brandon ledet

Maps to the Stars (2015)

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threehalfstar

David Cronenberg’s newest film is a cold, unforgiving puzzle that’s difficult to wrap your head around. It’s a familiar feeling. The Canadian auteur is responsible for some of the most disturbingly ambiguous horror films this side of David Lynch: Videodrome, The Fly, The Brood, etc. On the surface, Maps to the Stars is Cronenberg at his most clear-cut & candid. The film is deceivingly costumed as a straight-forward satirical indictment of Hollywood types’ various neuroses, a story we’ve seen told many times before. It wears the clothes of a bitter, navel-gazing comedy, but it’s so much stranger & more unsettling than that.

Much like with the recent entertainment industry caricature Birdman, the nasty humor in Maps to the Stars falls flat on its face. Rarely inspiring a chuckle, it’s downright embarrassing as wealthy Hollywood narcissists toss out bottomlessly cruel jokes that rarely land. With Birdman, the failure of the humor leaves a disappointing void that the beautiful cinematography struggles to fill & distract the audience from. In Maps to the Stars, there’s no such relief. The film boasts such a relentlessly negative worldview & such a matter-of-fact, uncaring visual style that it feels intentional that the humor falls flat. Characters are way less amusing than they think they are. Each cruel, unfunny joke posits them as increasingly monstrous and film revels in their vapid, self-absorbed callousness.

It’s difficult to appreciate the film as a comedy, but it does have legs as an off-putting ghost story. In Cronenberg’s Hollywood everyone’s interconnected in the usual ensemble cast ways, but they’re also linked by the ways they are haunted both by the past and by the rancorous decay of their inner selves. Tenuous personal & professional relationships are inconsequential compared to the way Maps’ characters are connected by less concrete elements like fire, incest, dead children, strange mantras, and weeping in bathtubs. In public the characters feign glamorous lifestyles; limo drivers, beautiful homes, baby-faced teens enjoying cocktails, and movie set pampering are all part of their M.O. In intimate company they become a little bleaker; they have sex with producers, joke about selling fans their feces, and celebrate the deaths of children. When they’re entirely alone they’re faced with the literal ghosts of their past and the self-hatred that their bravado barely conceals.

Maps to the Stars is a difficult film to recommend, because it’s near impossible to tell who will be able to get on the film’s wavelength. The film’s cast is phenomenal (Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson, etc.), but they’re used for such an unpleasant effect that it’s difficult to sell their presence as a draw. As nasty as the film is it also has a strangely campy undertone that reveals itself in strikingly cheap details like CGI flames & Julianne Moore’s exaggerated California accent. It’s a ghost story, but it’s one that requires the patience to sit through bitterly unfunny comedy before the ball starts rolling. Self-contradiction aside, the movie unmistakably finds Cronenberg on a mean streak, seemingly uninterested in winning an audience over or earning accolades (although he does find a somewhat unconventional use for award statues here). Maps to the Stars is bound to be divisive in both its nastiness & its flat, uninviting tone, but it’s a film I found both curiously engaging & surprisingly haunting.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: The Seventh Seal (1957)

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Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month James made Britnee & Brandon watch The Seventh Seal (1957).

James:
Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal was the Swedish auteur’s first major film and helped establish art-house cinema when it won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. Set in Europe during the Black Death, the film follows Antonius Block, played by the great Max Von Sydow, as he tries to outwit the personification of Death in a game of chess. The film is now remembered mostly for its historical significance and that iconic image of Death, parodied in movies like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Last Action Hero, rather than its substance. That’s a shame because The Seventh Seal is thematically rich and a masterpiece of cinematography. A jester’s performance interrupted by a procession of the plague stricken. An innocent woman burned at the stake. The Dance of Death. The stark black & white images Bergman presents are haunting, evocative, and foreboding, staying with you long after the final credits.

But watching the film again, I can see why The Seventh Seal isn’t as highly regarded as some of Bergman’s later films. As an art-house film, it is an intellectual, philosophical movie that modern audience might find too heavy and bleak. It also tackles one of the deepest and most disturbing questions of existence: Why, in the face of so much evil, does God remain silent? The Silence of God is a theme Bergman would explore in later films like Through a Glass Darkly and Cries & Whispers but in those films he found more nuanced ways to get his message across. In The Seventh Seal, by contrast, Bergman strips away everything in the story that doesn’t embellish the allegory, making it feel almost like a sermon. And as with most sermons, the effect the film has on you depends greatly on if you are on board with its message. The film’s rejection of religious dogmatism in favor of humanism was something that was very powerful for me when I watched it as a teenager. The scene where Antonius confesses his doubts about God and lines like “In our fear we make an idol and call it God” fed the existential angst of my teenage years but now the film seems somewhat heavy-handed.

Brandon, do you feel the film’s lack of subtlety helps or hurts its overall message?

