reviews

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 40: A Night at the Opera (1935)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where A Night at the Opera (1935) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 159 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “I am not one of those purists who believes the talkies were perfect and sound ruined everything. To believe that, I would have to be willing to do without Marilyn Monroe signing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ and Groucho Marx saying, ‘This bill is outrageous! I wouldn’t pay it if I were you!'”

What Ebert had to say in his review(s): Roger never officially reviewed the film, but he did reference it in his Great Movies series review of Duck Soup. He wrote, “A Night at the Opera (1935) [the Marx Brothers’] first MGM film, contains some of their best work, yes, but in watching it I fast-forward over the sappy interludes involving Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones. In Duck Soup there are no sequences I can skip; the movie is funny from beginning to end.”

Like all great comedians, the Marx Brothers were social anarchists. Blatantly disinterested in the pomp & civility of the modern world, the legendary comedic team would only create stuffy, rules-obsessed backdrops for their intensely illogical, confrontationally flippant vaudeville routines to break them down into total chaos. It would be presumable, then, that the self-serious world of the opera would offer one of the most perfect targets for their antics imaginable. The wealth & propriety that surrounds the opera is an inspired choice for a stuffy backdrop for the Marx Brothers’ slobs vs. snobs brand of social anarchy. Unfortunately, A Night of the Opera arrived at a later, transitional period in the Marx Brothers’ cinematic path, just before they became burdened with studio bloat in A Day at the Races, so it never really had a chance to use its conceit to its full anarchic advantage the way they would have in an earlier, freer work like Duck Soup. Luckily Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx are some of the funniest people to have ever walked the planet (especially Harpo), so the movie is wildly funny anyway. A Night at the Opera is only vaguely disappointing because it’s very funny, as opposed to being the funniest movie of all time, something that very easily could have been achieved with its exact plot & cast under less studio control.

The first film marking the Marx Brothers’ transition from Paramount Pictures to MGM, A Night at the Opera is somewhat burdened by the limited imagination of its producers. In particular, MGM exec Irving Thalberg made a point to oversee & reshape the comedy troupe’s schtick to make it more palatable to a broader audience. He wanted to enhance the Marx Brothers brand’s appeal by strengthening their movies with more story structure and more sympathy for the three goofball leads. Thalberg aimed to achieve this sympathy by reserving their social terrorism only for “deserving” villains, as opposed to everyone in sight. It’s an impulse that fundamentally misunderstands what people love about the Marx Brothers in the first place, overloading their usual light touch of illogical transgressions with increasingly sprawling plots & runtimes. Every moment dedicated to giving the brothers a reason to drive their victims mad with slapstick & wordplay is wasted time that could just as easily have been replaced with more comedic gags. A Night at the Opera is a story about two opera singers who love each other, but struggle to connect because of the distance created by their disparate levels of success. Instead of tearing down the civility of the opera world, the Marx Brothers’ main function in the film is to bring the two lovers together, across the boundaries of class. That’s their function in the plot, anyway, which despite what Irving Thalberg believed, does not matter in a film like this. Not for a second.

That’s enough obligatory nitpicking from me. This movie is hilarious. Harpo Marx remains the funniest man who ever lived, transforming the art of slapstick humor into a deeply deranged subversion that’s since been unmatched (even appearing briefly in drag for an early gag here). Groucho & Chico are as impressive as ever in the circular logic of their conman wordplay, scamming the rest of the world and each other into a luxurious position just above the poverty line. One elaborate gag even recalls the total chaotic meltdown of a Duck Soup by piling every character possible into a single, cramped state room on an already crowded ship, a bit that comes so naturally to their comedic style that Harpo effectively sleepwalks through it. As always, the Marx Brothers’ quality in comedic craft remains unchanged; it’s just the vessel it’s packaged in that feels questionable. I really enjoy A Night at the Opera as a stately showcase of vaudevillian comedy, even if its focus on plot, romance, and musical interludes greatly distracted from what the Marx Brothers could have achieved in an operatic setting without MGM supervision guiding their work. I mean, even A Day at the Races was an easily lovable MGM-era Marx Brother comedy, and that film was saddled with a bloated, plot-driven runtime & a deeply disappointing blackface gag. Left to their own devices, the Marx Brothers could have made A Night at the Opera an anarchic masterpiece. Under Irving Thalberg’s supervision they made it a very funny, naturally endearing comedy instead, something to still be grateful for.

Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating (4/5, 80%)

Next Lesson: My Dinner with Andre (1981)

-Brandon Ledet

Life of the Party (2018)

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In official terms, there hasn’t been an SNL Movie™ since MacGruber (perhaps the artistic height of the medium) tragically died in the theaters in 2010. Long gone are the days where recurring, one-note Saturday Night Live characters like Stuart Smalley & Mary Katherine Gallagher were allowed to carry a feature-length comedy on their own. The modern SNL movie is a low-key affair, manifesting in pictures like Popstar, Sisters, and Ghostbusters (2016), where the cast is stacked with chummy SNL vets, but the premise was born outside the show. Melissa McCarthy movies are an even more rarified breed within that modern tradition, as McCarthy herself was never quite an official member of the Saturday Night Live cast. She may have hosted & cameoed so many times on the show that she seems like a natural extension of the staff and she may have started her comedy career in The Groundlings with professional besties Kristen Wiig & Maya Rudolph, but McCarthy is an SNL guest player at best (like Steve Martin in the 1970s). What’s curious about that is the way her own comedy features (especially the ones she’s collaborated on with husband/fellow Groundlings-vet Ben Falcone) feel like the lowkey, unofficial SNL comedies that most closely recall the brand’s 1990s “Every recurring character gets a movie!” heyday. Reinforced by the presence of SNL vets Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph, and (current cast member) Heidi Gardner, the latest McCarthy-Falcone joint feels exactly like the 1990s model for the SNL Movie™, only with the absurdity turned slightly down to make room for saccharine sentimentality (something McCarthy can’t help but bring to the screen between her violent bursts of slapstick). That comedic aesthetic is a kind of risk, as the classic SNL Movie™ is only beloved by a hopelessly dorky few, but I personally find it to be an endearing comfort, a return to the sweetly dumb movies I was raised on out of brand loyalty to SNL as an institution.

Playing a Midwestern 90s Mom character I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she’s been whipping out since The Groundlings, McCarthy stars as a middle-aged divorcee who enrolls back in college to finish a degree she abandoned for the sake of her family. As she crashes the frat & sorority party scene also inhabited by her college-senior daughter, the movie doesn’t shy away from its unavoidable similarities to the Roger Dangerfield classic Back to School. The relentless barrage of party sequences & studying montages almost make Life of the Party feel like another McCarthy-helmed, gender-flipped remake. That bawdy Dangerfield irreverence & fish-out-of-water social humor is also contrasted against a striking amount of sentimentality, however, as the movie focuses more on McCarthy’s inner journey as a woman who’s tired of being an emotional doormat than it does on her daughter’s initial horror at her presence (not to mention her sex drive). For the most part, she fits right in with the younger students, even being inducted into their sorority house as an honorary sister and finding herself a young boy-toy to wear out in the bedroom. Life of the Party is overlong, burdened by an inspo-pop soundtrack, and generally suffers from an improvisational looseness that should have spent a little more time simmering in the editing room, but I think most audiences’ biggest hurdle will be reconciling that overly earnest tone with expectations of gag-a-minute slapstick. This is a much more labored, sentimental piece than either Tammy or The Boss, the previous two McCarthy-Falcone collabs, but its sweetness isn’t necessarily a mood-killer if you’re willing to accept it as an essential part of the movie’s fabric. I still think the hedonistic, low-class excess of Tammy is the couple’s greatest collaboration to date, but Life of the Party’s warm blanket of Midwestern Mom energy has a charm of its own.

