drama

A Star is Born (2018)

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I was almost an hour into A Star is Born when I realized Oscar Season had truly started, because it was then that a very familiar, mildly unpleasant feeling washed over me: I was pressured into watching a competently made, exceptionally performed 3-star drama opening weekend because of its value in the discourse, not because I was especially excited to see it. This fourth iteration of the classic Hollywood tale of fame, jealousy, and tragic romance is a decent movie packed with great performances, one that’s destined to sour in audiences’ collective memory as it’s over-praised in the next four months of Oscars lead-up. Great effort will be made to land Lady Gaga a (perhaps deserved) Academy Award for Best Actress and Bradley Cooper a (not at all deserved) Best Director statue; and the best possible outcome in either case is that they fall just short of winning, so that they don’t suffer significant critical blowback for being overdiscussed & overexamined. Frankly, I find this stretch of the cinematic year to be the most exhausting & unfulfilling, a feeling that hit me about halfway into this totally okay, already overpraised melodrama.

Whether you’ve seen this story play out before with Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, or (if you’re a thousand years old) Janet Gaynor in the lead, the basic narrative structure of A Star is Born is too familiar to require recounting in a review. The most interesting creative decision Bradly Cooper makes as this version’s auteurist voice is in acknowledging that familiarity by allowing his players to color as freely as they wish within those lines. The entire film boasts an improv looseness in its performances, which are freed up by the rigid structure of its narrative to search for tossed-off, believably natural tones. Drunken (and deliberately unflattering) conversations between Cooper & Gaga’s leads in the film’s early, pre-fame stretch are especially impressive in their immediacy & cavalier looseness. Domestic home life exchanges of overlapping dialogue lovingly shouted between Gaga & Andrew Dice Clay (playing Gaga’s father) also land with a pleasant naturalism, even recalling the similar home life snapshots of the Oscar-winning Cher classic Moonstruck. Unfortunately, that exceptional-performances-contained-by-an-unexceptional-premise dynamic wears thin by the time the film demands that you emotionally commit to its melodrama, especially when Cooper pretends he has something useful to say about that authenticity instead of just letting it be.

Part of the reason I could already feel myself getting exhausted with Oscar Season discourse halfway into A Star is Born is that I was preemptively starting to have very strong, negative takes on how it handles its music industry subject matter, where the material isn’t distinct or daring enough to support that passionate of a reaction. I found the dichotomy Cooper establishes between meaningful, “Authentic” rock-country Americana vs. supposedly frivolous, high-gloss pop music to be gross, especially since the gruff nostalgia & macho guitar noodling that was supposed to stand for good, Authentic art is not at all my cup of tea. Lady Gaga’s drag bar Edith Piaf covers & high-production SNL performances of pop songs about butts struck me as far superior art when compared to the singer-songwriter ballads Cooper’s character “elevates” her to when they collab as a romantic & creative couple, which is the exact opposite of what the film was attempting to convey. I could feel myself getting increasingly angry with the movie’s macho, old-fashioned attacks on the high-gloss, traditionally femme corners of pop music (where Gaga cut her teeth as a performer in real life) for being in-Authentic, until I had a post-screening epiphany: it ultimately doesn’t matter. The movie is too modest in its artistic goals & achievements to justify any real, substantial umbrage; I was just forming a strong take on the subject because of its Importance in the discourse.

Someone with a much kinder ear for the proto-country Dad-rock Cooper & Gaga perform as a duo in the film will likely have a much easier time swallowing its attacks on the Authenticity of high-gloss pop music than I did. Even if not, the improv looseness of the film’s early, pre-popshaming stretch (including brief appearances from RuPaul’s Drag Race vets Shangela & Willam) is infectiously charming, enough so that it carries the film though much of its second-half rough patches. It’s just much easier to enjoy the film for those performance-specific touches once you divorce it from the context of Oscars talk. A Star is Born is a good movie boosted by excellent performances, but also one hindered by more than a few thematic disappointments (the pop music patronizing is where I personally fixated & soured, but there’s plenty more grossness to pick at elsewhere). The more it’s lauded as the cinematic achievement of the year, something that absolutely must be seen by all, the worse its memory will fare in the ether. That is, until this year’s Oscars statues are doled out and the merits of the performances are all we remember. And then the whole cycle starts over again next October, if not earlier, with the first high-profile melodrama of the Fall. Honestly, I’m already a little tired of that movie too.

-Brandon Ledet

Douce (1943)

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As we’ve been working our way through Claude Autant-Lara’s set of romantic dramas produced during WWII in German-occupied France, the films have been understandably light in tone & effect. Autant-Lara seemed to be intentionally staging escapist fantasies during this era, providing an entertainment release valve for people who could use relief from the grim world outside. Although they’re both handsomely crafted, The Marriage of Chiffon is at heart a whimsical romcom about a teenage prankster and Lettres d’Amour functions as a political farce that climaxes with a You Got Served-style dance battle. Odette Joyeux is an adorable joy to watch in both instances, playing half her age as a merry teenager who disrupts social order in her anarchic pursuance of young romance. That’s why the third film in the series, Douce, is such a punch in the gut. There are certainly touches of escapist romance & mood-lightening comedy present in the film, but overall it operates more as a tragic, grim drama that deploys Joyeux’s apparent youthful innocence for a much more devastating effect.

