christopher walken

The Prophecy (1995)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I remember seeing previews for the Sci-Fi Channel premiere of Gregory Widen’s directorial debut The Prophecy (which, as of this writing, is his only feature director credit, although he did an episode of Tales from the Crypt) in the late 90s. It scared me a little, and I also remember being a little freaked out by the VHS cover, with Christopher Walken looming over figures in the desert, yellow eyes shining. He’s great in this, and when the movie works, it’s usually because of the inhumanity of his Archangel Gabriel, a kind of body language and erratic emphasis that’s one of the actor’s many specialties. Widen also wrote the film, having previously garnered some success for penning 1986’s Highlander as well as 1991’s firefighter action thriller Backdraft. As a horror fantasy, The Prophecy obviously borrows more from the former than the latter, once again featuring battles between immortal beings, ancient texts, and the grappling between Good and Evil. 

The film opens with narration from Simon (Eric Stoltz), an angel, as he recounts the events of the First War in Heaven, the story that we all know about a third of the angels being struck down from heaven because Lucifer rebelled in an attempt to become a god himself. What we don’t know is that there was a Second War, one that’s been in a stalemate since the first one, between those angels loyal to the Almighty and those led by Gabriel (Walken, as noted), who are throwing a cosmic temper tantrum over God’s preference for humans, as demonstrated by the latter’s possession of souls. In fact, because of this cold war, no soul has ever reached heaven in the history of mankind. As Gabriel later reveals, humans are much more skilled than angels in the areas of “war and treachery of the spirit,” and thus he and his lackeys are seeking out a deeply evil soul of a recently deceased war criminal, as his talent for warmaking could tip the scales in the balance of the rebels. Caught up in all of this is Thomas Dagget, a detective who, years earlier, saw a vision of angels at war during his final confirmation for the priesthood, causing him to abandon the faith. He’s called in when the body of one of Gabriel’s lieutenants, slain in an altercation with Simon, is found and autopsied, with strange results. For instance, when humans grow, their bones have natural striations that can be used to determine the age of a body, but this man’s bones have no such markings, as if they were created spontaneously in their current form; he also has the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. 

Simon and Thomas meet briefly before the angel takes off to Arizona to dig up the grave of the recently deceased Colonel Hawthorne, from whose corpse he inhales the man’s dark soul. Knowing that Gabriel is hot on his trail, Simon sticks the soul inside of a young girl named Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) at the local reservation school, shortly before Gabriel arrives and kills him. Mary’s teacher Katherine (Virginia Madsen) starts to notice a change in the girl’s disposition as well as her declining health. Meanwhile, Gabriel searches for the soul hiding spot with the help of two undead lackeys: Jeffrey (Adam Goldberg), whose life was suspended by Gabriel in the moment of his suicide, and later Rachael (Amanda Plummer), who is caught in the moment of her death by cancer. The film makes its most interesting turn with the appearance of Lucifer (Viggo Mortenson), who doesn’t care all that much for the people caught in the middle but knows that a victory on Gabriel’s part will turn Heaven into Hell which, as he says, “is one hell too many.” 

This movie is messy. Widen has a strong eye for composition and the film has a style that’s unique, and he manages to craft some truly horrifying images, most notably quick flashes of the grisly results of the heavenly war with angels impaled on spears and rotting through Thomas’s visions (think the very brief splices of the terrors that had to be cut from Event Horizon to secure its R rating). There are also some fun things that he does with the mythology that, since he was basically crafting his own Bible fanfic and could make up the rules as he went along, can likely be accredited to him all the way. In particular, I love the way that every angel that we meet has a habit of “perching” on things — road barriers, fence posts, the backs of chairs. It’s like an unconscious habit for them to sit on their feet with their legs folded beneath them like birds, and it’s a clever bit of storytelling through body language. I also really liked the angel autopsy, as each of the things that’s revealed about the corpse is something that makes sense as a scientific oddity that would befuddle a coroner in the way that it’s similar to but not exactly like a human body. 