If you can withstand the crushing weight of its Hallmark sentimentality, Life of the Party also offers the simple joy of women being afforded space to be funny. In addition to the always-reliable McCarthy & Maya Rudolph, who bring a middle-aged severity to out-of-nowhere slapstick gags of explosions & crotch-shots, the movie also allows plenty of screentime for promising lesser-knowns. Heidi Gardner recalls the same nu-metal & mall goth battiness she often brings to her SNL sketches as McCarthy’s shut-in roommate. Gillian Jacobs (who should be starring in her own wide-release features by now) often runs away with the movie as coma survivor & sorority sister who drifts through life in an anarchic haze. There are many tonally sloppy reaction shots in Life of the Party that director Falcone should have paid much more attention to in the editing room, but Jacobs manages to turn her own into an art form, acting as an element of dazed chaos even when idling in the background. Her Love costar Jessie Ennis also shows promise as a relative newcomer, operating with a wide-eyed derangement as a sorority sister who wants to fit in at any cost. The way these women rally around McCarthy’s new-lease-on-life mom is so sweet it borders on surreality, affording Life of the Party a sustained, low-key joy even when specific jokes don’t land or a labored party sequence drags on into a tequila-drenched eternity. The joys of Life of the Party’s slapstick & absurdism require a patience with its saccharine earnestness & editing room looseness, especially in a year where we’ve seen that sweet/raunchy balance achieved so expertly in Blockers. I’m more than willing to put in the effort for this endearing of talent (especially from too-rarely-seen performers like Gardner & Jacobs), something I’m long familiar with as someone who was comedically raised on the SNL Movie™ in its heyday. I haven’t quite fallen for a McCarthy-Falcone joint with full enthusiasm since Tammy, but as long as they keep making them I’ll likely keep enjoying them. I’ve got to get my SNL Movie™ fix somewhere and I just don’t see a Laura Parsons or Chris Kirkpatrick movie arriving anytime soon, no matter how badly I want them.

-Brandon Ledet

Hereditary (2018)

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It’s no secret that I love horror movies. Of my top ten movies of 2015, 3-5 were horror (depending on how you categorize thrillers like Cop Car and Queen of Earth); in 2016, that was a solid five out of ten, and in 2017, six of fifteen. I even did a list of my favorite horror movies by year for the past fifty years in 2017, and that’s not even getting into my months-long Dario Argento retrospective before that. So it might surprise you to learn that I’m rarely actually scared by horror movies. We’re entering a new golden age of horror (both in film and in the real world, at least here in the U.S.), but it’s rare that a film manages to induce such fear and anxiety in the animalistic part of my brain that it manages to topple the wall of critical theory that usually takes center stage in my viewings. In essence, the value, entertainment and otherwise, that I normally get from a horror film viewing, is in the dissection of its component elements and its social statements and theses. For instance, as captivating as Get Out was, the rhetorical space created in the theater between me and the text was one of intense interest in and attention to the social criticism and symbology of the film rather than making me actually afraid at least until the arrival of those flashing lights at the end, when I feared our protagonist was about to be murdered by the police, as so many young black men in our country are every day. In the past half decade, very few films have managed to actually engage with my fear response over my academic interest “in the moment”: Don’t Breathe, The Babadook, IT, The VVitch, Raw, the aforementioned Cop Car, and probably one or two others that aren’t coming to mind immediately. That pantheon now has a new member: Hereditary.

What an amazing film. I’m going to do my best not to spoil anything about it, but be forewarned: if you’re so sharp a person that discussion of foreshadowing and artistic influences can spoil something for you, you should go and see the movie now now now and come back when you’re done. Ok? Welcome back. First and foremost, I’d like to salute the marketing of this film for so thoroughly managing to disguise the premise. I can’t remember the last time a film’s trailers and TV spots threw such an opaque veil over the text’s true subject matter and so effectively obscured the content to preserve the surprise, successfully. Last year’s mother! did this by crafting a trailer that told you nothing about the movie, really, but that ended in more of a severe disconnect between audience expectations and authorial . . . let’s call it “artistry.” That same division may be coming for Hereditary too, given the disparity between the critical consensus and audience response (sitting at 92% for the former and 59% for the latter on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). There was even a moment close to the end of the film that sent much of the auditorium agiggle, despite being one of the creepiest sequences.