Brandon:
This may be a result of watching the film with fresh eyes, but the heavy-handed nature of the sermonizing worked for me, if not only because it was backed up by the strength of the film’s images. Death appears very early in the film & his iconic chess match with Max von Sydow’s Antonius is initiated almost right away. Also, the way the film is so conspicuously staged (it was mostly filmed on a studio lot) is mirrored in the traveling theatre troop’s performances, which feels like Bergman intentionally pointing out the artificiality of the world he’s created here. The movie’s honest & explicit about the fact that it’s sermonizing about the fruitlessness of life & The Silence of God and the atmosphere of a stage play is well suited for the task. The brutal imagery of the plague that haunts the proceedings also supports the weight of the lofty subjects discussed throughout. The only element that didn’t land for me was Bergman’s added gallows humor. The line of jokes surrounding the blacksmith’s wife’s affair was particularly flat for me, but ultimately it was so inconsequential in comparison to the towering presence of the film’s ideology & imagery that it didn’t affect my viewing too much.

Speaking of artificiality & stark imagery, it makes total sense that Death’s visage from this film has had such a long life in pop culture. Somewhere between a mime & a wizard, it’s a simple look, but an unnerving one all the same. Just like with last month’s The Masque of the Red Death, Death is portrayed in The Seventh Seal as an indifferent inevitability. The difference between the two portrayals is in Death’s sense of humor & amusement here. He allows himself to be tricked into the iconic chess match with Antonius because it amuses him and later poses as a priest to take the knight’s confession in a church for much of the same reason. The Red Death would never have participated in such tomfoolery. Bergman’s intense focus on portrayals of Death in art are prevalent throughout the film: an artist paints The Dance of Death in a church; the traveling actors wear a Death mask in their play; characters frequently sing about Death, God, and Satan in their leisure time. Even the image of Death playing chess that Bergman chose to portray early in The Seventh Seal is lifted from a real-life Medieval painting by Albertus Pictor, which is acknowledged by the knight in the film. When another knight asks the church painter why he paints images of Death, he responds: “To remind people that they’re going to die,” and reasons that people like to be scared & a skull can be more interesting than a naked woman. The church painter seems to be Bergman’s direct mouthpiece in this scene, an artist standing in for the artist at work.

Britnee, how did you react to the portrayal of Death in this film? Does his playfulness & humor detract from his scariness or only add to it?

Britnee:
I’ve avoided watching The Seventh Seal for years because artsy films about death just aren’t my thing, but I’m glad that Movie of the Month exists because I would’ve never given this remarkable film a chance. The film’s statements about the silence of God were so blunt and direct, which really took me by surprise and left me with some haunting thoughts. The scene with Antonius confessing to the priest, who was actually Death in disguise, was probably my favorite scene because he’s just so honest and genuine throughout his entire rant. My appreciation for his authenticity was at an all-time high at that point. Now, as for Death, I really believe that his humor and silliness most definitely contribute to his scariness. The fact that he’s having a good old time messing with Antonius is definitely creepy because it makes him seem almost human. I think the concept of the uncanny can explain how Death’s humor is terrifying. Humor, silliness, and playfulness are very human-like traits, but while these traits are familiar to us, the forces of Death are quite unfamiliar.

I really enjoyed the connection Antonius had with Jof & Mia. When he watches their family come together, there seems to be a change in his character. Jof, Mia, and their son, Mikael, are a sweet little family with nothing but love for each other, and they are so different from all the other characters Antonius encounters in the film. He is intrigued by their simplicity, morality, and the way they represent a sign of light in a world of darkness. He is waiting and searching for an opportunity to do something that would really give his life meaning, and at the end of the film, he is able to distract Death from taking the lives of Jof & Mia. After reading a couple of articles about the film, I noticed that many compare Jof, Mia, and Mikael to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Honestly, I don’t believe that they are direct representations of the Holy Family, but I do think they represent how being simple and virtuous can give meaning to life and make it worth living.

James, what do you think Bergman was trying to portray with the Jof and Mia? What do they symbolize?

James:
You hit the nail on the head when you describe Jof, Mia, and Mikael as a sign of light in a world of darkness and I think, through them, Bergman is trying to articulate his vision for the only real way to “cheat” death. For me, each major character (Antonius, the squire, and Jof and Mia) reacts differently to the “Silence of God” to represent a broader way that human beings deal with Death. There is Antonius, who reacts with anger, disillusionment, and hopelessness; the squire, who seems more cynical but at peace with the absurd nature of being alive; and Jof and Mia who, while maybe naive, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.

Brandon, do you agree with this interpretation? What do the different ways that the characters react to death symbolize to you?

Brandon:
I agree that there is an undeniable dichotomy set up between the way Jof & Mia gaily approach mortality as opposed to Antonius’ unhealthy obsession with it. If no characters were to survive the film, the couple’s final days would have been much more pleasant than Antonius’ fretting over how to cheat his inevitable demise. Even their occupations reflect their relationship with mortality. As a knight, Antonius is duty-bound to interacting with death on a regular, militaristic basis. As traveling performers, Jof & Mia entertain the living, bringing amusement into people’s lives instead of protecting their demise or threatening to end them.

