drama

Gabriel (2015)

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fourstar

I have an unusual, all-consuming fascination with the modern fairy tale Electrick Children. For a somewhat quiet & unassuming indie drama, the film has burrowed its way deep into my unconscious and I find myself thinking about it & rewatching it far more often than I probably should. A lot of the film’s success is easily recognizable in the lead performances from actors Julia Garner & Rory Culkin and in the past week I’ve been able to see those talents continue to shine onscreen in two new features. Julia Garner was wonderful in the modestly enjoyable Lily Tomlin comedy Grandma & now I’ve seen Rory Culkin excel in the titular role of the much bleaker, much superior Gabriel.

Gabriel follows a very eventful 48 hours or so in the life of its titular protagonist, a mentally ill Rory Culkin on weekend leave from an institution. Supposed to be in the care of his nerve-wracked family, Gabriel hatches several escapes as a means to find & propose marriage to an old flame, Alice. When the movie begins, a medicated, sluggish, but quick to anger Gabriel is somewhat creepy in his attempts to hunt down Alice, especially in a scene where he’s fawning over precious objects in her vacant bedroom, huffing her bed smells like Michal Ealy in The Perfect Guy. Even in these scenes, where Gabriel might potentially be a dangerous creep, he’s our dangerous creep and it’s easy to identify with his foolhardy attempts to reach Alice & propose marriage. If, as Roger Ebert used to say, movies are a machine that generate empathy, Garbiel is a highly efficient machine, one that reveals more & more empathetic layers to a troubled, chemically imbalanced protagonist who is extremely confused & vulnerable because of a physiological malfunction beyond his control.

Rory Culkin is immensely impressive in his featured role as Gabriel. The movie asks a lot of him, playing a wide range of notes that include the desperation of a knife-wielding maniac to the helplessness of a sick kitten. As the troubled protagonist begins to duck his medication, Gabriel gradually escalates its agitated nervousness to match his mental state & Culkin is incredibly adept every step of the way. There are some visual & aural touches that help convey this secondhand anxiousness, like obsessive focus on the patterns of tree branches & fan blades as well as vocal repetition & a nerve racking use of violins. However, no matter how much the film accomplishes visually, there’s no mistake that this is Rory Culkin’s show, as he can elicit just as much of that effect from a nervous chewing of his fingernails or a seemingly simple statement like “I’m not Dad.” The heart of Gabriel is an all-too believable, oppressively bleak look at the frustration of living with a familial history of mental illness & the vulnerability of not being able to help someone you love suppress the malfunctions of their mind & body. Still, it’s Culkin’s performance that brings to life the film’s emotional weight. After being captivated by him here & in Electrick Children, I’m eager to watch every role he can land in the years to come, the same dedication I’m eager to award Julia Garner.

-Brandon Ledet

Mi mefakhed mehaze’ev hara (aka Big Bad Wolves, 2014)

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threehalfstar

(Trigger Warning: Child Abuse and Sexual Assault)

What is a monster? We live in a world where we know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that there are no vampires, no werewolves, no scarred demons with razor gloves stalking our dreamscapes with the power to make our nightmare deaths carry over into the waking world. Films featuring antagonists that no rational person could legitimately fear, like a children’s doll haunted by the soul of a serial killer or an evil leprechaun covered in carcinomas, belong to the realm of fantasy. Thus, contemporary horror often confines itself to the plausible, in many ways becoming more like thrillers than the traditional horror films of yore. Our modern monster has to be a person, someone who could be your neighbor or simply a fellow citizen who happens to be a stranger, capable of doing something monstrous. For the past couple of decades, this phantom has to be someone capable of committing that most heinous of crimes–child molestation and murder.

The problem with this, of course, is that those of us in the West have become horribly desensitized to it. For seventeen seasons (and counting), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has shown episode after episode dealing with the neat, patly handled aftermath of sexual assault, especially of children. Every other crime or investigative drama of the new millennium has also featured rape of children as a plot point multiple times. Chris Hanson turned pedophile hunting into a frenzied spectator sport with To Catch a Predator–not that this isn’t something that law enforcement should be doing, but turning the deception and capture of child molesters into entertainment? What the actual fuck? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the commodification and de facto pursuant trivialization of sexual assault and abuse, virtually always of women and often of children, has led to the horrifying explosion of misogynists, rape culture opportunists and deniers, and people who are generally unmoved by the suffering of others. Cultural sensitivities have been numbed by decades of exploitation of those most in need of understanding and protection.