For the most part, the toying with of fantasy elements works. Lucifer’s reluctant (and ultimately self-interested) investment in preventing the villainous Gabriel from getting his way is good stuff. Although the inclusion of Jeffrey and Rachael is a bit superfluous (Jeffrey mostly serves the in-universe function of driving Gabriel around and handling all the human stuff and the narrative purpose of receiving exposition, and Rachael just replaces for the last fifteen minutes after Jeffrey when he dies), the whole slowly dying puppets angle is interesting. The conflict between Gabriel and the loyal heavenly guard is also clear. What doesn’t work is where it gets bogged down in all of Hawthorne’s soul stuff. We spend too much of the film with Thomas investigating who Hawthorne was (a Korean War general, war criminal, and apparent cannibal) just to establish that he has a truly awful talent for suffering and war, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that Simon would stick this McGuffin into a little girl other than because the narrative says he has to. It’s lucky that Lucifer turns up at the end to claim the soul once it’s exorcised from Mary via a Native American ritual (no tribe is ever named, nor is the ritual given a title either; it’s just the typical nineties “Magical Native American” trope), because otherwise I’m not really sure what his endgame was. It’s all a bit convoluted, to the film’s detriment. Its other problem is that, well, it’s just not very good. No one is giving a bad performance, there are some decently unique visual choices and interesting tableaux, but this is a 90s destined-for-VHS-cult-status movie that will forever be playing third banana to Candyman (which also featured Madsen) and The Crow, the sleepover flick for you and your goth best friend when those two (or The Craft, which released the following year) were already rented out on a Friday night. It’s available for streaming right now on Tubi … but only in Spanish. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dune: Part Two (2024)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Hey hey hey it’s throat-singing o’clock! I remember, lo several years ago now, when someone was online complaining about multiplex soundtrack overlap and how, in the moment that Beth died in Little Women, they could hear Babu Frik laughing in the next screening over. I had a similar experience last week when I could hear the chanting of the Sardaukar armies during a quiet moment in Drive-Away Dolls; I just sat there thinking how much I couldn’t wait to check out Dune 2, and that day has finally come. 

We open shortly after we left off in the last one, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the concubine of the late Duke Leto Atreides, have been taken in by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), the leader of a local division of scavengers known as Fremen. Paul has recently slain one of the Fremen in ritual combat, which makes most of them leery of him, but a young woman named Chani (Zendaya) sees something in the outworlder that she respects. The desert world of Arrakis, the only place in the universe where the space travel-enabling spice melange can be found, has been returned to the governance of House Harkonnen, headed by the Baron (Stellan Skarsgård), who is currently training his nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in the ways of wanton cruelty and planetary management. The Bene Gesserit, as headed by Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) sets her sights on using Feyd as the fulfillment of her sect’s centuries-long eugenics/missionary work following the presumed end of the Atreides bloodline, but reports coming from Arrakis that there is a new leader among the Fremen raise the curiosity of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), whose allegiance is torn between her allegiance to the Bene Gesserit and her loyalty to her father, the emperor (Christopher Walken). Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Paul becomes embedded with the Fremen. When his mother first attempts to use her powers and the apparent fulfillment of prophecy in Paul as proof that he is the long-awaited Fremen messiah, Paul’s public rejection of this endears him both to the non-believers, who appreciate his honesty, and the true believers, who believe that this is merely messianic humility. When his mother, now pregnant, drinks of the mysterious “water of life,” she becomes the new Reverend Mother of the Fremen, a position she’s more than happy to leverage to further spread the glad tidings of her son’s ascendancy. 

This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there. Desert environments are inherently otherworldly, but they do exist in reality, such that in the rare instances that we do see other environs like the world where the Harkonnens’ seat of power is, these are even more removed from what we consider reality but appear so complete and real that it’s truly something to behold on the big screen. The sequence in which we visit the Harkonnen arena and the sunlight is so intense that everything is monochrome except in the shade is a particular standout, just phenomenal, and the inky, strange fireworks that fill the air only make it that much cooler. Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more. 