I’ll refrain from making too many broad statements about the general public’s unwillingness to be shocked, but suffice it to say I’m long past being surprised when the average moviegoer expresses disproportionate outrage when something genuinely novel comes along simply because it isn’t what they would expect. This is part and parcel of the democratization of criticism, as the internet provides a platform for everyone to express their views, from that racist idiot in your office, to that guy on the bus who’s been reading the same David Foster Wallace essay collection for months, to that group of women at the next table at Phoenicia who want nothing more out of a movie than a kiss between a handsome man and the lady whose love changed him (and to lowly old me!). This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it certainly blurs the lines of discourse. I’m going off topic (surprise), but the point holds true: the film that you’ll see after you buy your ticket is going to be a different experience than you’re expecting, and that’s a good thing.

So what should you expect instead? (To allay the fears of those concerned that this is potentially spoilery information, let me advise that there are some dream sequences in which the imagery is thematically relevant and resonant but not necessarily literal.) Since you aren’t me, I can’t just say: “Remember that bizarre dream we had after watching the final segment of XX while on post-surgery painkillers last year? It’s basically the same narrative, but with Toni Collette instead of Tyne Daly.” I mean, it is almost exactly that, but that doesn’t mean anything to anyone else. Imagine a horror movie version of Ordinary People and you’re halfway there; add in some concerns about the heredity of mental illnesses and imbalances, a dash of the St. Patrick’s Day segment of 2016’s Holidays, a few handfuls of Rosemary’s Baby, a pinch of Killing of a Sacred Deer, and a dash each of Hausu, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Ring, and Carrie, just for good measure. Admittedly, this is a jumble, but it leads to a cohesive narrative that is shocking, creepy, and depressing, all in good measure.

Annie Graham (Collette) is having a hard time dealing with the recent death of her mother, Ellen, a mentally unstable woman with dissociative identity disorder. Mental illness seems to run in her family, as her depressed father starved himself to death when she was an infant, and her schizophrenic brother committed suicide after accusing their mother of “trying to put people inside of him.” She is an artist who works in miniatures, several of which appear throughout the sumptuous but isolated home she shares with her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), and teenage stoner Peter (Alex Wolff). In many ways, Charlie is most like her mother, as she likewise creates miniatures and figurines, but unlike Annie’s meticulously carved, sculpted, and painted recreations of reality, Charlie’s tiny homonculi have electrical outlets instead of faces, or pigeon heads instead of humanoid ones. After further family tragedy, Annie meets Joan (Ann Dowd) outside of a grief support group, and the older woman lends her a sympathetic ear before introducing her to the occult as a way to communicate with those who have moved on. Or does she? Is there really a conduit to speak with the loved ones who have died, or is it all in Annie’s head? Or is perhaps neither of those things true? Or both?

I’m at a loss to say more without giving away some of the movie’s biggest swerves, especially given that, as noted above, I wasn’t in “critical film theory” mode while watching. From the opening moments, when we swoop in on one of Annie’s miniatures of the home in which the Grahams reside and the tiny dollhouse becomes Peter’s bedroom, the film captivates the width and breadth of your attention. I wasn’t inspecting the music to see if it mixed high and low frequencies to create tension (CW for the link: uses a jump scare from a Conjuring film); I was too concerned about the characters and what was going to happen to them to worry about any of those things, and I’ll be processing the ideas and concepts in the film for days to come, but I can’t get into those without telling you too many of the film’s secrets. Just go see it, if you dare.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami (2018)

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Both the concert movie and the musician’s hagiography are difficult to pull off with any cinematic finesse. With few exceptions like Peter Strickland’s concert footage of Bjork’s Biophilia project and the bizarre tale spun by The Devil & Daniel Johnson, the musician’s documentary is usually flatly crafted, relying on the audience’s interest in the subject to meet the filmmakers halfway. The recent Grace Jones documentary Bloodlight & Bami curiously splits its time between both troubled mediums, the concert movie and the musican’s hagiography, and opens itself up to both’s follies in the process. Its concert footage is no-frills, matter-of-fact documentation of recent Grace Jones performances in Dublin, exerting only a minimal amount of artistic energy into an occasional crane shot in-between its more static edits. Its interview footage, which comprises most of the runtime, is the exact kind of meandering, low-fi/low-effort hangout energy that can sink a musician’s profile in for-fans-only tedium. Somehow, though, the movie transcends these limitations in medium and offers something that feels like a rare, unearned blessing: Grace Jones. Jones saves Bloodlight & Bami from any potential tedium by simply being a living, breathing phenomenon. The movie requires massive patience, but her mere presence makes it frequently fascinating, if not essential viewing. We are extremely lucky to have access to Grace Jones at all, in any form, something Jones herself seems to know more than anyone else in the world.