As a result, a thriller that creates great tension and remains (mostly) non-exploitative while dealing with a child murderer in an appropriate way is a rarity, and 2013 Israeli film Mi mefakhed mehaze’ev hara (literally “Who fears the bad wolf,” released in English-speaking markets as Big Bad Wolves in 2014) is a surprisingly good watch, barring two major problems. It’s a thematically sound, lean and taut ride from start to finish.

The plot follows three men. The first two we meet at Micki (Lior Ashkenazi) and Dror (Rotem Keinan); Dror is a Tanakh teacher who has been apprehended by a quartet of punch-happy police, led by Micki, in connection with the abduction of a girl who went missing during a game of hide-and-seek. They take him to a seemingly empty warehouse and rough him up before taking him in for processing; unbeknownst to them, they are filmed by a teenager who happens to have been hanging out in the abandoned building. Commissioner Tsvika (Dvir Benedek) pulls Micki from the case, initially demoting him for his actions before firing him once the video goes viral. Meanwhile, Dror finds himself already having been judged guilty in the court of public opinion after he is released and is ostracized. An anonymous tip leads the police to the missing girl’s corpse, which is missing its head (meaning she cannot be truly put to rest under traditional Judaic law, although this is not explicitly mentioned in the film) and bears signs of sexual assault; she is not the first. The girl’s father, Gidi (Tzahi Grad), concocts a plan to torture Dror in order to find out where his daughter’s head is.

At the film’s core, the thematic intention is to call into question our convictions about good and evil. Is Dror guilty? What if he’s innocent? And, if he is guilty, does that justify that’s done to him, so graphically and brutally? Even if all that happens is a revisitation of the murderer’s crimes, will recreating those horrors really bring Gidi or Micki closure? Is everyone really a monster? This is beautifully delineated in the way that Dror and Micki act as reflections of each other. Once the video is released showing Micki and his fellow officers beating Dror, both lose their jobs; Dror is fired from the school due to parental complaints, and Micki is let go from the force for participating in the assault (with the unstated, implicit reason being that his firing is less for the event itself than for the fact that he was stupid enough to get caught doing it). Both the head of the school and the chief of police say that the dismissal is temporary, and that each man will come back to his respective position once everything blows over. Both men are estranged from their wives, causing them to feel distant from their daughters (Gidi is also estranged from his wife, and, of course, his daughter is dead).

Despite being an engrossing and cinematically pristine film, there are several factors that simply cannot be ignored with regards to the film. First and foremost, it’s reprehensibly irresponsible to portray the documenting of police brutality as being a greater social ill than the brutality itself. Many of the events of the narrative could have been prevented had the video not come to light, but the film doesn’t lay the blame at the feet of the policemen who are beating a suspect, instead having the characters lament that they were caught. No spoilers–I’ll simply say that this movie would have had an unambiguously happy ending had Micki and crew followed procedure in the first place.

But there’s an even greater problem here. There’s only one woman in this movie: the realtor (Nati Kluger). There are also a few young girls, obviously, but none of them ever speak or have any autonomy at all. Arguably, there’s a certain unavoidable lack of complete agency for all children, given that they require caretaking, but contrast this to the way we are presented with the chief’s son, who is actualizing his hero worship of his father and being empowered by his father’s knowledge and guidance. He’s treated like a person, which is more than can be said for any of the adult women who are heard (and never seen) in this movie. Every single man who makes up the core of this ensemble has a wife, a woman who exists entirely offscreen, appearing only as a disembodied voice on the phone. This is a fantastic movie, taught and evocative and timely, but there’s just something about the fact that this is a revenge movie in which three men exact harsh torture upon a fourth, with all of them being motivated by the rape and murder of a voiceless girl with a formless mother.

The last time I saw a plot that handled all the elements on display here with the same kind of tension, ambiguity, and deftness was 2005’s Hard Candy, starring Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page. Page’s character is an underage girl who is lured in by Wilson’s alleged pedophile, only to reveal herself as a possibly unhinged self-made vigilante; the rest of the film plays out as a series of power games that calls into question audience assumptions about who is the predator and who is the prey. Both movies have a cast in the single digits (not counting phone voices) and exist solely to play with expectations, but Hard Candy had something that Wolves does not: female characters.