Jof & Mia’s playful, jocular approach to living is contrasted not only by Antonius’ morbid navel-gazing, but also in the interruption of their theatrical performance by a procession of doomsaying monks. If Bergman wasn’t trying to praise the couple’s zest for life through their survival of Death, he at least drew a distinction between their public performance and that of the self-flagellating monks, who basically spoil a pleasant afternoon. As a provider of joy & entertainment, Jof is portrayed as a holy character in the film, one that receives divine visions from beyond the mortal realm. The religious folks & Antonius are more or less party poopers that don’t know how to enjoy a good thing before it’s gone.

Britnee, where do you think Bergman’s film falls on that divide? Does it strive more to provide life-affirming entertainment & encourage joy or does it obsess over the more morbid aspects of the inevitability of our mortality?

Britnee:
I think the film successfully provides a positive view about the rather depressing fact that we are all going die. We all seem to be on the same page when it comes to the Carpe Diem attitude of Jof & Mia, and the couple’s influence on Antonius is what, in my opinion, makes this film fall more into the positive side of the divide. Antonius makes himself sick by obsessing over death and trying to give his life meaning before he cashes in his chips. After witnessing years of brutality as a Crusader and returning home only to find a town filled with Negative Nancys, it’s no wonder why he has no gusto or passion for living. He only seems to be truly happy once he meets Jof & Mia and spends time with them. Bergman makes the couple the standout characters in the film in order to create an optimistic view on life.

Lagniappe

Britnee:
We are all going to die at some point, so living in the moment and not worrying about our inevitable demise is the key to a happy, meaningful life. That’s the main message that I got from The Seventh Seal, and I really didn’t expect to have any positive lingering thoughts from a film best known for its personification of Death. There’s not much action or drama in the film, but the rich symbolism, thought provoking scenes, and intricate themes make up for anything the film may lack. I finally understand why The Seventh Seal is so legendary.

Brandon:
I’d just like to point out that our first few choices for Movie of the Month (The Seventh Seal, The Masque of the Red Death, Blood & Black Lace, and Crimes of Passion) are a pretty morbid group. I wonder if the cold weather’s getting to us. Maybe by the summer it’ll be all Gidget movies and stoner comedies. That being said, The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death were a pretty great one-two punch in the way they fed off of each other thematically. According to Wikipedia, Roger Corman himself was aware of the thematic similarities, admitting that he delayed the production of Masque because of them. He said, “I kept moving The Masque of the Red Death back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind.” Even if it is an artificial connection, they’ll be forever linked in my mind as well, because our back to back conversations about them here covered a lot of the same territory (mostly in our contemplation of an uncaring, inevitable Death).

James:
I thought it was interesting how The Masque of the Red Death and The Seventh Seal share similar themes, but the directors handle them in strikingly different ways. Bergman uses stark black and white images while Corman uses bright colors. Bergman’s dialogue is melodramatic while Corman’s is campy. The contrast really shows the tremendous influence a director’s style has on how we perceive a film. The art-house style of The Seventh Seal makes it feel more important and “deeper”, but, in my opinion, The Masque of the Red Death is the more enjoyable film. Regardless, The Seventh Seal is a bona fide classic and a great introduction to the world of Ingmar Bergman. Can’t wait until next month.

Upcoming Movie of the Months
April: Britnee presents Blood & Black Lace (1964)
May: Brandon presents Crimes of Passion (1984)

-The Swampflix Crew

Lovely Molly (2011)

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three star

I recently had a goofy good time with Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez’s found footage Sasquatch movie Exists. I had so much fun with it in fact, that after reviewing the movie I wrote a second article detailing how to play the Exists drinking game. Exists isn’t exactly a laugh riot, but it was the kind of goofy, straight-forward horror flick that’s best served after midnight with a few game friends & a couple cocktails. Knowing nothing of the film’s plot or tone, I foolishly expected a similar experience with Sánchez’s gritty ghost story Lovely Molly. I was way, way off. Exists did nothing to prepare me for the emotional brutality of Lovely Molly. It turns out the cycles of child & substance abuse make for much more disturbing & much less campy horror movie fodder than Bigfoot. Go figure.