A Jamaican-born pop singer who made huge waves in the 1970s & 80s through the androgynous sexuality of her high fashion imagery just as much as through the strange tones of her post-reggae music, Jones is a long-established legend. Early in Bloodlight & Bami, Jones is swarmed by intensely dedicated fans after a performance—strangers who greedily drink in her every word & physical motion as if she were a deity. That’s not the Grace Jones this movie is about. You can glimpse her attention-commanding power in the interspersed concert sequences, where she models various exquisite headpieces & black lingerie while singing to an appreciative crowd of hundreds, like a demonic Eartha Kitt. Most of the film, however, is an effort to humanize the pop culture icon, hanging out with her between gigs, often at home with family. The high production value of the concert footage is clashed with the serene calm of Jones’s return trips to Jamaica, framed in a cheap digital haze. The conversations captured in this off-stage downtime range from small talk with strangers & petty disputes with session musicians to deeply painful reminiscing of childhood abuse & long-dead romances. There’s no historical hagiography of Grace Jones’s top-of-the-pop-world heyday, only a document of her current art as a stage performer & her current relationships with an inner circle who knew her as a person, not an avant-garde deity. The movie is in no rush to impress you with the enormity of Jones’s achievements or legacy, relying instead on her natural charisma to hold your attention as the digicam footage gets distracted by images as inconsequential as a car mirror ornament or a flashing streetlight. It’s a gamble that takes for granted that audiences’ minds won’t wander off in its long moments of quiet, one that mostly pays off.

As entertaining as her music can be, Grace Jones is most distinctly impressive as a visual artist & a performer. It seems counterintuitive, then, to strip her of all her visual gloss in a documentary that often looks like it was filmed on a flip-phone. Jones is, to this day, still a phenomenal performer, even shown hula hooping in high heels while singing a vocal-intensive stage number, never missing a beat. Director Sophie Fiennes also has an early credit as an art department contributor for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, one of the most exquisitely staged films I can name, so it’s presumable her eye for visual craft is at least somewhat comparable to Jones’s. The aggressively low-fi, meandering aesthetic that guides most of Bloodlight & Bami must be understood as a deliberate artistic choice. Jones is stripped of the gorgeous lighting & costuming she wears like armor onstage (the headpieces are so extravagant that there’s a “hats by” credit included in the opening title cards) to demonstrate how naturally fascinating & culturally essential she remains without them. Even when she’s not making bawdy sex jokes about the mussels she’s eating for dinner or explaining to an ex-lover why all men should be penetrated (at least once), she naturally commands attention. There’s a fierce, no-bullshit way she carries herself that makes her come across like an undeniable force of Nature, even when she’s just waiting around in a recording studio for stubbornly lackadaisical musicians to arrive or lightly bickering with her mother. Even including the more immediately arresting concert footage, the most fascinating sequence of Bloodlight & Bami is a lengthy montage where Grace Jones applies her makeup in the hours leading up to a performance, oblivious to the world outside her mirror. She compels the eye.

Late in the film, Jones boasts that even without costumes or amplification or even lights, she would still be able to entertain her crowds alone, in the dark, with nothing enhancing the spectacle of her being. Bloodlight & Bami is proof of the veracity of that claim. If you want a document of Grace Jones the otherworldly icon, the 1982 concert film Grace Jones: A One Man Show is likely much more useful than the stripped down, low-fi hangout rhythms of Bloodlight & Bami. This movie is more proof that she does not need production spectacle to make her fascinating & idiosyncratic. Those qualities come to Grace Jones naturally and we should be grateful to be blessed with her existence in any form we can get it. Even when presented in the most plain, genre-burdened version of the musician’s documentary imaginable, one where she’s shown in as pedestrian of a light as possible, Grace Jones still feels like a divine gift we do not deserve.