Wolves may be a five star viewing experience, but its subtextual erasure of the horrifying implications and realities of its own premise severely detracts from the film’s recommendability as well as its relevance and canonization as a work of art. “If you want to see this premise done right, watch Hard Candy” is the wrong lesson to take from this review, although that statement is mostly accurate. Wolves is a legitimately good movie, it’s simply that its lack of self-awareness of the way in which it articulates its thesis weakens the movie’s overall statements and concepts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Grandma (2015)

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three star

Director Paul Weitz has a confusing list of credits. The only connection I can draw between his works (which include American Pie, About a Boy, Down to Earth, Little Fockers, and Being Flynn) is that they tend to be underwhelming films with phenomenal casts. There’s nothing particularly distinct about Weitz’s aesthetic or choice in projects, but he has had the good fortune of working with such diverse talents as Robert DeNiro, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, John C. Reilly, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore, and the list goes on. Too bad few (if any) of his films have been worthy of the talent involved. It’s no surprise, then, that I was drawn to the theater for Weitz’s latest picture, Grandma, based on the strength of its two leads alone. It’s also no surprise that the film was okay at best & survived solely on the strength of its lead performances & long list of cameos. If Weitz has a shtick or a calling card as a director, that reaction was pretty much par for the course.

Always dependable comedian Lily Tomlin plays Grandma‘s titular matriarch, a misanthropic lesbian poet who was “marginally well known 40 years ago”, but now suffers an over-the-hump slump of nonproductive self-deprecation in the wake of her longtime partner’s death. Saddled with the lingering debt of her deceased partner’s medical bills, Tomlin’s poet protagonist barely gets by on one-off gigs as a guest lecturer on college campuses. This perilous financial situation is strained even more by the unexpected appearance of her teenage granddaughter Sage (Electrick Children‘s Julia Garner), who only has a few hours to raise over 600 dollars for an appointment to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. What results is a sort of Day in the Life roadtrip comedy-drama as Sage tags along on her miserly grandma’s attempts to hit up ghosts from her past for spare cash. Grandma not quite as funny or as transgressive as the multi-generational roadtrip debauchery-fest Tammy or the frank abortion comedy Obvious Child, but it is a mildly enjoyable picture that leaves room for welcome extended cameos from folks like Laverne Cox, Judy Greer, John Cho, and Sam Elliott, not to mention the killer lead performances from Tomlin & Garner.

When I say that the cast is what drew me to the theater for Grandma, what I really meant is that I wanted to see more from Julia Garner, who was absolutely stellar in Electrick Children, a film I loved enough at first sight to be the first title included in The Swampflix Canon. She’s honestly just as effective here, even if the quality of the material is far from comparable. Grandma is, of course, also a rare treat as a star-vehicle for Lily Tomlin, who hasn’t headlined a film in nearly three decades. Tomlin is funny enough in the titular role, but her character is a bit much to handle for long stretches of time, given her tendency to slip into curmudgeony rants about Kids These Days with their Googles & their Ebays & whatnots. In a telling exchange, Tomlin’s flower child poet is annoyed that her granddaughter has never heard of The Feminine Mystique, while Sage is equally annoyed that her grandma doesn’t know that Mystique is also an X-Men character. It’s not too hard to see who the film sides with there.

Worse yet are casual platitudes like, “I like being old. Young people are stupid,” “Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion these days?”, and the biting, career-specific insult, “You’re a footnote.” Tomlin’s protagonist is the first to admit that she’s “a horrible person”, but her constant attempts to be seen as a hip grandma (including her dragonfly tattoo, her old Dodge hotrod, casual marijuana use, and incongruous affinity for rap music), all downplay the heft of those statements. Although they’re given a lot less to do, most of the film’s pathos is conveyed through turns from Julia Garner, Sam Elliott, and Judy Greer, who help balance out Tomlin’s more jaded notes of emotional detachment, age-specific bitterness, and outdated feminism. Grandma is an enjoyable, modest film with its own interesting visual language (poetic in the dragonfly imagery, subtly funny in visual gags that include a polar bear painting & a toy Jeep) as well as an admirably casual/balanced approach to its themes of abortion & sexual autonomy. If you’re looking for a calm, pleasant picture with a rarely-seen featured performance from either Tomlin or Garner, Grandma is serviceable. As with everything else I’ve seen from Weitz, it’s a decent enough film with a stacked cast of actors that could probably do much better. I’m not sure that the film would pass The Gene Siskel Test (“Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?”), but at the very least it’s a close call.