Narratively, this one does a great job of establishing all the lore that you would need to know through dialogue and imagery, and adds some things which give the text a slightly different depth or interpretation. While Stilgar is every bit the perfect disciple, who sees the wisdom of the prophesied “Lisan al-Gaib” even in Paul’s dismissal of the title (it shows the messiah’s humility) and is willing to give his own life just to give Paul a chance to speak to a quorum of tribal leaders, Chani is here (unlike in the text) unwilling to ascribe any kind of spiritual meaning to Paul’s accomplishments. The film chalks this up to a cultural difference, which helps make the Fremen seem less monolithic; the northerners (like Chani) are of a more agnostic bent than their neighbors in the south (like Stilgar), who are more religious in general and have among them a strong lean toward fundamentalism. Their opposing views of Paul make his tragic turn more meaningful, as he moves from the moral certitude that he must reject all attempts to elevate him to power, as he believes the Fremen can only be meaningfully and permanently liberated if they are led to victory by one of their own, to taking on the mantle of their deliverer and leading them against the Harkonnens. Although there was a kind of filigree that the David Lynch adaptation had that is mostly absent here, there are still moments of bizarre psychedelia as well; after all, it wouldn’t quite be Dune without it. Psychic dreams abound, and when Jessica drinks the Water of Life while pregnant with her daughter, the fetus becomes psychically capable of communication with her mother while possessing the knowledge and experience of a hundred generations, so there are some shots of her in utero as she and her mother “talk,” and that’s the kind of seriously-treated wackiness that makes this whole thing so much more than the sum of its parts. 

I wouldn’t normally make this specific recommendation, but I really think that you ought to see this one in theaters if you can. Every person that I talked to who saw the first Dune at the movies thought it was a staggering masterpiece, while reactions among those who saw it at home were more mixed. To paraphrase Nicole Kidman, we go to the movies to go somewhere we’ve never been before, not just to be entertained, but to be reborn. You should see this one as big as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bonus Features: White of the Eye (1987)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Our current Movie of the Month, Donald Cammell’s 1987 sunlit thriller White of the Eye, is a real weird one.  Our first Movie of the Month produced by the Canon Group (improbable but true), it’s a violent clash between high & low art aesthetics.  Whether it’s a result of the sun-blazed setting or the Golan-Globus production funds, there’s a daytime TV cheapness to the look of White of the Eye that cannot be overcome through Cammell’s . . . unusual choice of imagery.  So, he mostly overcomes that cheapness in the editing. The images look like excerpts from a Walker, Texas Ranger episode, but they’re assembled into a dreamlike, Lynchian tone.  The whole movie borders on looking & feeling mundane, and yet it’s electrifying in its off-kilter presentation. 

It’d be easy to write off White of the Eye‘s uneasy, unwieldy tone as a result of incompetence if it weren’t for Cammell’s larger catalog of unwieldy genre oddities.  White of the Eye plays like a knockoff giallo that gets lost in the American desert for a while, then emerges as a sun-dazed erotic thriller.  The kicker is that it gets lost on purpose.  Cammell’s tragically short career as a filmmaker is comprised entirely of loosely edited, borderline incoherent genre exercises that reach past the storytelling expectations of his audience’s bloodlust to prod the outer limits of the human psyche.  He teetered between being a mad genius & a total hack, and the tension between those extremes made for constantly exciting work.  To that end, here’s a rundown of the other three feature films directed by Donald Cammell, in case you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and are curious about the rest of his off-kilter catalog.