Joyeux stars as a wealthy Parisian brat in Belle Époque France who risks the lives of her home’s working-class employees out of teenage boredom & romantic longing. Her governess is torn between the romantic intentions of her father & the man who works the stables, as Joyeux looks on in jealousy. The governess is at risk with either beau she chooses to entertain. The stable worker has a secretive extramarital past with her that precedes their employment in the house, which he threatens to expose at her refusal of his affections. The father, in turn, is asking her to marry outside her class at a time when those divisions were aggressively policed, both socially & legally. The real danger, however, is presented by Joyeux as the titular Douce, whose secret crush on the stableman & protective touchiness over her widower father puts the governess at great risk of losing her job & home, despite being pursued by these men through no fault of her own. Douce’s girlish romantic fantasies & petty jealousies turn an already precarious situation into an inevitable tragedy. She’s still as adorably youthful as always, but here in a context where that naivety is deadly dangerous.

That’s not to say there’s no escapist entertainment to be found in Douce. The film is set during the sentimentality-prone season of Christmastime, even opening with a snow-covered miniature of Paris to set the mood (including a mid-construction model of the Eiffel Tower in the foreground), as if the entire drama unfolds in a snow globe. There’s also consistent comedy to be found with Douce’s eternally grumpy grandmother, who polices the house’s class divisions with the incredulous self-bemusement of Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey. For the most part, however, the film’s love triangle conflict is played for emotional devastation rather than socially anarchic laughs or romantic fantasy. That more dramatic intent is best evidenced by the film’s conclusion at a ballet performance that erupts into lethal, fiery chaos in a massive set piece counterbalance to the opening’s miniature. It’s a far cry from the hilarity of Lettres d’Amour’s climactic dance battle, one that is made all the more devastating when considered in contrast with the lighter fare Autant-Lara had established a pattern of delivering in the era. When considered as a part of a set, it’s a total tonal sucker punch.

Of course, comedy & romance aren’t the only modes of escapist entertainment; they’re just the most easily effective. Whenever I’m in a grim mood myself, I tend to seek out art that reflects & deepens that emotional state, so I can see how some audiences at the time could find escapist pleasure in sinking into someone else’s tragedy for the length of a film to distract from the grim realities of German wartime occupation outside the theater. The widower father suffers from an amputated leg as a result of a past war’s wound, but most of the film dwells in the sentimentality of Christmas and the high emotional stakes of unrequited love in a way that feels entirely divorced from the concerns of war. If all the films in this set are meant to be understood as escapist entertainment, Douce is one meant to satisfy the most morbid of Parisians, ones who’d prefer a weepie over a farce. It’s just as handsomely staged & playful as Autant-Lara’s other German-occupation romances, but its overall effect is exceptionally grim for that context.

-Brandon Ledet

White Boy Rick (2018)

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The opening shot of White Boy Rick is of a child plunging their hand into a popcorn maker for a snack, then running onto a gun show floor room to lead the audience to a character whose life’s dream is to sell enough guns to open a VHS rental store. Everything you need to know about the film’s balance between thematic daringness & easy entertainment value is contained in that introduction. Based on the true story of a white teenager in 1980s Detroit who was recruited as an FBI informant before transforming into a kingpin drug dealer on his own, White Boy Rick is extremely well-behaved in its style & structure as a biopic, approximating what Good Time might have felt like if it were a mid-90s VHS rental at Blockbuster instead of a modern stylistic freak-out. This is the kind of movie your aunts & uncles are asking for when they say they just want “a good story” without all the artsy-fartsy stuff getting in the way, the kind best enjoyed on the couch with a bowl of microwave popcorn. The story it tells lends itself to potentially complex, challenging themes of legal corruption, the failed War on Drugs, white privilege, and the cycles of poverty, but the movie is much less interested in slowing down to pick apart those topics than it is in repeatedly asking “Isn’t this crazy?” as it crams in every possible detail from its (admittedly crazy) true-life story. Director Yann Demange & his team of three credited screenwriters seemingly decided that the real “White Boy” Rick Wershe’s life story was entertainingly absurd enough on its own to need no further embellishment or thematic examination beyond being presented as-is in dramatization, that the movie practically makes itself. They’re not wrong.

Like with most well-behaved biopics, White Boy Rick’s greatest faults result from the compulsion to cram every possible real-life detail into a rigid two-hour structure that can barely contain it all. It’s understandable why the film’s small screenwriter army would indulge in that compulsion here, as Rick Wershe’s life between the ages of 14 to 17 in mid-80s Detroit was wild to the point of incredulity. In just three years, he embodied a range of functions within the “Just Say No” Reagan crack epidemic era as varied as arms dealer, drug kingpin, undercover narc, and convicted criminal – all before becoming a legal adult. It’s the kind of life story that makes for a great journalism piece (and has in this 2014 Atavist Magazine profile) but is overwhelming to tackle in full in under two hours of screen-time. The result of that information-compression is a drama too rushed to make an emotional impact, one that must rely on archetypes like The Stoic Drug Dealer With A Hidden Temper & The Tragic Cold-Turkey Junkie to move its story along at a manageable pace. Anyone looking for White Boy Rick to examine the corruption & deep-seated racism of a legal system that would elevate & protect a white teenager in order to take down a network of poor black people operating in a drug market they helped foster will leave the movie deeply disappointed; it simply doesn’t have the time. Instead, White Boy Rick chases capturing each beyond-belief beat of Rick’s short biography as a big-name hustler, focusing on telling “a good story” instead of a meaningful one. Its thematic material sticks with you about as along as it would take to read a mid-length profile of Ricky over your morning coffee. You only have time to say, “Whoa, that’s crazy” before the movie ushers you along.