-Brandon Ledet

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

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fourhalfstar

There was something about the laughter in the audience I saw The Diary of a Teenage Girl with that really freaked me out. Yes, the movie is funny, but it’s funny in an uncomfortable way that recalls difficult works from Todd Solondz like Welcome to the Dollhouse & Happiness moreso than any laugh-a-minute yuck ’em ups. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a rare picture that manages to incorporate effective black comedy into its beautiful visual artistry & the brutal, unmitigated honesty suggested by its confessional title. Adapted from a graphic novel by the same name, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the story of a vulnerably naive 15 year old comic book artist who gets wrapped up in a sexual affair with her mother’s much older boyfriend in 1970s San Francisco. It’s a difficult film to stomach at times, but it’s one told with an intense attention to verisimilitude & vivid incorporations of top notch comic book art, all held together by a career-making performance from Bel Powley, who plays the exceedingly endearing, but deeply troubled protagonist Millie. I’m willing to chalk up a good bit of the laughter from the theater where I watched the film to discomfort with the subject matter, something I’m more than sure was intended by first-time writer/director Marielle Heller, but I often found my own reactions to what was happening onscreen to be far more complicated than mere ribald laughs. It almost felt transgressive to watch the movie with a large group of vocal strangers, as if I were actually hearing the private diary of a complete stranger being read aloud in public. It’s a starkly intimate work.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl opens with a leering shot of Millie’s denim-clad butt as she struts through a public park populated with 70s San Fransiscan hippies, weirdos, bellbottoms, and mustaches. Amidst this time warp fashion show, Millie proudly declares, “I had sex today. Holy shit.” We soon learn that her newfound sexual exploration isn’t quite as positive of a development as she believes. Not knowing the full extent of what she was getting herself into (how could she?), Millie intentionally seduces her mother’s boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), initiating a longterm affair that eventually drives some irrevocable wedges between her & her mother (Kristen Wiig). Her reasoning for acting out on her lust for Monroe? “I was afraid to pass up the chance because I may never get another.” Millie is full of these self-deprecating, sadly funny “truisms”. After sleeping with Monroe, she asks “Is this the way it feels for someone to love you?” She later yearns, “I want someone to be so in love with me that they would feel like they would die if I were gone,” and makes ridiculous declarations like “I want to be an artist so school actually doesn’t matter that much for me,” & “Hookers have all the power. Everybody knows that.” Her naiveté can be amusing when she gets teen-deep in her sexual philosophizing, but it also indicates a terrifying vulnerability that Monroe was a monster to take advantage of.

While Millie pines over Monroe in a typical “he loves me, he loves me not” fashion, he treats her more like a younger sister, incorporating an uncomfortable amount of childish horseplay in their flirtation. She’s a shameful fling in Monroe’s mind. She’s also, according to him at least, completely to blame for the affair. The movie does little to sugarcoat the realities of its mid-70s setting, establishing a very specific cultural mindset with references to the Patty Hearst kidnapping controversy (which Wiig’s flower child mother refers to as “fascist misogynistic bullshit”), the rise of sexually androgynous milestones like Iggy Pop & The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the omnipresence of Fruedian psychology (represented onscreen by Christopher Meloni), depictions of teens freely ordering drinks in barrooms, the drugged out loopiness of H.R. Pufnstuf, and era-honest inclusions of casual racism & homophobia. It’s tempting to say that an affair with a 15 year old in that context would not have been as big of a deal as it is now, it being “different times” & all, but c’mon . . . Monroe feels intense guilt for the affair, because he knows it is wrong. Still, he blames Millie for his own transgression, as does every other person who learns of the affair (another indication of the times). When Monroe becomes increasingly frustrated with Millie’s adolescent behavior, he explodes “You’re a fucking child!” Well, he’s not wrong there, which is a large part of why he should’ve known better & why he’s so much at war with his own conscious.

To her credit, Millie is often blissfully unaware of just how detrimental her affair with Monroe actually is. Convinced that Monroe is only continuing to sleep with her mother to avoid suspicion, Millie mostly worries about whether or not he loves her back, not how much longterm damage he’s causing her psyche. In a lot of ways, Monroe is just one part of Millie’s coming of age story, which also involves experimentation with ditching class, hard drug use, bisexuality, self body image, skinny-dipping, prostitution, running away from home, and attempts to connect with her favorite comic book artist, Aline Kominsky (a real life talent & real life wife of Robert Crumb). Stuck halfway between an older man who can’t keep up with her overactive libido & her teen sexual partners who aren’t nearly as good in bed (not to mention often freaked out by her pursuit of her own orgasms), Millie is alone in a crowd. She both makes intentionally provocative statements like “I hate men, but I fuck them hard, hard, hard, and thoughtlessly because I hate them so much,” & hypocritically shames friends who are struggling with the same pursuits of sexual & personal autonomy.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl pulls no emotional punches as Millie perilously navigates these deeply troubled waters, often lightening the mood both with its protagonist’s endearing sense of humor & teen-specific lack of self-awareness, but never letting its characters off the hook for their often-cruel transgressions. All of this heft is backed up by a vivid visual collage format that allows ink drawings to come to life, wallpaper to transform into a jungle, and a bathtub to suddenly expand to an ocean, making great use of that concession without it ever outwearing its welcome. What results is an incredibly adept debut feature for Marielle Heller & an remarkable display of range for actress Bel Powley. I’m just as excited to see where their careers are headed in the future as I am to revisit this film as soon as I can get my hands on the novel (and experience it with a more intimate, on-my-wavelength audience).