Performance (1970)

Cammell’s most vivid extremes of brilliance & incoherence are on full display in his genre-defying debut, Performance.  A collaboration between fellow inscrutable artist Nicolas Roeg, Performance starts as a chaotically edited gangster picture before emerging from an intense mushroom trip as a macho echo of Bergman’s Persona.  James Fox stars as a bigoted, close-minded gangster with a seething hatred for “females” & “foreigners”.  When he defies the orders of his mobster employer, he finds himself in need of a proper hideout, so he disguises himself as a free-spirited bohemian rocker and takes refuge in a rented room owned by Mick Jagger, essentially playing himself.  Through the power of marijuana, psilocybin, and polyamory, Jagger’s libertine landlord breaks down the rigid boundaries of his gangster tenant’s psyche, turning him into a genuine, genderless version of the free-spirit archetype he disguised himself as to escape his fate – all on a harem-style crash pad set that looks like it was decorated by Kenneth Anger.

That’s the most concise, straight-forward recap of Performance I can provide, since it’s a film that’s deliberately, defiantly loose in both its scene-to-scene details and its overall meaning.  Because Roeg has touched on similar territory elsewhere—otherworldly rock star personae in The Man Who Fell to Earth) & extraordinarily intimate sex scenes in Don’t Look Now—it’s tempting to attribute a lot of the film’s high-art pretensions to his influence, but the dreamy surrealism of this debut collab echoes throughout the rest of Cammell’s work as well.  As soon as the long establishing shots of rain-slicked London exteriors are intercut with flashes of a genderfucked threesome between Jagger & his groupies in the very first scene, it’s clear this is pure Cammell, for better and for worse.  The only thing that’s really out of place here is the film’s setting, since the rest of his work feels magnetically drawn to the American West.  If you’re looking for more of the untethered weirdness of White of the Eye without all the hyperviolent genre tropes grounding its story, Performance is all filler & no killer – often transcendently so.

Demon Seed (1977)

Although Performance & White of the Eye have their own vocal cults, Demon Seed is Cammell’s most popular, iconic work among the general moviegoing public.  It belongs to a very special subcategory of classic horror: I saw it parodied on The Simpsons decades before I saw the movie itself.  In some ways, it’s the most well behaved of Cammell’s films, telling a coherent story with an almost made-for-TV level decipherability.  Except for maybe some lingering exterior shots of the American desert, and some deeply strange War of the Sexes philosophical tensions, you might not even be able to clock it as a Cammell film at all.  Despite its tightened-up editing & storytelling style, though, Demon Seed is just as strange as Cammell’s most out-there works.  It’s not every day you see a movie where Julie Christy plays a lonely housewife who’s imprisoned & impregnated by her husband’s automated-home A.I. technology – a rapist HAL9000 on the fritz.

I’ve been putting off watching this film for decades, since its premise is so sleazy (and that particular subject matter was rarely handled well in the grindhouse days of the 1970s), but thankfully it’s less focused on the physical act of impregnation than I feared and instead finds a kind of wretched transcendence through retro computer graphics & technophobic rambling.  Adapting a novel from paperback titan Dean Koontz, Cammell prods at his usual War of the Sexes tensions here, pitting “male” logic-brain against “female” emotion-brain in a sinister, physical manifestation of a violent divorce.  Its woman vs. machine gender battle spirals out from there to hit on a galaxy of button-pushing hot topics, though, ranging from technocratic fascism to the patriarchal surveillance state to blocked abortion access.  It’s a movie about the misogyny & assault I was worried it was going to indulge, and it’s one that telegraphs the strange proto-MRA violence of Cammell’s next picture, White of the Eye, except with an iTunes visualizer mystique.

Wild Side (1995)

Because Performance & Demon Seed are his most out-there, genre-defiant works (and, frankly, his classiest), the closest companion piece to Cammell’s White of the Eye was his follow-up erotic thriller, Wild Side.  Wild Side feels like watching Tommy Wiseau remake the Wachowski sisters’ Bound.  It’s about how cops are rapists, lesbians are rad, and Christopher Walken is an absolute madman.  Walken’s performance is completely unpredictable in its cadence & internal illogic, pushing the third-act villain turn from White of the Eye into a feature-length character study of an unhinged gangster freak.  If it were a Nicolas Cage performance, Wild Side might be Cammell’s most celebrated cult classic; as is, it’s rotting in 360p on YouTube, which might be exactly what it deserves. 