What White Boy Rick lacks in thematic complexity it more than makes up for in the humor & specificity of its character work. Newcomer Richie Merritt plays the titular hustler as a sweet, hapless idiot too naïve to fully grasp the severity of the game he’s playing. There’s a quiet tragedy to the way he looks to his older junkie sister for wisdom & life advice, but Bel Powley (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) plays her as such a feral, inhuman goblin that the character takes on a Jerri Blank-esque humor, however dark. Matthew McConaughey, Bruce Dern, Piper Laurie, and RJ Cyler (Power Rangers) all match those siblings’ sweetly pathetic energy in a way that finds intensely uncomfortable comedy in the daily tragedies of urban poverty. White Boy Rick works best when it functions as a Seinfeldian absurdist farce, with self-absorbed, delusional characters yelling at each other over minor grievances like pancakes, dead rats, frozen custard, and Footloose while the world crumbles around them. It’s only through that disarming humor that the drama makes any impact, since the swift brutality of the violence that disrupts it is in harsh juxtaposition. The film plays like a less challenging, non-meta I, Tonya in that way, reveling in the discomfort of finding dark humor in poverty’s violence & absurdity. There’s also an easy beauty to its recreation of mid-80s Detroit sounds & fashion, especially when it gawks at the fur coats, gold chains, and neon lights of the social scene at the local roller rink while Detroit soul & early hip-hop breaks cheerfully blare in the background. The clash of those indulgences against the medically accurate fallout of a gunshot wound or the grim step-by-step process of making & distributing crack is almost jarring enough for White Boy Rick to masquerade as an Important Drama, when it’s truly a character-driven farce.

It’s important to find balance in your movie-going habits. While I understand the urge to champion challenging art like I, Tonya, Good Time, and You Were Never Really Here over the more pedestrian payoffs of this Based On A True Story drama, there’s room in your diet for both. A few eccentric, character-based performances & “a good story” are more than enough to entertain as for-their-own-sake indulgences and there’s something adorably old-fashioned in White Boy Rick’s contentment to not reach any further than that. You can practically smell the popcorn popping & hear the VCR whirring in the background, as it’s incredible this movie wasn’t made in the Blockbuster Video era – both because of its simplistic artistic ambitions and because it’s absurd that Wershe’s life rights weren’t optioned decades sooner.

-Brandon Ledet

Skate Kitchen (2018)

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Most filmmakers’ impulse when setting narrative films in a skateboarding community is to treat skateboarding itself as the subject of the story. Whether it’s as a historically-minded hagiography (Lords of Dogtown) or a quick cash-in on the sub-culture’s marketability (Thrashin’) skateboarding cinema often treats its setting as a narrow-minded novelty, a highly specific range of imagery that’s interesting enough on its own to require no substance under its surface pleasures. Skate Kitchen grinds a thin rail between indulging in that for-its-own-sake novelty imagery and telling an emotionally resonant coming of age story that uses skateboarding as a placeholder for any kind of youthful awakening in confidence, independence, and self-identity. The movie’s most transcendent, memorable sequences are fully submerged in the simple pleasure of skateboard performers filmed with professional skill, but it could have been just as powerful if it were set in the world of tennis, fencing, or competitive foosball. It’s a great movie first and a great skateboarding movie second, a rarity.

Suburban doldrums & parental overbearance weigh on a young teen protagonist who cares far more intensely about watching clips of an all-femme skating crew on Instagram then she does about the immediate world around her. Against her mother’s orders, she sneaks away with her board to NYC by train, meeting up with the Skate Kitchen crew she idolizes, quickly being assimilated into their ranks. There isn’t much plot beyond this initial set-up; the film instead carefully contrasts the intense emotional bonding & betrayals of teenage life with the serene beauty of young women skateboarding around NYC. Although the technology & terminology may be different, Skate Kitchen feels at home with similar Big City coming of age stories like Girlhood & KIDS, except with a much more mannered, less volatile emotional palette. The transition from suburban boredom to boarding around NYC is like Dorothy stepping into the Technicolor landscape of Oz, which is more than drastic enough for the film to get by without resorting to the more sensationalist dramatic details of either Girlhood or KIDS, even if it’s trafficking in similar terrain.

Director Crystal Moselle is entering the world of narrative filmmaking with Skate Kitchen, her second feature after the cinephiliac documentary The Wolfpack. Her debut was often criticized for presenting a fuzzy version of the truth (I even personally called it “just beyond the reach of believability”). It’s wonderful to see her lean into that documentation grey area in its follow-up, which features and is named after a real-life skateboarding crew. The Skate Kitchen have been individually assigned fictional character names in the film, but as a collective they’re essentially playing themselves: an all-femme crew of skateboarders pallin’ around NYC in pursuit of video clips worthy of broadcasting their talents to the world through social media. Rachel Vinberg (as the protagonist Camille) and Nina Moran (as comic relief/consummate shit-stirrer Kurt) are particular standouts, outshining even professional actors Elizabeth Rodriguez & Jaden Smith. That’s partly a result of their natural charisma & exhibitionism, but also due to Moselle’s talent for crafting emotionally resonant, authentic-feeling stories out of real-life Characters. In both The Wolfpack & Skate Kitchen, Moselle has found highly specific, naturally fascinating collaborators and turned their lives into emotionally engaging art just askew from the center of true-life. At this pace, she’s shaping up to have an incredible body of work in just a handful of pictures.