-Brandon Ledet

Crime of Passion (1957)

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fourstar

(Viewed 9/4/2015, available on Netflix)

Maybe the moral of this story is that ambitious women shouldn’t get married. Maybe the moral of this story is that ambitious women are unstable and will come to unsavory ends. Maybe the moral of this story is that forcing social roles onto people creates monsters.

Barbara Stanwyck’s Kathy goes from an ambitious journalist to a stifled housewife to a conniving and manipulative antihero. One of the reasons that I love and return to Film Noir is the presentation of flawed, but still very human characters. Viewers can identify with Kathy up until her last couple of turns. Who hasn’t been so caught up in the excitement of love that they make bad decisions? Who hasn’t been so bored by a mediocre party that they wanted to run screaming? We start losing her when she begins to manipulate the people around her, first out of “love” for her husband, and then out of the pleasure of fulfilling her own ambition, and we get to follow her dark journey towards violence and desperation.

I think that, maybe,at the time of its release, Crime of Passion was meant to convey a moral tale about learning to be happy in your station in life. Crime of Passion was made during the Hays Code era, and therefore bad behavior must be balanced with punishment. Not that Kathy should get away with her transgressions . . .

Despite the emphasis on punishing characters for behaving outside of carefully stipulated norms, I see a feminist subtext that makes the movie work for a modern viewer. I watched Crime of Passion like a tragedy about a woman trapped into a stifling life without any outlets for her own needs and wants, slowly descending into darkness.

I can recommend this movie for anyone looking for a drama or would like to see some solid acting from well-known silver screen actors. It’s a pretty accessible movie even though it comes out of a different era in movie making. Barbara Stanwyck delivers a fair performance, and Fay Wray (yes, that Fay Wray) plays a small role in the movie as well. The leading man, Sterling Hayden as Police Lieutenant Billy Doyle, comes across convincingly as a manipulatable rube. Raymond Burr (yes, that Perry Mason) does well as the hard-boiled Police Inspector that has Kathy’s number from the start.

-Erin Kinchen

While We’re Young (2015)

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threehalfstar

As I explained in my review for Mistress America, Noah Baumbach is remarkably talented at making me feel like shit while also enjoying a good, old fashioned nervous laugh. I ended up appreciating Mistress America a great deal more than I did Baumbach’s earlier release from this year, While We’re Young, but the pair did work together nicely as two sides of the same coin. In Mistress America, we’re swept away by & quickly grow disgusted with a pretentious free spirit who lives a frivolous life in the magical version of NYC that only exists on film. In While We’re Young, on the other hand, we’re similarly disgusted by a go-getter of a young documentarian who embodies every disdainful idea about what it means to be a hipster to an infuriating degree in an all too real NYC we wish didn’t exist in real life. Part of the reason While We’re Young‘s self-absorbed sociopath of a subject doesn’t excite the audience in the same way Mistress America‘s does is that he feels more like a carefully selected collection of quirks than a real person, never really evolving beyond much of a caricature, so your feelings towards him are much less complex. He is exceedingly fun to hate, though. Baumbach at least got that part right.

The sycophant in question is Jamie, a role Adam Driver plays like a bizarro world version of Joey Ramone where everything he does & says, right down to the basic motions of his limbs, are vile affectations worthy of vitriol (just look at the way he holds beer cans if you’re looking for something to angry up your blood). Jamie’s latest victims/”friends” are a middle aged couple played by Ben Stiller & Naomi Watts, who are attracted to the excitement of meeting younger versions of themselves in Jamie & his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried) because it allows them to escape a dull life where their contemporaries use peer pressure to convince them to do things like have children instead of younger-oriented fare like experimenting with drugs. In the compare/contrast portion of the movie, Jamie’s victims are portrayed as Gen-X squares who watch digital television & listen to CDs instead of enjoying the finer antiquated formats of vinyl records & VHS tapes. Despite how things may seem on the surface here, however, the true difference between the two couples is that the older set is a normal pair of human beings while the younger ones are a curated set of dishonest affectations.