The quick-cut edits of mundane images that make White of the Eye such a disorienting head-trip continue in full force here, now accompanied with similarly scrambled Christopher Walken syntax in lines like “Women: with them, without them, who can live?”  Anne Heche stars as Walken’s romantic foil – a banker by day, prostitute by night, who’s hellbent on stealing the heart of his hottest moll (Joan Chen, Josie from Twin Peaks).  If Performance is the purest version of Cammell’s choppy, dreamlike editing style, Wild Side might be the purest form of his sleazy War of the Sexes gender conflicts, which teeter wildly from thoughtful critique of societal misogyny to horned-up participation in that very thing.  As chaotic as White of the Eye can feel in other ways, it does find a neutralized balance between those extremes of Cammell’s debut & his final work before his suicide.  Demon Seed might be the furthest outlier in that career trajectory, but let’s be real, every Donald Cammell movie is an outlier.  He was a deeply strange dude, and it’s a tragedy he didn’t leave us with a deeper mind-fuck filmography to puzzle over.

-Brandon Ledet

The Country Bears (2002)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Imagine if the infamous The Band documentary The Last Waltz was remade as a dramatic film where every actor was created by the animatronic technicians behind the Chuck E. Cheese house band. Now rework that premise into an 88 minute live action Disney comedy and you have the delightfully nightmarish flop The Country Bears from 2002. Much like other blatantly commercial misfires of pop culture past (Mac & Me, Super Mario Bros., Howard the Duck, Monster Trucks, etc.), The Country Bears‘s main draw is the disturbing novelty of its character design, the titular bears. The movie is too short and too ramshackle for the absurdity of its animatronic country musician bears to ever wear off, so every wiggle of their roboticized ears and every flicker in their dead robo-bear eyes registers as a crime against Nature. What distinguishes The Country Bears from other nightmarish misfires of shameless commercialism, however, is that its various goofs & gags can actually be genuinely funny on top of its overall surrealist novelty. Directed by Animaniacs writer (and Pinky & The Brain creator) Peter Hastings, the film is somehow successful as a straightforward kids’ comedy (for the kids who don’t wake up screaming later that evening, at least).

Our protagonist and audience surrogate is a preteen bear robot voiced by Haley Joel Osment, who opens the film asking human parents (including Steven Tobolowsky), “Am I adopted?” over the breakfast table. His human brother, a generic teen bully with early 00s frosted tips, is befuddled that his parents tell a white lie in that moment and that no one seems to care that Beary Barrington is a bear, taking it into his own hands to tell the truth. This inspires Beary to run away from home on a road trip to the concert hall where his all-time favorite band, The Country Bears, used to play regularly. Discovering that the robo-bear version of The Greatful Dead is currently broken up and the concert hall is in danger of being demolished, Beary vows To Get The Band Back Together in order to save the historic space that stands as his bear culture mecca. The plot is mostly a series of set pieces from there as he collects bear musicians voiced by Stephen Root, Toby Huss, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt (in a disturbing bear form the producers are hoping you’ll find sexually attractive), etc. for the climactic, day-saving concert. Standing in the way of success is a demolition-happy real estate developer played by an especially deranged Christopher Walken and a set of idiot cops tasked with bringing Beary home to his “family.”