A lot has changed in skateboarding culture since the 80s cash-in of Thrashin’. The fashion, the gender divides, and the terminology of skateboarding are almost unrecognizable between that film & this more artful update (which would have been titled Valid if it were made with that 80s mindset). Both films, matter how authentic, serve as a snapshot of their times, saying just as much about the 1980s & the 2010s as they do about skateboarding. Skate Kitchen doesn’t offer much that you wouldn’t expect from a small budget coming of age drama packed with “non-professional” actors, but the specificities of those personalities & the 2010s NYC skateboarding culture they traffic in allows for frequent moments of beauty & emotional resonance. Old-line skateboarding movies treat the culture as a marketable novelty, whereas Skate Kitchen treats it as a community worth documenting & making familiar though emotional storytelling. Honestly, both tactics are worthwhile in their own way because, on a basic level, skateboarding just looks incredibly cool on camera. Still, it’s a pleasure to see the skateboarding movie emotionally mature at least a little, while still holding onto its prankish spirit of teenage rebellion.

-Brandon Ledet

Eighth Grade (2018)

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One of my pet favorite subjects in modern cinema is The Evils of the Internet, especially as represented in gimmicky cyber-horrors like Unfriended, Truth or Dare, #horror, and Nerve. For years, I’ve been praising these shameless, gimmick-dependent genre films for documenting the mundane details of what modern life looks like online in a way that more prestigious, artsy-fartsy productions wouldn’t dare. That’s started to change with more recent releases like last year’s Ingrid Goes West & the upcoming film Searching, which sober up the Evil Internet Thriller a little with more grounded, adult tones. Even the recent sequel to Unfriended, Dark Web, lessened the absurdity of its predecessor’s premise by literally exorcising its ghosts and abandoning its supernatural bells & whistles for a much less ludicrous (and, in my opinion, less interesting) plot. And so, the coming-of-age teen drama Eighth Grade completes this transition of the Evil Internet Horror formula from high-concept gimmickry to awards-worthy art house fare. With a piercingly astute eye for the way social media has reshaped & mutated adolescent anxiety into an entirely new beast, Eighth Grade excels both as a snapshot of what life online looks like in the 2010s and as a distinct, character-driven drama even when removed from its of-the-moment focus on social media. Movie-wise, the Internet Age as finally arrived.

Eighth Grade is, reductively speaking, an anxiety Litmus test. As the circumstances of its plot are a relatively low-stakes depiction of a teen girl’s final week of middle school, it might be tempting to group the picture in with other modern revisions of the classic coming of age formula – Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, Princess Cyd, etc. For a constantly anxious person who feels immense internal anguish even in the most “low stakes” social interactions imaginable, the film is a non-stop horror show. As Elsie Fisher’s young teen protagonist attempts to assert herself in crowds, approach the early stirrings of sexuality, establish meaningful bonds with anyone who’s not her father, and develop Confidence as her personal brand, the overwhelming weight of the world around her (especially in moments when all eyes are on her) chokes the air with a non-stop panic attack. Even in my 30s I still approach every minor social interaction in public with an unhealthy overdose of dread; I remember that anxiety only being magnified a thousand-fold in the eighth grade, possibly the most awkward, unsure time in my life I can recall. As Fisher puzzles her way through a world that no longer seems conquerable & a changing self-identity she has little control over, you’ll either find her awkwardness adorable or horrifyingly relatable. I was personally watching it through my fingers like a jump scare-heavy slasher.

The unconventional tension of Eighth Grade feels similar to the tactics of anxiety-inducing dramas like Krisha & The Fits, but the movie manages to carve out its own distinct tonal space in its explorations of The Internet as a visual & emotional landscape. This can be oddly beautiful & seductive, as with a sequence where the protagonist is put into a daze by overlaid social media posts set to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.” It can be numbing & cruel in scenes where other kids use the distraction of their smart phones as a means to avoiding direct interaction with someone they deem unworthy of attention. Most significantly, it can be heartbreaking, as with the protagonist’s YouTube tutorials on how to be a confident, well-rounded person – two things she’s anything but. As someone who broadcasts unearned, inauthentic confidence to a near-nonexistent audience on a podcasting & blogging platform on a subject I have no authority to speak on whatsoever (why are you even reading this?), I recognized so much of my own mechanized compulsion to participate in social media content production in those tutorials. She makes them with no prompt nor reward, then broadcasts them to no one in an online void, like atheistic prayers to Nothing. Her social isolation is only compounded by the one tool that’s supposed to relieve it, which is a horror shared across all age groups & anxiety levels in modern culture.