While We’re Young is most alive when it aims for cringe comedy in the never-ending gauntlet of indignities that accompany a midlife crisis. Once Stiller & Watt’s older couple start dressing younger, wearing stupid hats (including indoors! at the dinner table! yuck!), tripping & puking at an phony shaman’s apartment, and failing miserably to look competent at hip-hop dance classes, the movie not only earns most of its genuine laughs, it also effectively depicts modern life in NYC to be a nightmarish hellscape. That’s not to say that Baumbach goes anywhere near the jugular here. If you’re looking for a full-on scathing takedown of the Brooklynite hipster, you’re much better off watching the Tim Heidecker vehicle The Comedy. The saddest moments in While We’re Young mostly amount to minor embarrassments & the distinct feeling of losing touch with old friends while chasing new ones. There may be a bitter remark here or there about The Baby Cult of new parents or rampant cellphone addiction or how the millennial generation are a collection of “entitled little brats”, but for the most part the film is well aware that it’s being an old curmudgeon in these moments. That’s not to say that there isn’t a good deal of venom in the portrayal of Adam Driver’s horrendous hipster abomination Jamie, who is at one point described with the phrase, “It’s like he once saw a sincere person & has been imitating them ever since.” The movie is ostensibly willing to let him off the hook for his transgressions, though. In the end what Jamie is up to doesn’t really matter, because he’s young & frivolous. It’s the emotional journey of the film’s middle aged characters that carry most of the film’s heart, which makes for a serviceable cringe comedy & lightly romantic indie drama depending on the scene in question. It’s nowhere near the forceful impact of the more pointed Mistress America, but While We’re Young is another success for Baumbach nonetheless.

-Brandon Ledet

Mistress America (2015)

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fourstar

Noah Baumbach is extremely adept at making me feel like shit. While from the outside his signature films The Squid & The Whale, Margot at the Wedding, etc. may look like the kind of cutesy indie dramas that often earn the quaint moniker “Sundance darlings”, they actually pack much more of a devastating emotional punch than you’d first expect. Baumbach’s parade of broken, often vile characters truly get under my skin, mostly because they’re so real & so relatable. What’s even worse is they have the nerve to make me laugh at the same time, despite myself. Even if I don’t personally identify with the moral reprobates Baumbach brings to the big screen, I can at least recognize their traits in real life people that stalk this cursed Earth, often people I love or at least find amusing. For instance, the deeply unpleasant film Greenberg hosts a lead performance from Ben Stiller so heartlessly misanthropic & cruelly self-centered that I left the film shaking so thoroughly with anger that I couldn’t help feeling as if part of my discomfort was that I recognized aspects of his destructive behavior in people I know intimately or, shudder to think, myself at my worst. It was so tempting to reduce my reaction to Greenberg to “Fuck that movie!” but at the same time it was near impossible to ignore that it had struck a chord, unpleasant or not. In a lot of ways, Baumbach’s latest film Mistress America is the spiritual opposite of Greenberg, yet both films somehow strike that dark, too-close-to-home chord of discomfort.

Mistress America, which Baumbach co-wrote with actress Greta Gerwig (who portrays the titular human anomaly Brooke), strikes a funny, but acidly damning portrait of Millennial pretentiousness. Brooke is anything & nothing simultaneously. She’s a creative spirit with no follow-through to finish any of the many projects she conceives. She drifts in & out of people’s lives without ever emotionally engaging with them in any specific way, leaving behind a trail of destruction that she is far too self-absorbed to even notice. She constantly rags on “rich people”, but obviously coasts on a certain level of privilege she won’t acknowledge. Brooke tries to be everything to everyone, even going as far as adopting different costumes (sometimes on an hourly schedule) depending on the task at hand: pencil skirts for business meetings, workout gear for the health nut part of her day, non-prescription glasses & sweaters for tutoring sessions, etc. While tutoring a math student she’s shown describing the nature of “x” as a variable that “can’t be nailed down”, which is very much on the nose. However, when she later describes herself as “kind & fearless”, she’s completely off the mark. Brooke may think she knows every last thing about how the world works, but the truth is she doesn’t even know the first thing about herself.

At the same time, though, her boundless energy & roaring self-confidence can be intoxicating, especially to a young admirer. Brooke’s soon-to-be stepsister Tracy (played by Lola Kirke) is mildly critical of, but completely starstruck by Brooke, who is, by all means, an impossible person (the kind that lives in Times Square & spontaneously gets invited onstage at concerts). Alone on a college campus in New York City, Tracy is an emotionally vulnerable freshmen who is looking for a sense of self-purpose & personal identity. Tracy yearns to be a pretentious literary type, but just doesn’t have the heart for it. In Brooke she sees the unbridled moxie she wishes she possessed herself. As she fawns over & begins to imitate Brooke, the film gets similarly excited, picking up speed in a delirious manner & getting drunk on self-awarded power. However, Brooke’s modern day Holly Golightly lifestyle is not nearly as glamorous as it may seem on the surface & Tracy quickly discovers that her hero is a broken, selfish narcissist not so gracefully transitioning from the twilight of her frivolous 20s into a much less flattering frivolous adulthood.