Similar to the way Possession turns the real life-horrors of divorce & romantic separation into dangerous, supernatural forces, Lovely Molly makes a monster out of child abuse & heroin addiction. When the titular protagonist and her newlywed husband move into her childhood home, demons of her past rise to the surface and begin to affect the physical world. Molly’s personal confrontations with her history of substance abuse & the hideous details of her youth start small. At first she’s getting stoned with her equally traumatized sister, the two adult women giggling, “I can’t believe we’re smoking weed in Mom’s kitchen.” The drug use escalates from there, as does Molly’s frantic mood as she’s left alone in a space where she used to suffer hellish acts of cruelty. Her husband becomes frustrated, the way loved ones of victims & addicts often do, confessing “I love her. I just don’t know how to help her.” Family, religion, and modern medicine all fail to slow the horror of Molly’s descent into the brutal cycles of abuse. Her sister desperately asks her, “Why did you have to move back into this goddamn house, Molly?” but it’s as if she had no choice. The house has an overwhelming draw for her, which eventually leads to a body-count, supernatural occurrences, and the unconventional use of a screwdriver.

Instead of telling the story entirely in a found footage style (à la Exists or The Blair Witch Project), Sánchez employs a mixture of professional cameras & camcorder footage here. The camcorder footage is mostly used for a chilling atmospheric effect, but still manages to serve the film’s central theme. Molly is compelled to record the horrors of the houses’ ghosts in fear that no one will believe her, which is a terrifying thought, considering her past. The film also uses an intense, roaring sound design to represent threats that cannot be seen, but this isn’t the completely obscured horror of Blair Witch either. Violence, gore, and the like are used sparingly, but effectively as the situation in the house deteriorates. Despite the lackluster acting (Molly’s boss is particularly awful) & limited scope inherent to Sanchez’s low-budget productions, Lovely Molly is a hauntingly disturbing picture. This is far from the goofy midnight movie of Exists, if not only because it portrays a horrifying threat that actually exists.

-Brandon Ledet

Exists (2014)

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three star

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I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly why mainstream critics were so hard on last year’s found footage Sasquatch movie Exists. The movie’s been called everything from “dismally generic” to “aggressively unimaginative” to “fucking stupid”. I’m not saying those claims aren’t at least partly true (especially that last one; the movie is stupid), but dumping this much vitriol on a low budget horror film about Bigfoot feels a lot like punching down. Exists is a straightforward horror cheapie that makes few to no attempts to stray from genre clichés, but does it really deserve to be trashed more than last year’s equally pedestrian (but far more expensive) I, Frankenstein, Annabelle, or Dracula Untold? All three of those films didn’t exactly run up great scores on Metacritic either, but they were mostly brushed off as boring, not spat on as “fucking stupid”.

The best explanation for this vicious critical beating I can come up with is that Exists’ director Eduardo Sánchez was one of the two minds behind the surprise cultural hit The Blair Witch Project. By punishing Sánchez for making a generic, post-Blair Witch found footage horror flick, critics are by extension punishing him for all the other generic found footage horrors we’ve suffered through since Blair Witch’s success over a decade ago. It’s an almost cut & dried case of Schadenfreude. I’m not saying Exists’ straightforward approach to the genre is criticism-proof; I’m just saying that if it weren’t for Blair Witch the film wouldn’t have been deemed worth the time of a lot of these one-to-zero star reviews.

The most common complaint about Exists is what I believe to be its biggest strength: the fact that it plays its material straight. The campy appeal of a found footage Sasquatch movie is silly enough in concept that it would’ve been a huge mistake to adopt a winking, ironic tone to back it up. Exists is fully committed to its genre, for better or for worse. Its opening title cards read “Since 1967, there have been over 3,000 Bigfoot encounters in the U.S. alone. Experts agree that the creatures are only violent when provoked.” While some may find this kind of self-serious nonsense to be a huge warning sign, it speaks to me as a fan of schlocky horror. It says to me, “This movie will be silly. Bring liquor.” When the film’s narrator/camera-operator/resident goofball first becomes aware of the Bigfoot that ruins his vacation in the woods, he drops his sad stabs at comic relief and adopts a serious tone similar to the one in the title cards. He says, “Years ago my uncle saw something out here. Something that freaked him the fuck out. Bad enough that he never came back to this beloved hunting cabin.” The film knows when to be dour & when to be playful. That line is so goofily ludicrous it had to be said with a straight face to work.

Unfortunately, Camera Dude (which I will henceforth call him, since he punctuates nearly every sentence with “dude”) isn’t always as charming as he is there. Mostly, he’s a device. The film’s five protagonists include two cute couples & one hairy hipster bro in a Daniel Johnston t-shirt, our beloved Camera Dude. As a 5th wheel, Camera Dude is free to document the goings on of the cabin trip & subsequent Sasquatch attacks, filming his buddies as they crack wise, swim, sleep (weird), fuck (super weird) and get torn apart by a Sasquatch (thank God). Why exactly is Camera Dude filming every mundane second of his vacation in the woods on his ungodly stockpile of GoPro cameras? To make “The Best YouTube Video Ever”, of course. If this sounds obnoxious, it’s because it is. Camera Dude’s best moments are when he drops the loveable goofball act and tries to convince his buddies that they’re under attack by a Bigfoot. He tells the audience, “I’ve got some GoPros set up all over the forest,” setting up a laughably implausible excuse for the film’s multiple camera angles. Camera Dude eats up a lot of the film’s run time but when he switches from Best YouTube Video Ever mode to Bigfoot Believer mode he becomes a fairly amusing one-dimensional plot device. I also enjoyed that the moment you can tell his spirit is broken is when he’s too sad about his dead friends to smoke weed.