Being alive and in public is a never-ending embarrassment. With the internet, the public sphere has been extended even further into our private spaces so that there is nowhere left to hide. In Eighth Grade, first-time writer director Bo Burnham (who got his own start growing up in the public sphere on YouTube) captures a heartachingly authentic character learning to navigate & push through that embarrassment at the exact moment when anxiety is at its most potent. If that’s a struggle you’ve never fully moved past and you frequently feel the need to punctuate each social interaction with self-humbling repetitions of “Sorry, sorry, sorry” as if you’re apologizing for the audacity of your own existence, this film will likely weigh on you as an incredibly tense experience. Anyone who isn’t burdened by anxiety or the eeriness of the internet is likely to find something much more easily manageable here, maybe even something “cute.” Even the film’s warped electronic soundtrack, provided by Anna Meredith, can either be heard as a playful adoption of modern pop beat production or a horrifying perversion of those sounds into something nightmarishly sinister. Either way, the film is worth seeing as an empathetic character study & a thoughtful modernization of the coming-of-age formula, but it’s difficult to imagine someone who sees the film as a light, low-stakes drama getting as much of a rich, rewarding reaction out of it as I viewed the film: an intensely relatable Evil Internet horror about anxiety in the social media age.

-Brandon Ledet

Blank Generation (1980)

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Sometimes you discover a movie you need in your life through the happenstance of a recommendation, a TV broadcast, or a convenient showtime. Other times, you discover an inessential but moderately entertaining picture just because you confused its title with something more substantial. While digging into background context for the Lizzie Borden bomb-thrower Born in Flames, I watched a documentary on the “No Wave” cinema scene that birthed it. Blank City was an excellent crash course in late-70s/early-80s no budget NYC filmmaking, one that credited the film The Blank Generation for inciting the movement. A short documentary compiling footage of who’s-who CBGB regulars like Blondie, The Patti Smith Group, and Television, the film seemed like an essential snapshot of the scene’s early stirrings, something I was delighted to find hosted on the library streaming service Kanopy. Unfortunately, I had gotten a film titled Blank Generation confused with the aforementioned The Blank Generation, an embarrassing mistake for which there is no excuse. Instead of profiling a wide sampling of CBGB heavy hitters, Blank Generation serves as a document of exactly one group from that scene: Richard Hell & The Voidoids. The film is also missing the D.I.Y. crudeness of earlier No Wave productions, instead adopting the European art house genre patina of director Ulli Lommel, a frequent collaborator of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Still, even without the expected no wave grime and with the documentary value of the picture muddled by its fictional plot, Blank Generation largely delivered the exact historical texture I was looking for in The Blank Generation, a film that’s not as readily accessible at this time. Even with mistaking its title with an entirely different film, I still found a fairly substantial document of NYC’s punk rock hangover.

Blank Generation is for Richard Hell what Crossroads was for Britney Spears, what Burlesque was for Christina Aguilera, what Cool as Ice was for Vanilla Ice. There’s a kind of absurdity in finding an early punk scene version of this kind of pop star vanity project, one the movie barely attempts to conceal with the flimsiest of dramatic plots. Playing the Richard Hell-like rock star “Billy,” Hell has to navigate the crises that trouble any successful rock musician on an ego trip: too much attention from beautiful women, too much pressure from record execs, too much scrutiny from the press, too many adoring fans. Poor baby. A minor romantic plot involving A Beautiful French Journalist on assignment to profile “Billy” emerges, but nothing much comes of it beside a few kinky powerplay exchanges in the bedroom and the value of promoting Hell & his band, The Voidoids. A side plot involving a monumental cameo from Andy Warhol (another collaborator of Lommel’s) functions much the same way, strengthening Hell’s brand by association. As is the case with most of these pop star promo dramas, the only reason the film works at all, then, is that Richard Hell & The Voidoids are genuinely charismatic & worthy of fascination. After being introduced to Hell’s work in The Voidoids through the CD anthology Time in high school, I‘ve always struggled with hearing cleaner, more professionally produced recordings of those same tracks on the band’s proper LPs; so it’s wonderful to hear the band in their live, rambunctious form here while also seeing them in action for the first time. Songs like “Blank Generation,” “New Pleasure”, and “Love Comes in Spurts” frequently repeat throughout the film, with Hell even selecting them on the jukebox of his neighborhood bar in the few scenes when he’s not in the recording booth or preforming onstage at CBGB. He also holds his own as a style icon, sporting his spiked hair & safety pins version of punk fashion that was coopted by Malcom McLaren and then mall punks everywhere. Yes, it’s absurd that there was ever a Richard Hell & The Voidoids promo movie in the first place, especially one this artistically pretentious, but the band is so mesmerizing in look & sound that the indulgence is justified.

Because Blank Generation adopts such a minor, surface-level plot, its staying power rests entirely in its details. The credits’ display on Times Square billboard ads, Andy Warhol’s cameo’s framing as a kind of performance art piece, and the way the journalist’s camera functions as a tables-turning phallic tool are all more interesting in isolation that anything that actually happens in the story. The movie also plays with the cognitive remove of filming videotape displays, something that would later become a huge deal in 80s indie cinema, most evident in titles like Videodrome & Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Above all, Blank Generation is valuable for the details it captures of a pre-Giuliani NYC, something that’s an integral part of Richard Hell’s DNA. It’s not quite the purposeful, all-encompassing documentation I expected from The Blank Generation, but it still navigates the city’s early punk hangover with a useful eye for cataloging the objects & people that populate it. Like in the glam rock hagiography Velvet Goldmine, Blank Generation uses the lens of music journalism as a device for capturing the moods, sounds, and fashions of a very particular arts scene for future posterity. This film’s imagination is far less poetic & lyrical than that Todd Haynes classic, relying heavily on familiar tropes of rock star excess to construct its deliberately minor drama. Still, it’s an essential document of a great, young band in their prime, including the physical & cultural context of their surroundings. Anyone looking for a European art house drama about troubled artists in love negotiating their sexual power dynamics could likely find hundreds of better films to suit their needs. Anyone who’d be interested in seeing Richard Hell & The Voidoids immortalized in cinematic posterity have few (if any) other titles to turn to, however, and that rarity is this film’s greatest asset.

