtrack overall. As a longtime DJ at KNWD and KLSU and former Chief Announcer at the latter, I appreciate the prominence of the unseen man whose voice touches different scenes. I won’t deny that a bittersweet smile broke across my face when he threw his playlog to the wind and broadcast what he wanted, but the movie truly revealed the narrowness of its budget when it came to the music selection. The final song was fine, given the way that it was woven into the narrative, but I would think that I’d recognize more than one or two tracks on the countdown of the “greatest songs of all time.”

To backtrack a little to our nihilism in the face of the gestating sea-to-shining-sea fascist regime, I’ve always prided myself on my belief that my worldview would more or less mirror Patrick’s: quiet acceptance of the end. When my friends would compare plans to bug out in the face of viral epidemics, bunker down against the nuclear song of fire and ice, or imagine themselves as the one who fought off a crazy with an assault rifle, I never wanted to participate; I instead pointed out that the majority of people would die in the first wave and that I accepted without complaint that I would be one of them. Who knows where any of us will be a year from now (history tells us that they come for artists, writers, and teachers first, and the registry for the last of these is already slouching toward Megiddo, DC, waiting to be born), but I can say that I never expected that the end would come with whispery goose-stepping past the Lincoln Memorial and Tila Tequila declaring “sig heil.” I’ve been less self-assured of late. Like Britnee, I am afraid: afraid for myself, afraid for my Muslim neighbors, afraid for every person with flesh that errs on the far side of ochre, afraid for my queer brothers and sisters, afraid of a bleak future that extends to the horizon and afraid of how far that future might extend beyond the rim of my sight. All I know is that I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Patrick’s final scene in recent days: “ln a way, l feel kind of privileged. I mean, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened, and we’re gonna be there. I mean, no one was there to witness the beginning, but we’re gonna be there at the end.”

Brandon, it seems I’ve gone a little maudlin, although no more so than is called for in these dark days, I’m afraid. Let me ask: which character’s final moments do you feel best reflect how you would imagine you’d face your last day? Whose final moments resonate with you most, on a personal level?

Brandon: It’s much easier for me to answer that question than I’d care to admit, since I’ve already thought about it a lot. Like Boomer, I always pictured myself just sort of accepting immediate demise in a Doomsday scenario. I’m deeply creeped out by “doomsday preppers” who stockpile weapons & escape plans for a possible Apocalypse, since it seems like they’re actually looking forward to humanity’s final moments in an exceedingly unseemly way (with John Goodman’s recent performance as a prepper type in 10 Cloverfield Lane being a great illustration of what I mean by that). My own final day in a planned-ahead-of-time Apocalypse would likely fall on one of the two sides of Patrick’s family, depending on what kind of endgame scenario we’re talking about. If we’re talking a real life Trumpian death by nuclear holocaust (or whatever other kind of holocaust our president-elect could easily trigger in office), I’d probably go out like Patrick’s parents. I’d spend my final hours glumly going through my things, eating a nice meal with loved ones, and (although I don’t particularly care about Christmas) staging one final run-through of a favorite holiday or activity: Halloween, Mardi Gras, my birthday, a film marathon, something like that. On the other hand, if we’re talking a natural or supernatural event like the one hinted at in Last Night, a demise far outside humanity’s control, I’d like to think I’d go out like Patrick’s sister, Jennifer, played by Sarah Polley. I’d love to spend my final minutes strapping on a stupid party hat, raising a bottle of champagne to the soon-to-disappear sky, and yelling drunkenly with a bunch of other doomed idiots celebrating their own final moments on this garbage planet. There’s a the-band-keeps-playing-as-the-ship-sinks vibe to that mentality that I’ve always closely identified with (which is probably why one last Mardi Gras ranks so high on my list of wishes & wants).

Speaking of that partying until the bitter end mentality, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my favorite gag of the entire film in this conversation. There’s a very brief scene in which a news report details the world’s largest guitar jam taking place in humanity’s hour of crisis. The song the doomed souls decide to play & sing together? Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business,” one of the most inane pop songs I could imagine given the severity of the setting and, like Boomer pointed out, one of the only songs of any cultural significance the film shelled out money for. We’ve been pretty dour as we talk over this film’s themes & tone, which is to be expected given the total shit show 2016 has been on the whole and the imminent doom we’re staring down ourselves, but it’d be a shame if we didn’t make it clear that it’s successfully funny as a comedy as well. Although understandably bleak, Last Night is consistently humorous throughout and there’s a brilliance to the brevity of that “Taking Care of Business” gag that sums up the believable way the film portrays mass mania in the face of humanity’s impending extinction.

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Lagniappe

Brandon: I think it’s worth repeating that although this film was framed and marketed as a Y2K movie, it doesn’t need or rely on that cultural context for longevity in its significance. Even if he wasn’t particularly smart about casting himself as the lead role, McKellar was dead on in completely avoiding direct mention of the machinations of the Apocalypse in the story and instead focusing on humanity’s reaction to the crisis. Besides straining the limitations of the budget, any kind of asteroid or Y2K bug or killer spiders or what have you threatening the world might’ve reduced Last Night to a novelty (again, just look to Michael Bay’s Armageddon for context there). By avoiding the narrative gratification of knowing exactly what’s going on globally and instead focusing on the small details of interpersonal drama within that crisis, McKellar made something a lot more significant and potentially timeless, which is a funny thing to say about a work that feels so Gen-X 90s in its resigned shrug of a tone.

Britnee: Last Night and the conversation we had about the movie has made me realize that I am super scared about the end of the world. I think that may be why I didn’t vibe well with the movie. I wasn’t able to connect with any character because no one was screaming and freaking out like I would have been. If no one hears from me for a few weeks, please check for me in my closet. I’ll probably be in the fetal position in the corner.

Boomer: I don’t know what song I would choose to be my doomsday knell, but I can tell you that last week at karaoke there was only one song on my mind: the late Leonard’s “Everybody Knows.” It seemed the most apropos (well, actually, “Democracy” seemed most suited for the situation, but I wasn’t prepared to be on stage for eight straight minutes): “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost / Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.”

Alli: It’s interesting to be living in a time that we sort of have to think about the end of it all. It’s also interesting to watch a quiet, personal take. While we’re not exactly in the same circumstances as Patrick and co, Last Night feels eerily relevant. I guess while we’re making plans and if we’re just looking at the current situation, I think I have to regretfully inform everyone that I’d be joining in with the hooligans and smashing stuff up. I need a good primal scream and to smash some things.  If we’re talking about a natural event though, I think I’d have a big party and make a lot of food for anyone who wants to come.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
January: The Top Films of 2016
February: Brandon presents Society (1992)

-The Swampflix Crew