Despite Camera Dude’s attempts to steal the show, Exists’ true comic relief comes from another character: Deer Bro. As the title cards revealed, Sasquatches will not attack unless provoked, so the film needs to set up the five victims’ reason for being hunted by the hairy beast. Borrowing a page from I Know What You Did Last Summer, they strike a Bigfoot with their car early in the film. A few characters are convinced that they clipped a dear, but no, not Deer Bro. He warns them all, “That wasn’t no deer, bro.” As far as terrible characters in horror movies go, Deer Bro is a gem. When he isn’t tossing out an indiscriminate amount of “bro”s with every awkward sentence, he’s claiming he should be in charge of the group’s sole rifle because he plays paintball or he’s accidentally sitting down on his best bro’s broken legs. Classic Deer Bro. If Exists is to be understood as The Adventures of Camera Dude & Deer Bro, Deer Bro is the clear winner as an audience favorite. Every idiotic moment he’s on screen is a gift to schlock lovers everywhere.

Enjoying Exists, much like surviving an encounter with a Sasquatch, requires approaching it the right way. Critics looking for Eduardo Sánchez to justify his fluke success with Blair Witch were wrong to expect anything but a silly trifle out of a found footage Sasquatch movie. At this point, it’s nearly impossible to make a Sasquatch costume 100% menacing. Audiences will always see a little Harry & The Hendersons or Geico Commercial Cavemen in Bigfoot, whether or not he’s crushing skulls & hurling bicycles. As a straightforward B-movie about a Sasquatch attack, Exists is a pleasant enough picture. Its clichéd plot devices about strategically placed GoPro cameras & lack of cellphone reception are excusable as modern horror tropes and the quiet calm of its pacing is much preferable to the shrill panic of other found footage cheapies. It’s far from the most inventive horror film I’ve ever seen, but it’s also far from the worst. As a schlocky genre diversion it’s a fun, inconsequential film. Especially if you focus on the goofy charms of Deer Bro.

-Brandon Ledet

UPDATE: The Indywood Kickstarter Campaign was a Success!

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Last week I wrote that the independent New Orleans cinema Indywood was looking to expand their programming through a Kickstarter campaign. The intimate theater has already been up and running at the edge of the French Quarter for just over a year now, but through a very reasonable requested donation they were looking to expand the scope of what services they could offer to the city’s cinephile community. At the time I wrote about their Kickstarter campaign it had two weeks to fund its project and just over half of its requested funds secured. I am happy to report that Indywood has since reached its goal and will now be able to expand its programming to include diverse offerings like Saturday morning cartoons, stand-up comedy, silent films with live musical accompaniment, “80’s VHS gems” and more.

In the last announcement I wrote that Indywood “occupies a strange, comfortable middle ground between watching a film in a traditional theater and popping in a DVD in a friend’s living room. Much like the experience of seeing a film at Zeitgeist or the outdoor Moonlight Movies screenings, there’s a communal aesthetic to Indywood that can’t be achieved at a larger, corporate-owned venue.” It’s awesome that the very community Indywood shares movies with stepped up to help them expand & grow. Personally, I very much look forward to watching to see what they bloom into and believe that, no matter what the scope of what they can accomplish, New Orleans will be all the richer for it.

Although the Kickstarter campaign has been fully funded, it’s still not too late to contribute if you haven’t already. They’ve secured the basic donation amount they’ve asked for, but more funding always helps. At this time there’s exactly one week left (until 8pm on March 5th to be exact) to contribute to the growth of New Orleans’ cinematic community & claim some truly cool rewards. There will also be a celebration for their backers (including a screening of The Big Lebowski) on March 5th to commemorate the success of the campaign. Hope to see you there!

-Brandon Ledet

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

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onehalfstar

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I’ve been curious about The Adventures of Pluto Nash for over a decade now. It’s widely accepted that Eddie Murphy has been putting in subpar work since at least the late 90s & Pluto Nash seemed to be one of those early signs that his best days were well behind him. With a $100 million budget and a mere $7 million dollar return, the movie was one of the top ten biggest box office flops of all time. While I didn’t expect it to be a particularly great movie, I though it did have potential as a trashy gem (à la Leonard Part 6 or Howard the Duck) because of its sci-fi premise. I suspected that Pluto Nash had potential as a fun bad movie because it was a Bad Movie in Space, which gave it a distinct advantage over the appeal of the Klumps & Norbits of Muprhy’s career. Unfortunately, it instead committed the number one sin in the Bad Movie Bible: it was boring.