-Brandon Ledet

Upgrade (2018)

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Often, when I prattle on about my deep love of Evil Technology luddite genre films, I tend to cite recent examples like Unfriended, Nerve, and #horror as the defining works of the canon. There are plenty of pre-Internet Era luddite thrillers I love just as deeply, however; they just already have established cults that don’t need the awareness boost. Films like Hardware & Videodrome have, even if only through the passage of time, already earned passionate fanbases that haven’t caught up to more recent, less prestigious works like, say, the Snapchat filter horror film Truth or Dare. The recent Blumhouse sci-fi thriller Upgrade seems to be transcending that limitation, instantly earning a fiercely dedicated fanbase that isn’t typically afforded tech-obsessed genre films. It’s highly doubtful Upgrade will ever be as culturally iconic as a classic example like The Matrix or The Terminator, but it is bypassing the long road to genre fans’ respect suffered by just-as-deserving works like Unfriended. This might be partly due to its avoidance of exploring the evils of the Internet specifically, since that topic is often dismissed as being too frivolous or too silly to justify a feature length movie (as if a movie could ever be too silly). Instead, Upgrade largely exploits & satirizes luddite fears of self-driving, automated technology. It also, smartly, buries that satire under the surface of a comedic, hyperviolent, cheap-thrills action film that plays much dumber at face value that it actual is in its core cultural commentary. What I’m saying is that that Upgrade is the RoboCop of the 2010s (not to be confused with RoboCop [2014]), an instant genre-fan favorite because it channels the thrills & tone of an undeniable classic without directly copying it.

Paul Verhoeven’s sly satire of police privatization, Reagan Era fascism, and governmental control over personal autonomy is what makes RoboCop an enduring classic, not necessarily its over-the-top violence & (admittedly great) character design. Plot-wise, Upgrade only superficially resembles that time-tested work, touching on themes of police surveillance & the melding of the human body with creepy future-tech only in passing. Its own satirical target is the discomfort people feel with the increasing presence of self-automated technology of “smart” domestic appliances, self-driving cars, and predictive A.I. This is a violent action film about a self-driving body, where the only freedom of choice presented is how much permission is allowed a human body’s implanted operating system to act as its own discretion. And, of course, even that freedom is chipped away. It specifically focuses on the challenge automated technology presents to macho men who long for a now-extinct world that values their brute strength & ability to achieve labor-intensive tasks with their own hands. This very real, very macho anxiety of approaching obsoletion at the hands of future-tech is shown in gloriously over-the-top extreme, where a once-mighty macho man now needs a computer’s help to even move a single muscle. Upgrade has an entirely different plot & satirical target than RoboCop, but the way it buries that social commentary under a thick layer of popcorn movie Fun that can be just as easily read at face value is very much classic Verhoeven. It’s a subversive, playing-both-sides tone that’s exceedingly difficult to pull off without tipping your hand, which is what makes the movie so instantly recognizable as a modern genre classic.

In a near-future dystopia, a classic macho man mechanic bristles at his wife’s love of & reliance on self-automated tech, nostalgic for a world where his hands-on skills were more useful. This anxiety is only made more extreme when his motor skills are taken away from him completely in a senseless act of violence that destroys his family & leaves him physically crippled. A fey tech-bro offers him the promise of a better future through an advanced version of the automated technology that made him so uncomfortable to begin with, affording him a new chance at “self” sufficiency by implanting a “new & better brain” (a biotech computer chip) in his body. Mimicking the humorously calm, sinister tones of HAL 9000, this new operating system, STEM, reinvigorates the fallen mechanic to enact revenge on the brutes who ruined his life. The problem is that he’s not particularly skilled at revenge. Even with his motor functions fully restored, he struggles to best the goons he hunts into physical confrontations, as they’re more skilled in brutal violence. He then must overcome his macho pride and allow STEM to take over as the driver of his own body, closing his eyes as the computer inside him enacts horrific atrocities that make him want to puke. From there, Upgrade is a race to see if the revenge mission can be completed before police-drone surveillance blows its cover completely. Honestly, the resolution of that plot is not nearly as compelling as the over-the-top violence & satirical comedy that drives it. As gore-soaked & boneheaded as the film’s action can frequently be, the overall tone is so cartoonish (especially in the internal arguments with STEM) that Upgrade effectively plays like an action comedy. It’s an indulgence in grotesque slapstick that hints that maybe its hero’s macho paranoia shouldn’t be taken as seriously as you might expect in a more standard thriller. It’s easy to imagine a straight-faced Hollywood version of Upgrade that plays this same self-automation anxiety for genuine tension (presumably starring Liam Neeson) but it’s difficult to imagine that version being half as fun or worthwhile.