In a lot of ways Brooke is more of a collection of empty platitudes & thinly veiled attempts to be quotable than a real person. While casually posing for a friend’s Instagram photo she asks, “Must we document ourselves all the time? Must we?!” When Tracy explains she wants to be a stort story writer, Brooke responds “I read that TV shows are the new novel.” Other self-generated clichés include “You can’t really know what it is to want until you are at least 30,” & “There’s no adultery when you’re 18. You should all be touching each other all the time.” She’s also prone to introducing herself to new friends with the account that “I watched my mother die […] Everyone I love dies,” a personal catchphrase that feels all the more disquieting because she sounds like she doesn’t mean one word of it. It’s no wonder that Brooke is so proficient at Twitter fame, schmoozing businessmen, and coaching a spin class. Her vapid phrasings can be downright inspirational at times . . . as long as you don’t pay attention to what she’s actually saying.

It’s possible that not everyone will engage with Brooke in the same adversary way that I did. Like Tracy (who Brooke deems “Baby Tracy”) it’s feasible that some audiences could fall for her surface charms. It seems like no mistake to me, though, that the more Tracy imitates Brooke, the less unique & likable she becomes as a protagonist. In a lot of ways her newfound confidence turns her into an insufferable jerk & a bully. Also amplifying this feeling is the vibrant 80s synth soundtrack, which always feels like it’s building to a significant breakthrough moment that it never actually reaches. In so many ways, this echoes Brooke’s entire, vapid existence. She thinks that she’s the star of the show (and life is certainly nothing if not a staged production in her case), but she’s actually the butt of its cruel joke.

Mistress America pulls an incredible trick of not only exposing that fragile emptiness behind Brooke’s Everything Is Perfect & So Am I façade, but also making you feel sort of bad for her when the illusion crumbles. Like Tracy, we want to believe that someone so free & so in tune with The Ways of the Universe could actually exist, but by the end of the film you’re left with the feeling that the very idea of someone living that impossible lie on a daily basis is not only far from admirable, it’s also deeply sad. Brooke is the kind of person you’d love to talk to at a party & someone you could have a general sense of concern about, but not a presence you’d want to connect with on any intimate level. She’s far too fleeting & brutally egotistical for that & Mistress America has an emotional bodycount to prove it. Like with a lot of Baumbach’s work, it’s the kind of film that makes you feel truly awful for laughing, a conflicting sensation I personally enjoy very much.

-Brandon Ledet

White God (2015)

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fourhalfstar

White God opens with an immediate delivery of its basic hook: a canine revolution. Our young teen protagonist Lili is shown biking down empty city streets, passing the same vacant cars & eerie urban voids that begin 28 Days Later. Before you can piece together an answer to “What happened here?” Lili meets a canine flood. Hundreds of real-life pups chase her down the road, suggesting some kind of Dogpocalypse. Even in these opening minutes you’re overwhelmed with the feeling that White God is an instant classic or, at the very least, something you’re not likely to see too many times in your life. The trick is once it has you on the hook with a taste of what’s to come, it has to earn the grand scale lunacy of that moment, which the film backtracks to accomplish with an intense tale of (somewhat supernatural) revenge.

Although Lili is first shown bracing the Dogpocalypse by herself, she’s far from alone in this world. Her pet mutt Hagen is Lili’s right hand dog, forming a strong sense of solidarity with her as the pair is passed off to her meat inspector father for a three month visit. Lili’s father is not fond of the dog, to say the least, and at first it’s tough to see his tenderness for his own daughter as well. The parallels between Lili & Hagen are established as early as when they’re being passed off to the nonplussed meat inspector at his slaughterhouse workplace. As they’re walked to his car, two cows are literally marched to the slaughter, hammering home the metaphor as much as possible in visual shorthand. As Hagen is shouted at, dragged by the collar, isolated, and abused throughout the film, Lili is similarly pushed around by the cops, teachers, and parental figures of her life. Her coming of age story poses a teenage girl’s lack of autonomy to be just as miserable & vulnerable as that of an abused street dog. As Hagen hurts his paw, Lili injures her leg. As Hagen’s filmed galloping down city streets, Lili prowls the very same locations on her bicycle, etc.