When I pictured a Shitty Eddie-Murphy-in-Space Movie with a $100 Million Budget, I naively expected all kinds of goofy adventures featuring Murphy exploring improbable planets & cracking wise at the expense of goofy-looking aliens. Instead, Pluto Nash bottled all of its action on the Earth’s moon and supplanted madcap adventure with run-of-the-mill gunfights & a staggering surplus of jokes about horny robots. Murphy’s Nash is a retired smuggler struggling to run a clean nightclub business where oddly costumed weirdos can line dance to Outkast songs in a futuristic version of doing the robot. His wholesome nightclub is threatened by mafia types who want to turn the moon into a tacky outer space Atlantic City and he risks his life to stop them. The movie could’ve been set on Earth in the present and not lost much in the translation.

In the rare moments when the movie is in full gear the screen is littered with cheap-looking gunfights & car chases crippled with mediocrity. When it slows down Nash literally goes into hiding and essentially watches the Moon’s version of Netflix, which has to be one of the most boring approaches to a space adventure ever conceived. Imagine if The Fifth Element were adapted as a hackneyed UPN sitcom that frivolously wasted its entire budget on huge explosions & cameos that no one asked for and you’d have a pretty good idea of Pluto Nash’s style. Even the movie’s sole set outside on the Moon’s surface is embarrassingly cheap looking, faker than even 1969’s “real” Moon landing.

It’s hard to imagine where the film’s budget went outside the cast (and the gratuitous explosions). The list of supporting players is beyond impressive: B-Movie legend Pam Grier plays Nash’s gun-toting mother; the beautiful Rosario Dawson is his unlikely love interest; Peter Boyle is his partner in crime; Jay Mohr is a pop star that narrowly avoids drinking battery acid; John Cleese is some kind of AI butler. That’s not even including the appearances of Alec Baldwin, James Rebhorn, Joe Pantoliano, Illeana Douglas and Randy Quaid (as the aforementioned horny robot). Unfortunately, this ungodly stockpile of talent is put to waste and everyone seems to be in full paycheck mode. Even Murphy himself is dead weight here, keeping the antics to a minimum & surrounding himself with a script seemingly designed to massage his ego by constantly reminding everyone how awesome he is. The only actor that has any fun with the film is the always-dependable Luis Guzmán, but Guzmán is about as consistent as they come, so it’s a fairly hollow victory.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is an action comedy that fails both in its action and its comedy. Jokes about Hilary Clinton’s face on future money (har har) and robots desperately trying to get laid (hee hee) aren’t funny the first time around and are downright painful in their repetition. The film even unironically uses a record scratch sound effect to punctuate its action gags, lest the audience forget to laugh. It’s that dire. As I’ve pointed out before in reviews of Exit to Eden & 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it’s possible for failed comedies or action movies to still be interesting as cultural time capsules or complete train wrecks. There’s a miniscule amount of early 2000’s charm in Pluto Nash’s shoddy rap versions of corny songs like “Blue Moon” & “Dancing in the Moonlight”, its semi-futuristic nightclub attire, and its use of Space Jam-inspired font, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own self-crushing blandness. In this case the schlock is both unfunny and boring, which is a brutal combination for any audience. I should’ve left Pluto Nash where it belongs: forgotten in the past, in hiding on the Moon, watching Moonflix (or whatever) in its pajamas, and trading tired quips with oversexed robots.

-Brandon Ledet

An Angry Rant about the Angry Rant that is Birdman (2014)

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Look, I don’t take pleasure in hating on any film. As I noted on our About page, “We genuinely try our best to love every movie we watch, so know that it hurts us to give one a negative review. We’re looking for the gems in the garbage, not for films to shame.” I watch movies with the full intent of loving them, sometimes a little too eagerly, which often leads to positive reviews of questionable titles like Zombeavers and Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Internet is already full to the brim with vitriol and it’s a fairly tedious exercise to contribute to its negativity, but watch me do it anyway.

Birdman or (the Unamusing Pretension of Arrogance) is a terrible film with a truly nasty disposition. Like a wounded animal, it lashes out at every target within reach. Aging theatre types are too snooty to function; young people are narcissistic voids who bow before the false god of Social Media; average audiences are slack-jawed dullards who vapidly drool over celebrities & superheroes; more discerning critics are vindictive hacks; women are oversexed messes obsessed with their fathers & dying to make out with each other as soon as they can be alone. It’s a bitter worldview at best and a hopelessly misanthropic one at worst. However, that nasty disposition is not its Achilles heel. Birdman‘s major flaw is that as a lampoon of the entertainment industry, it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. Pitch black misanthropy has worked for comedies like Happiness & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the past, but those movies are also, you know, funny. When a film hates all of humanity and only roughly 20% of its jokes land, it’s a remarkably dire experience. Just ask That’s My Boy or Nothing but Trouble. A failed comedy is already painful enough without the hateful arrogance Birdman has in spades. If you’re going to believe yourself to be above everyone & everything, you probably should at least succeed in the most basic requirements of your genre.