Watching these hideous robo-bears play their giant guitars, banjos, and harmonicas, it’s easy to fantasize about how much better this film could be with a punk or metal soundtrack than it is with the lackluster country pop served up here. There is something subversive about dedicating something so visually bizarre to a wholesomely American artform, though, and no matter how bland the music gets, the bears never stop being fascinating to look at, whereas if this film were made in the last five years they’d be rendered in grey mush CGI. As the winking-at-the-audience cameos from unexpected celebrities like Queen Latifah, Wyclef Jean, and Elton John pile up, the movie’s normalized commercial sheen becomes even more bizarre in juxtaposition with its hideous character designs & zany Animaniacs humor. Sped-up bus chases, cops getting beaten senseless by automated car washes, musical arm pit farting, and old lady diner patrons pulling saxophones out of nowhere amount to the logic of a music video or a Saturday morning cartoon, which makes the VH1 Behind the Music-inspired premise all the more ridiculous. The film never pauses long enough to allow you to wonder how this human/bear society functions socially or why Beary Barrington would have a Nine Inch Nails poster on his bedroom wall. The whole thing just barrels through diners, weddings, car washes, dive bars, and music video shoots toward the inevitable, day-saving concert climax. It comes and goes so quickly and with such bizarre enthusiasm that I barely had time to notice that I was constantly smiling throughout.

-Brandon Ledet

Nine Lives (2016)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

Mark August 2016 down as the exact moment 90s nostalgia reached peak ridiculousness, since we’re apparently now making movies about corrupt businessmen who learn life lessons by getting turned into talking animals again (in this case a cat). And I’m talking real movies with real theatrical releases, too, not just some straight-to-DVD trifle from Air Bud Entertainment. Said talking animal comeback film, Nine Lives, even features two (!!!) Academy Award-winning actors and hinges its lovable furball antics on topics as hefty as greed, adultery, the ethics of leaving a vegetative state loved one on longterm life support, and attempted suicide. The result is a violent clash of tones that, as evidenced by the surprisingly well-attended screening I just witnessed, will have both toddlers and gin & soda-clutching wastoid drunks (It me.) alike laughing for the entirety of its runtime, albeit for wildly different reasons.

The most impressive thing about Nine Lives to me is how it finds a way to satisfy both sides of the toddler-drunk divide in its audience. For instance, the movie opens with a montage of cat videos lifted from YouTube, a tip of the hat to the audience that says, “Hey, we all know why you’re here, you pathetic thing you.” If you regularly find yourself losing valuable time to internet wormholes of cat-themed home video, you’re likely to get a kick out of Nine Lives‘s simple pleasures: a cat drinking scotch, a cat falling over, a cat slow-dancing with his human daughter, a cat rushing to prevent his human son’s attempted suicide. You know, the little things. If that weren’t enough, and if you don’t mind me spoiling a climactic moment in a children’s talking cat movie, Nine Lives presents internet permakitten Lil Bub as if she were the biggest celebrity cameo get of all time (and she very well may be). The movie’s dedication to broad comedy is inherent to its DNA, so it already has younger kids on the hook, but it also finds ways to rope in a goofier older set who showed up to chuckle at some cat-themed schlock. It does so both in its reverence for internet cat irreverence and in its subversive tendency to tackle dark, chilling topics in an incongruously lighthearted way.

Nine Lives opens with a greedy businessman (Kevin Spacey, Oscar Winner #1) ignoring his wife’s texts & daughter’s birthdays in pursuit of constructing the largest tower in the Northern Hemisphere, a monument to his own grotesque ego. Through a texting-while-driving PSA machination, our business prick anti-hero finds his body trapped in a coma and his mind trapped in an ordinary house cat. This arrangement is orchestrated by a mysterious pet shop owner (Christopher Walken, Oscar Winner #2), who uses his magical, secretive powers as a “cat whisperer” to teach the absent father, now known as Mr. Fuzzypants, a thing or two about humility & familial love. Mr Fuzzypants’s wife & daughter are super bummed about the unexpected coma patient in the family for about the length of a cab ride home and then immediately shift focus to the wacky hijinks of their new furball pet, who meows up a storm in frustration. In between getting drunk, spying on his wife’s suspected infidelity, leeringly watching her undress, and trying to maintain control of his business, Mr. Fuzzypants walks the audience through an inner monologue journey of sarcastic quips until he finally realizes, “I should’ve been a better dad.” His daughter comes to the same realization, declaring “I wish Daddy was more like the cat,” and bonding with the fatherly feline over slow-dances to The Coasters’ “Three Cool Cats” & retaliatory attacks on snotty preteen social media bullies. It’s all very silly (until you reach the suicide crisis of the climax, a moment so shockingly out of place it’s worth mentioning thrice).