-Brandon Ledet

Cold Water (1994)

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With both of his recent critical darlings, Personal Shopper & Clouds of Sils Maria, I’ve found myself mildly frustrated with the cinema of Olivier Assayas. Both of those films were hinged on incredible performances (especially from Kristen Stewart) and intriguing narrative conceits, but both also felt just short of greatness as completed works. In particular, I remember leaving Personal Shopper last year thinking that Assayas would one day deliver a movie I would totally fall in love with, but that he wasn’t quite there yet. What I didn’t know to consider at the time is that I shouldn’t be looking to Assayas’s future, but rather to his already rich past. While I assumed Sils Maria & Personal Shopper were the films of a young artist still honing their craft, it turns out Assayas has been directing feature films since the 1980s; they’ve just been outside my genre trash-loving radar. A recent local screening of his 1994 indie romance Cold Water has, in one picture, convinced me I’ve had Assayas all wrong. I now see his current crop of near-great films as a transitional adjustment period, the first stage of an evolution in the craft he already honed decades ago. I can’t say with certainty that Assayas’s best work is ahead of or behind him, because there is a much larger catalog of films than I was aware of to indicate that trajectory. However, I can report that he has made at least one great film before, one that relies on the same tactics & tones as the two titles that recently left me wanting.

Cold Water is a kind of 1970s rock n’ roll spin on a classic Romeo & Juliet teen tragedy. Forever understated, Assayas delivers the least commercial version of that premise imaginable, telling a slow, stubbornly quiet tale of pointless teenage rebellion & aimless romance the exact way you’d expect a 1990s French indie to. Two teenage reprobates on the outskirts of Paris seek excitement in petty vandalism & minor shoplifting, staging small-scale rebellions against their increasingly frustrated caretakers at home & school. At the threat of being quarantined in boarding school & mental institutions, they make a foolish pack to run away together to a mythical artist’s colony in the frostbitten provinces, risking their lives for a utopia that may or may not exist. Before they begin this fool’s journey, however, they pause to enjoy an out of control teenage rager where kids form their school & community party to rock records, smoke hash, and destroy everything in sight with an ever-growing fire. It’s in that chaotic centerpiece that Assayas pulls back in scope to explain that these two lovelorn teenage runaways are not at all atypical. The just happen to be their social circle’s scapegoats, the two who always get caught while everyone in their vicinity indulges in the exact same teenage depravity, undetected. Cold Water is an intimate love story between two naïve, self-destructive fools, but it’s also a larger portrait of an entire generation of aimless, frustrated rebel children itching to break free of the societal doldrums of the early 1970s.

Maybe in part because I’m used to these types of stories being told in American & British contexts, I was a little perplexed by Cold Water’s temporal setting not being six to ten years later than its early 70s hippiedom. Watching these kids smash & burn their surroundings in bratty, frustrated rebellion to a soundtrack defined by the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival is a little disorienting, especially when they start pogoing & slam-dancing at the climactic bonfire party. Cold Water is so obviously a punk story to me; it just happens to be set to the sounds of pre-punk hippies. Regardless of what’s spinning on the turntable, however, Assayas achieves a blissful hedonism in that party’s nihilistic teenage chaos. It plays like a sprawling, hazy predecessor to the rager that opens Lynne Ramsay’s similarly quiet, nihilistic Morvern Callar. The majority of Cold Water is guided by hushed, conversational gloom as neither teens, their teachers, nor their guardians know what to do with their frustrated, rebellions energy. There’s no proper score to the film outside its diegetic needle drops & rock radio tune-ins, so that everything outside its loud, vibrant, destructive party sequence feels dead & hollow by comparison. Even the central romance doesn’t feel especially impassioned or life-changing to the two protagonists outside their need to feel something in the cultural, emotional void of their surroundings. Chasing the high of that emotional rush is an ultimately tragic impulse, so maybe the worn-out hippie melancholy of Woodstock-era classic rock is exactly what this film needs. In the transition from Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” to Joplin’s “Me & Bobby McGee,” you can somewhat feel the tone Assayas was reaching for; it’s just difficult to shake the feeling that these kids are punks who had not yet heard the sounds that would later define them.

Something I’m coming to admire in Olivier Assayas is that every film I see from him feels like a young artist actively trying to figure themselves & their craft out on the screen. Just like how I assumed Personal Shopper & The Clouds of Sils Maria were the works of a fresh-faced filmmaker chipping away at future greatness, I could just as easily see Cold Water as being a debut feature from someone young & hungry to make Important Art. It’s not the shoplifting, vandalism, or teenage-runaway romance that makes me feel that way either. It’s more that Assayas appears open to messiness, haunting quiet, and unresolved emotional crises in his movies, having made no apparent effort to tidy up these impulses into more controlled work in the past two decades. There is a kind of coldness to that restraint in his more recent works, however. Assayas’s aimless wanderings feel much more appropriate to the pointless, frustrated teenage rebellions of Cold Water than they do to the adult ennui of his more recent work; or at least they feel more effective in that context. Heighted teenage rebellion lends itself well to his oddly youthful, consistent sense of messy, open, vulnerable gloom. As I further dig around in his decades of back-catalog features, I might make a point to seek out any titles I can find with teenage, lovelorn protagonists; it’s thematic territory that feels at home with his style. It also helps that Cold Water allows those teens a slash & burn catharsis in the bonfire party centerpiece, an emotional release he hasn’t afforded his more recent, adult protagonists.