Of course, I wouldn’t even be addressing a film I miserably suffered through several months ago if it weren’t for its recent Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. If it’s redundant for me to complain about a film online it’s almost reprehensible to add to the surprlus of complaints about a film that won the Oscars. Awards of that nature always have a way of splitting votes between idiosyncratic choices and allowing mediocrity to rise to the top and suffer excessive scrutiny. When was the last Best Picture win that truly felt deserved? The Silence of the Lambs in 1991? The Deer Hunter in 1978? There are plenty of enjoyable films that have won over the years, but it’s rare (if not impossible) for The Academy (and other awards-giving institutions) to “get it right”.

The 2014 awards season was particularly tiresome, however, because after a year packed with exciting cinema you’d think that Boyhood & Birdman were the only two films of any merit. They not only ate up all of the Oscar buzz; they topped almost every critical list imaginable. Boyhood this. Birdman that. They’re both films interesting in concept, but deeply flawed in execution. It’s great that two ambitious works have earned so much recognition, but there were plenty of other ambitious films released last year that were far more successful as finished products. Birdman’s Academy Award for Best Picture wasn’t an affront to the sanctity of cinema or anything as drastic as that. The film, although sour & unfunny, did have its occasionally impressive ideas and its cinematographer, longtime Alfonso Cuarón collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, provided an intense visual appeal (when the single-take gimmick wasn’t being too distracting). My problem was more that after a long, tiring award season where the same two films ate up every prize available (Boyhood, Birdman, Birdman, Boyhood) the more viciously bitter of the two claimed the final trophy, arguably the most coveted prize of them all.

Plenty of people love Birdman and that’s perfectly fine. Duh. My own Best of 2014 picks never stood a chance of sweeping the awards season anyway. The trashy charms of titles like Snowpiercer, Interstellar, The Guest, and Wetlands aren’t the exactly the kind of artistic merits that earn accolades. Part of my failure to connect with Birdman might be a basic difference in personal sentiments. Perhaps I didn’t find it funny because we’re coming from opposing POV’s and the self-righteous humor of the film worked a lot better with folks on an entirely different wavelength. Although I personally failed to appreciate its final product, the film obviously clicked with a large audience so who am I to question its validity? It only took one mind a couple hours to write this diatribe against Birdman, but it took hundreds of people several months to complete the film itself, so it seems foolish at best to continue to rage against it.

Instead of ending on an angry, Birdman-esque note, I’d like to offer a few other 2014 titles for consideration as alternate viewing. For a similar attention to striking cinematography, I’d like to recommend Under the Skin, The Double, and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. For dark, embittered comedies with genuine laughs, I’d recommend The Guest, Cheap Thrills and Wetlands. Most importantly, if you connected with Birdman’s attack on the artificiality & sex politics of life & theatre, I highly recommend Polanksi’s Venus in Fur. It accomplishes so much more with so many less moving parts, supplanting Birdman’s strained efforts with a simplistic grace and still somehow not losing a drop of the vitriol. Despite the reductive nature of awards seasons, I’d just like you to know that there were more than two films released last year and that Birdman was far from the best among them.

-Brandon Ledet

The Other Vincent Price Masque: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

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Vincent Price’s fey, effete, menacingly campy persona made him a natural for old-school horror. It was a persona he intentionally cultivated. In his transition from 50’s monster movie classics like House of Wax and The Fly to the 60s Corman-Poe Cycle that made him infamous, he gradually ramped up the eccentricities in his voice & mannerisms that established him as a horror staple. By the 70s Price had devolved into delicious self-parody. His playful demeanor was perfect for the horror genre: his characters were not only evil; they took great delight in their wicked deeds, proudly snickering at the depths of their own cruelty.

It was this persona that made Price perfect for the Prince Prospero role in February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death. The film’s masquerade setting not only afforded Price the chance to be sadistic to a large group of costumed guests, it also gave the sadism a party setting. That mischievous combination of pleasure & pain was positively ideal for the Vincent Price aesthetic. The masquerade setting was so perfect for Price, in fact, that it was recycled years later in another one of his iconic roles: 1971’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

By the time Price starred in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, he was in full self-parody mode. Where Corman’s Masque is a trippy horror show with occasional, unsettling touches of humor, Dr. Phibes is a full-on horror comedy. Price’s Phibes is a horrifically scarred car crash survivor hell-bent on avenging his wife’s death against the surgeons that failed to save her life. The pattern of his revenge mimics the seven Biblical plagues. Despite that disturbing premise, it’s a deviously fun film and one of Price’s most memorable performances. Phibes himself wears a prosthetic mask to hide his facial scars, but that’s not the common thread it shares with Masque. In the film’s best scene (or at least my personal favorite) Phibes offs one of his deceased wife’s doctors at a masquerade ball. His murder method? He supplies the doctor with a mechanical frog mask that crushes his head. The frog mask is not only a beautiful work of art; it also cleverly fulfills the frog plague requirement of the film’s premise.