As similar as their troubled paths may be, however, it’s difficult to argue that Lili’s struggles with authority figures & indifferent older crushes are nearly as devastating as the indignities Hagen suffers. A mixed-breed street dog, Hagen is cruelly treated by every human being in his life in a gradually escalating gauntlet of abuse. After the cold beratement he suffers from Lili’s father, Hagen is abandoned roadside & left to fend for himself. A large part of the movie’s narrative takes a dog’s POV in a style that’s much more akin to the harsh realities of Baxter than it is to Homeward Bound. The confusing chaos of ducking through traffic, scavenging for puddles to drink & garbage to eat, and curiously pawing at roadkill are only the start to Hagen’s perilous journey. He initially makes enemies with animal control, a villain the film holds common with Shaun the Sheep & Babe 2: Pig in the City, but then his growing list of wrongdoers escalates to include butcher shop employees, desperate & homeless fiends, and heartless animal shelter brutes. Worst of all is an organized dogfighting ring (portrayed here in disturbing detail) that systematically abuses Hagen into becoming a trained killer instead of the sappy sweetheart he was in Lili’s protection. Speaking of Lili, even she becomes culpable in Hagen’s abuse as she gets so distracted with her own life that she gives up looking for her best friend, who’d been left to survive alone.

The good news is that as much as White God tests the strength & patience of animal lovers’ hearts (that dogfighting ring sequence is particularly brutal), it also delivers the immense sweetness of abused dogs’ revenge in a way so satisfying & so calculated that it approaches the supernatural. The final half hour of the film, which features extended sequences of Dogpocalypse mayhem & very precise acts of revenge on Hagen’s list of enemies, reaches a grand scale crescendo of chaos that rivals anything you’d see in a more well-funded natural horror film, like a Godzilla or a King Kong. White God pulls a surprising amount of pathos out of a dog’s dialogue-free journey through various forms of cruel captivity, whether he’s displaying the unbridled freedom of a leashless run, assembling a gang of dogpound miscreants (in curiously butsniffing-free exchanges), or, sadly, transforming from a kind soul to a hardened killer. Dogs really do just want to please us. They want to make us proud, asking only for love & attention in return. Even if you can see where the movie is going in its final minutes as Lili answers for her own participation in Hagen’s abandonment & resulting abuse, the climax still hits hard. Both in the sheer joy of beholding seemingly all of the world’s abused dogs exact their revenge on us human scum & in the tender intimacy of watching two wounded animals, Hagen & Lili, facing off & reconciling their pasts, White God makes every ounce of suffering that came before the climax well worth it. It’s a rare, satisfying conclusion of a genuinely strange film that gratifies both in its willingness to go over the top & in its ability to touch you emotionally.

-Brandon Ledet

She’s Lost Control (2015)

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twohalfstar

It’s difficult to tell exactly how much of my disinterest in She’s Lost Control has to do with my personal tastes, which lean towards excess over understatement, but there really isn’t much in this film for me to recommend. I didn’t exactly expect a bright, ecstatic affair from a drama about a sex worker ostensibly named after a Joy Division song, but She’s Lost Control still surprised me in just how lowkey & somber it could be from scene to scene. I didn’t particularly loathe the film at any point during its melancholy proceedings, but I didn’t engage with it much either.

As a sexual surrogate, the protagonist Ronah toes the line between therapy & sex work. She doesn’t have johns; she has patients. Early on in the film, when she proclaims “You pay me for my time but you can’t control how I feel” (in a speech she apparently delivers often), she’s already establishing that her clients are men towards which she has an incredibly vulnerable potential for emotional attachment. These are broken men with deep-seeded intimacy issues (such as a difficulty being undressed in front of a partner or a mental block when it comes to physical contact) that Ronah attempts to coax out of their well-guarded shells. Her vulnerability in these scenarios reaches a breaking point late in the film that feels simultaneously inevitable & brutally cruel.

There’s a lot of potential in these fragile, intimate moments, but first-time director Anja Marquardt does very little to tie their meanings into something more than “These things happen.” I’m sure that this was a deliberate choice & it’s one backed up by a similarly somber visual aesthetic, but I still found very few memorable moments in the final product, despite the great potential. Other folks more tuned-in to the gloomy, low-key indie drama as a genre might find something much more fulfilling here, but for me She’s Lost Control was essentially a gray wash of uncomfortable intimacy that signified little more than how cruel people can sometimes be when you make yourself vulnerable before them.

-Brandon Ledet

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.

Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.

So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).

If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.

Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.

There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.

-Brandon Ledet