One of the weirder aspects of Nine Lives I haven’t touched on yet is the film’s visual palette. Overall, it has an uncannily unreal, cheap feeling to its slick, CG look, recalling the living cartoon artificiality of titles like Speed Racer, Spice World, and Cool as Ice. The overall look of its sarcastic cat protagonist, however, is actually fairly realistic. This obviously isn’t the state of the art technological epiphany of Jon Favreau’s recent Jungle Book adaptation, but the cat genuinely looks pretty great considering the film’s budget. What’s really weird is how the realistic feline navigates the shoddy Photoshop aesthetic of his environment, creating a  strange fantasy realm space in the drastic contrast. Nine Lives thankfully doesn’t pull any last second “It was all just a dream” revelations in its conclusion, but its entire story could have all been revealed as a coma-induced hallucination at the end and the visual style would’ve comfortably supported the twist.

The king of anthropomorphic animal schlock in 2015 was undoubtedly the Jack Russell terrier pro wrestling picture Russell Madness. Nine Lives is a clear winner for 2016 so far (though it could’ve easily been surpassed by The Witch or The Shallows were they nudged a little harder in that direction). There’s something absurdly anachronistic about Nine Lives‘s very existence that makes it a fascinating watch as a modern theatrical release. Beyond its Jack Frost-type plot structure & cheap CG production design, Nine Lives manages to feel out of step with time in small details like its multiple George W. Bush & mean ex-wife jokes and its Gremlins-esque magical pet shop. And all this 90s-00s nostalgia haze serves to do is mask a truly disturbing tonal clash between toddler-friendly physical humor & pitch black subject matter, sometimes fused together, like in gag where the mysterious cat whisperer threatens to have Mr. Fuzzypants fixed.

I can’t promise you’ll get as hearty of a laugh out of lines like [trying to operate a computer tablet] “Ironically, I could use a mouse right now” & “Is this cat my dad?!” as I did, but I do think Nine Lives is recommendable for its horrific train wreck appeal in its inner conflict of tone vs. subject matter. When I first bought my ticket I was shocked that it was stamped with the incredibly high rating of PG. By the end credits I was shocked that it was marketed for kids at all. But there we all were, laughing in the theater together, children & tipsy adults alike, each clutching our respective juice boxes & hard liquor containers, finding a wealth of small joys in a dumb movie about a talking cat. A lot of people have declared this a dull summer for major releases without any particular film standing out as a one-of-a-kind event, but I can’t imagine a more essential cinematic experience than that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Jungle Book (2016)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

bear

fourstar

I’ve gone on record as not being a particularly huge fan of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man movies, but it seems the director might’ve learned a thing or two about how to deliver a big budget CG spectacle while helming that franchise. Favreau’s latest effort, The Jungle Book, is a “live action” remake of a Disney animation classic & marks the director’s most impressive work to date. I put “live action” in quotes because there’s really only one live action character here existing in a computer animated world, newcomer Neel Sethi as the protagonist Mowgli, which sort of positions The Jungle Book among nostalgia-inducing titles like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and, less deservedly so, Cool World. The film intentionally cultivates this nostalgic lens through certain subtle details like a decades-old yellow font for the credits that look like they were lifted straight from an ancient VHS cassette. It’s a smart decision that eases the audience into a certain level of comfort & familiarity despite the state-the-art technical prowess on display. Again, Favreau seems to know exactly what he’s doing here, as if he’s seen it all before.