-Brandon Ledet

Hearts Beat Loud (2018)

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There’s something really satisfying about the trial & error process of songwriting that lends itself well to feel-good cinema. The recent heartfelt indie drama Heats Beat Loud recognizes the joy of building a song from scratch, where confused & frustrated emotions can start in an incoherent haze and then be better understood & emotionally processed once solidified in song. It’s nowhere near the first movie to adopt that songwriting-as-self-therapy concept as foundational thematic ground, but it does feel like part of a recent push to build on that theme by closely following the frustrated stops & starts of the songwriting process while characters figure themselves out. 2016’s Sing Street used that conceit to craft a full-on romantic fantasy piece as a band that barely knows what they’re doing become more confident & cohesive with practice. 2017’s Band Aid is much more brutally honest about the underlying emotional devastation that dives its characters’ need for musical self-therapy, supplanting fantasy with darkly humorous observations about small-time musicianship & romantic crises. Hearts Beat Loud treads water between those two extremes. It flirts with attacking raw nerves with Band Aid’s ruthlessness, but tempers that impulse with Sing Street’s tendency for wish-fulfillment fantasy. The result is still a wholly satisfying movie, even if a less distinct one.

Nick Offerman continues his career-long Grumpy Cat routine as the owner of a failing record store in a small East Coast town. Depressed about the inevitable closing of his shop, his complete lack of romantic & professional prospects, and his daughter’s impending move away to college on the opposite coast, his face only lights up when he dedicates his energy to one obsession: making music, forming a father-daughter band. Hearts Beat Loud occasionally pretends to be an ensemble drama, spreading its POV energies to character crises as wildly varied as middle-age dating anxiety, queer teen romance, senility, addiction, grief, and the list goes on. No one topic is ever explored at any thorough length or depth. That approach can sometimes be admirable, especially whenever same-gender or interracial romance is treated like no big deal, entirely unworthy of comment. For the most part, though, the potency of its emotional beats isn’t reached through any character-based drama as much as through the emotive power of music. Each relationship lightly sketched out in the film could have been more fully developed, but that time is instead dedicated to the cathartic payoff of a climactic concert where the half-formed songs that have been tinkering their way to completion over the entire film are allowed to shine in their now fully-realized glory. It helps that the music is genuinely good and easily carries the emotional weight the deliberately light narrative demands of it.

Low-key, earnest indie dramas like this often survive by the strength of their casts, which is no problem for the Hearts Beat Loud ensemble. Offerman is surrounded by such heavy lifters as Toni Collette, Ted Danson, Blythe Danner, American Honey’s Sasha Lane, and impressive newcomer Kiersey Clemons, who sings the film’s original numbers with Lorde-like emotional heft. High-Fidelity packed just as many impressive performers into a romantic drama about a failing record store, though, and that film’s caustic, self-absorbed bitterness sits on the stomach like a bout with food poisoning (not a fan). By contrast, Hearts Beat Loud approaches its own vinyl dude’s midlife crisis with a welcome dose of heartfelt sweetness to balance out the melancholy. It’s not quite as willing to interrogate its own emotional darkness as Band Aid, but its story of somewhat mediocre musicians finding immense relief in the therapeutic joys of songwriting still lands with a thundering thud when it counts: while the music plays. You can feel mediocrity creeping in from the corners of the frame in moments when the film pauses to worship at the almighty altar of Jeff Tweedy or updates the band-excitedly-hearing-their-music-on-the-radio-for-the-first-time trope with coffee shop Spotify listening, but mediocrity is oddly part of its low-key charm. This is a story about normal people finding joy in D.I.Y. song-building, a process that is infectious in its built-in satisfaction, as indicated by the increasing number of recent films in this genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Have a Nice Day (2018)

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Questions of cross-cultural influence are always difficult to pin down with any definitive authority. At first glance, the animated Chinese gangster story Have a Nice Day looks like an awful lot like the post-Tarantino American crime pictures of the 1990s, where criminals spend way more time hanging out & chewing the fat than they do committing crimes. However, as Tarantino himself was heavily influenced by Hong Kong action cinema of the 1980s (the A Better Tomorrow franchise’s influence on Reservoir Dogs is especially apparent), it’s difficult to determine whether Have a Nice Day is a reflection of his work, a continuation of a larger Chinese crime cinema tradition, or a combination of both. There’s a second 90s-era American auteur who potentially had just us much of an influence on Have a Nice Day’s tone, though, a much more unlikely source of inspiration: Richard Linklater. The film’s flat animation style and long stretches of meandering, sometimes philosophical dialogue recalls a distinctly Linklater headspace that’s not exactly common to crime thrillers about villainous gangsters. It’s an unlikely source of inspiration that solidifies the film’s 1990s indie cinema atmosphere, even though its visual design resembles a graphic novel from the 2010s.