The masquerade scene in Dr. Phibes is brief, but beautiful. It not only echoes Corman’s Masque in the setting, but also in the gorgeous saturation of color and in the other guest’s nonchalance at the frog-mask victim’s pleas for help. Just as Prospero laughs cruelly at his party guests’ demise, Phibes casually looks on from behind a crystal chandelier as his frog mask contraption exterminates his prey. The two films are tonally different works from two opposing phases of Vincent Price’s career, but in the brief moment at the masque in Phibes, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes are spiritually linked.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death, visit our Swampchat on the film, the round-up of its dueling 1989 knockoffs, and last week’s photos of The Red Death at Mardi Gras. Coverage of our next Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, begins early next week.

-Brandon Ledet

Upside Down (2013)

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It’s probably safe to say that by the end of its whopping seven minutes of opening narration you’ll be prepared to tell if you’re game for where Upside Down wants to take you. In heavy, overreaching breaths the protagonist coos about pink bees, forbidden love, flying pancakes, and “the three basic laws of double gravity” in a stunningly over-explanation of the film’s ludicrous premise. It’s as if Romeo & Juliet were retold through the half-mad kaleidoscope of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. The line “Once love was stronger than gravity” best sums up the tone, distinctly warning the audience that this is a fairy tale and a love story, not a crowd-pleaser for discerning sci-fi types.

As is common with fairy tales (and sci-fi for that matter), the film sets up a very simple haves-vs-have-nots dichotomy. Two worlds are connected by opposing gravitational pulls, so that inhabitants of one are always looking upside down at the inhabitants of the other. The world on top is rich. The world on bottom is poor. It’s about as simple of an allegory as you’ll get outside the front & back of the train in Snowpiercer. The fun is in the film’s more fantastic elements, like the aforementioned pink bees that pollinate flowers from both worlds and improbably make an interplanetary romance possible. Besides a few grim details in the wealth disparity and interplanetary oil trade, Upside Down is mostly light fare. If you have the ability (or desire) to turn off your brain and enjoy a sappy against-all-odds love story that involves distant planets and magical pink nectar, it’s a truly fun film.

Even though the movie requires a complete absence of cynicism, it does boast visually thoughtful rewards as well. The spaces where the two worlds meet (particularly in offices & ballrooms that stretch on like two mirrors facing each other) are just straight up nifty. There’s an effortless cool to watching Kirsten Dunst sip a martini out of an upside down glass or watching her love interest hop around on floating platforms like a video game character. After the film’s opening Richard Kelly-style rant, it slows way down to tell a simple love story that will sound awfully familiar to most, but it’s a cliché that’s substantially boosted by its outlandish setting. The romantic fairy tale Upside Down tells is trite, but it’s also timelessly cute and backed up by a puzzling visual landscape that’s deliciously stubborn to even the most basic logic.

Upside Down is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Possession (1981)

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Let’s just get this out of the way: Possession is a masterpiece. It’s a cold, incomprehensible film that confidently unleashes cinematic techniques like deadly weapons. Filmed in Berlin in 1980, Possession occupies harsh, uncaring architectural spaces, but populates them with passionate characters that remain in constant, violently fluid motion. The camera moves with them, rarely allowing the audience to settle as it chases its tormented subjects down sparse rooms and hallways like a slasher movie serial killer. In one shot the central couple undulates back & forth in front of a blank white wall, constantly swirling around each other during a bitter argument, but seemingly going nowhere as if trapped in a void. The film feels like a visual manifestation of madness, inertia, and heartbreak all rolled into one dizzying package. It captures the cold horror of divorce & separation and transforms it into an unknowable evil. It’s one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in quite some time, but finds its horror in ambiguity instead of a tangible, comprehensible threat.

That’s not to say there aren’t the typical on-screen genre-signifiers of horror in the film. There is gore. Characters bleed at the impact of sharp instruments and are confronted by humanoid demons, but these aspects serve more as exclamation points than the main attraction. With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, “Maybe all couples go through this” it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.

For a taste of the film’s fascinatingly bizarre sense of movement, the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague” samples key scenes and repurposes them as demonic, Kate Bush-style interpretive dance. It could possibly spoil some striking images, but the film’s plot is mostly spoiler-proof in its intentional obfuscation. The Berlin setting, the sound design in the final scene and the protagonist’s confession that he’s “at war against women” all allude to the possibility of a war allegory subtext, but it’s not explicit or concrete. If anything, characters are at war with themselves and the uncaring nature of the world they occupy. When Sam Neill’s protagonist confesses “For me, God is a disease” it’s easy to empathize. Whoever created the cruel, heartless world of Possession and brought life into it must have at least been as callous as a disease. With its brutal momentum & inevitable bloodshed it’s a terrifying hellscape, especially if it’s something that “all couples go through.”

-Brandon Ledet