The story of The Jungle Book may be familiar to many audiences by now, but I’ve personally never read its Rudyard Kipling-penned source material & it’s been a good two decades since I’ve seen the Disney original, so I honestly didn’t remember jack shit about it going in. The only detail of The Jungle Book that was clear to me when I entered the theater yesterday was the character Baloo’s personal anthem “Bear Necessities”. Indeed, the modern version of this story doesn’t truly come alive until Baloo’s personal laid back huckster philosophy enters the scene. Early depictions of the lovable scamp Mowgli interacting with various animals of the jungle (after being raised by a pack of wolves like a little badass) range from cute to terrifying to majestic, but also lack a distinct personality & emotional pallet that Baloo brings to the table. The Jungle Book is a two-fold tale of revenge (one for Mowgli & one for the wicked tiger Shere Khan) as well as a classic coming of age story about a hero finding their place in the world, but those plot machinations are somewhat insignificant in comparison to the emotional core of Baloo’s close friendship with Mowgli (which develops a little quickly here; I’d like to have seen it given a little more room to breathe). So much of that impact rests on the all-too-capable shoulders of one Bill Murray, who delivers his best performance in years here (outside maybe his collaborations with Wes Anderson).

You might think that performance wouldn’t matter so much in a film populated with CG animals, but part of what makes The Jungle Book such a technical marvel is how realistic the animal faces are while still retaining the expressive qualities of the actors who voice them. The film essentially looks like those nature-themed t-shirts you can only seem to buy at national parks & gun shows come to life, but it’s the motion capture technology that adds a whole other layer of awe to the film’s visuals. Lupita Nyong’o is very sweet as the wolf mother Rashka who tells who tells Mowgli things like “No matter where you go or what they call you, you will always be my son.” Christopher Walken is wonderfully bizarre as the mythically gigantic orangutan King Louie (I’m guessing his uncomfortable turn as Captain Hook last year was a kind of dry run?). ScarJo & Idris Elba are both effectively terrifying in their respective roles as a murderous snake & tiger (with Johansson more or less combining her parts in Her & Under the Skin on her end). None impress quite as much as Murray does here as the con artist bear Baloo, however. Just look at his Harry and the Hendersons moment when he has to push Mowgli away despite his deep affection and you’ll find more pathos in those thirty seconds than most of the rest of the film could carry with all the time in the world. Murray has always been exceptional in his interactions with children on camera & his casting here was a brilliant choice that elevated the material greatly in terms of emotional impact.

That being said, I do feel there was somewhat of an emotional deficit at work here that made The Jungle Book more of a technical achievement than an all-around cinematic one. This was the most awe-inspiring depiction of talking animals I can think of since George Miller’s Babe (and one of the best depictions of animal coexistence politics since Babe 2: Pig in the City), but it didn’t quite reach Babe’s emotionally impactful penchant for drama. I could easily recommend The Jungle Book the same way I’d recommend a Hugo or a Dredd. You have to see this movie in the theater. You have to see it in 3D. I just don’t think it commands quite the same emotional weight as some of Disney’s more pointed work, with Zootopia being a great example from earlier this year. I should note that I might’ve been a little distracted by exceptionally poor movie theater etiquette at the particular screening I attended (screaming children, repetitive Facebooking, 4/20 bros acting unruly, the full gamut), but my emotional detachment from the film still remains true. It was beautiful to look at & Baloo made it fun, but I wish it had hit me harder square in the feelings.

It’s also worth mentioning, because it’s such an unfamiliar reaction for me, that the end credits for the film might’ve been my favorite part of the whole ordeal. The obnoxious crowd scuttled out of the theater & left me mostly alone with a beautiful pop-up book animation on a blue velvet background that made excellent use of the 3D technology on hand by playing with depth & scale. Walken’s weirdo performance also returned to serenade the (mostly empty) crowd with more New Orleans-inspired tunage and that oddly nostalgic yellow font returned to make me feel warm & fuzzy for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint. All that was missing was some extra Bill Murray content. It sounds kind of vapid to say, but the end credits in itself seemed to position The Jungle Book as a huge advancement in cinema’s visual tools, with encouraging implications as to how that advancement could be applied in a meticulously manicured art film (once it’s more affordable/accessible). The film was visually fascinating & at times wildly fun, but for the most part it just made me excited about the future of movies in general.

-Brandon Ledet