An in-over-his-head professional driver steals a bag stuffed with one million yuan from his crime-boss. Over the course of a single night, several disparate parties, from top level gangsters to money-hungry restraunteurs, jockey for possession of the bag, leaving a trail of broken bodies in their fight over its ownership. Have a Nice Day is less distinct for its narrative, which is a typical post-Tarantino crime story, than it is for its atmosphere. It feels as if its conflict is contained in a universe where it’s perpetually 3am and everyone’s as delirious as they are desperate for easy money. The landscape is established as a quiet, desolate picture of urban squalor, backed by hip-hop instrumentals & (more often than not) total silence. Meat cleavers, switchblades, cellphones, plastic surgery disasters, rundown internet cafes, a sparsely populated pavement slick with light rain: this is a small, inconsequential world defined by financial desperation & early morning depravity. The money in that bag means a lot to many people, maybe even least of all to the gangsters it was stolen from. The stolen money seems to be the only road out of this forever-rut of 3am crime sprees, a chance for freedom worth drying for, if not for escaping boredom alone.

The actual animation of Have a Nice Day isn’t as much of a draw as its static visual design. The crisp lines & flat fields of color feel representational of modern graphic art sensibilities, but the computer-smoothed movements of its action isn’t exactly impressive. Often, entire scenes will play out with a single character unloading long paragraphs of dialogue, portraying no movement outside the Flash animation flapping of tense mouths. The only break from this late-night drudgery is a tangential musical spoof of Chinese propaganda films, a brief daydream in an environment that requires that kind of mental escapism for survival. Otherwise, this is Tarantino (or Woo, depending on how you want to track that influence) without the explosive violence. This is Linklater without the broad relatability. The blankness of the animation style matches the financial & ambitious rot of desperate characters in an empty world where the only excitement offered is a stolen sack of cash. The film is calm, hollow, and slow-moving in its escalation of violence & danger, a distinctly 90s hangout vibe in an animated context where that type of atmosphere is a rarity.

-Brandon Ledet

The Seagull (2018)

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At first glance, it’s easy to see why the costume drama The Seagull is being undervalued in its early critical reception. A literary adaptation of an Anton Chekov play led mostly by women in period-specific costuming, this is the exact kind of stuffy-seeming costume drama that typifies most people’s perception of independent cinema, the kind of film festival fodder that lures elderly audiences into daytime-napping in public. However, The Seagull is only half the stately indie drama indicated by its Chekov stage play source material. Its other half is a surprisingly morbid, exquisitely bitchy comedy that laughs in the face of self-important, artsy fartsy types who would typically watch that more pretentious end of cinema in the first place. Saoirse Ronan anchors the genuinely dramatic end of that divide as an aspiring, vulnerable actress caught between the love & lustful whims of two playwrights. Annette Bening & Elisabeth Moss run wild & gnaw scenery on the morbidly humorous end, affecting the performative, comedically exaggerated femininity of a barroom drag act. Together, the trio transform The Seagull from minor prestige indie to slyly subversive comedy & meta-melodrama, an oddly delightful mix of femme-specific tones that deserves more critical respect than it’s ever going to get.

Annette Bening lords over the proceedings as a boastful matriarch (inviting a 19th Century Women pun I’m too clumsy to pull off) and a successful stage actress who demands 24/7 admiration from her family & fans. Her son is a depressive playwright who believes her craft is empty, pandering frivolity, as opposed to True Art. A lesser movie this stately in appearance might side with him, using his complaints that “The modern theatre is trite and riddled with clichés!” to comment on its own elevated place as true art in a cinematic landscape ruled by Transformers sequels & the MCU. Instead, his artistic idealism is satirized as being born of juvenile insecurities, especially in comparison to the much more successful playwright who is mother’s de facto concubine. This jealousy only deepens as the two playwrights struggle for the affections of the same hopelessly naïve muse (Ronan), while Bening & Moss (who is in love with the son) look on in horror. This he-loves-her-but-she-loves-another web of unrequited affections plays out in both perfect comedy & tragedy, equally balanced. Moss hovers between both ends with the most versatility, dressing as a widow because, as she explains it, “I’m in mourning . . . for my life.” Bening & Ronan are more constant in their demeanor (self-aggrandizing & hopelessly wide-eyed, respectively), as they allow a petty tug-of-war between two foolish, destructive men play out to an inevitably tragic end.

At its start, The Seagull feels artistically nondescript, as if anyone could have made it at any time. Early music cues even feel as if they were lifted from episodes of Downton Abbey. Its costumed soap opera stage setting eventually melts away, however, as the caustic relationships between its characters devolve into absurdist, playfully cruel humor (not to mention genuine, old-fashioned cruelty). Bening, Ronan, and Moss pull a minor miracle in transforming The Seagull into a must-watch subversive comedy that is not at all telegraphed by the film’s humble, lovelorn melodrama beginnings. Director Michael Mayer does his best to keep up with the trio, becoming increasingly daring in his framing & music choices as the stakes of the story increase and become more deranged. The cathartic emotional climax of the picture only works because of its performers, however, who sell the severity of this story’s cruelty, whether played for humor or genuine dramatic effect, with full, lasting impact. The Seagull is worth watching for those three performers alone, whether or not Chekov adaptations & stately costume dramas are your usual cup of tea. Here, the tea is boiling hot and surprisingly bitter, leaving the whole room laughing & fighting back tears in equal measure. It’s a shame it isn’t getting enough respect or attention for that accomplishment.

-Brandon Ledet