A longtime collaborator with modern horror mainstay James Wan, Upgrade director Leigh Whannell impressed me once before with his willingness to go over the top in the evil doll horror Dead Silence. Just like how that bonkers horror frivolity transcended its limited means by feeling like two dozen Charles Band scripts crammed into one monstrosity, Upgrade is endearing in the way it overloads itself with ideas. Neon lights, body-mounted cameras, and intense practical gore effects complicate the humor of the film’s action sequences. Throwaway potshots at VR gaming, police drones, and erudite tech bros threaten to distract from the film’s central satirical target: macho men’s fear of approaching obsoletion through automated tech. This is the exact overstuffed, go-for-broke dual indulgence in absurdity & craft that I love to see in my genre films. Its bifurcated nature as both a gory action comedy spectacle and a subversive act of cultural commentary is indicative of the film’s “Have your cake and eat it too” attitude at large, something that was much more common in high profile genre films back when Paul Verhoeven was making mainstream hits that played a lot dumber on the surface than they truly were. Upgrade isn’t one of my precious Evil Internet horror cheapies that needs to be championed for people to see its value (I may need to conserve that energy for the upcoming Unfriended 2: Dark Web anyway). Its approach to luddite genre filmmaking is more instantly recognizable as a crowd-pleaser, with all its cultural satire buried under the surface of a hyperviolent action comedy. It’s the modern RoboCop in that way, as opposed to the more common approach of remaking & reshaping the original film’s exact plot through updated tech. This is more of a spiritual descendant than a carbon copy, something that’s much more difficult to achieve.

-Brandon Ledet

Beast (2018)

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It’s increasingly rare to walk into a modern theatrical release without any extratextual info setting expectations for what you’re about to see. Maybe it’s because I spend way too much time engaging with film criticism online (it is), but I’m usually familiar at least with a film’s critical consensus, if not its basic plot & production history, before I get to experience a movie for myself. Especially with bigger, heavily advertised blockbusters under the ever-expanding Disney umbrella, it feels as if I’m so familiar with a film’s history & early critical buzz by the time that I actually see it that there’s no possibility left for surprise or discovery, just an echo of what’s already been observed. Completely blind experiences are the stuff of local film festivals, not national theatrical releases. It was wonderful, then, to walk into the recent, darkly romantic drama Beast at a corporate multiplex with no idea what I was in for. Based on the film’s title, promotional poster, and inclusion in this year’s Overlook horror film fest I halfway expected a werewolf-type creature feature. Based on its promotional push on the MoviePass app and complete lack of critical buzz otherwise, I expected it to be a cheaply-produced frivolity. My vague expectations, based entirely on personal conjecture, were entirely wrong, something I wish could happen at the theater much more often.

Within an isolated community in the British Isles, a young, well-to-do suburban woman with an overprotective family falls in love with a wildling bad-boy who often finds himself on the wrong side of the law. Their shared physical, dangerously intense thirst for each other is apparent as soon as they first lock eyes, making it inevitable that she will have to leave the comfort of her country club lifestyle for a life of off-season rabbit hunting & menial physical labor. Part of this attraction is the pair’s capacity for & history of violence, something they sense in each other before it’s ever spoken aloud. She struggles to live down a childhood incident where she lashed out at a schoolyard bully with disproportionate vengeance. He suffers suspicion of being a serial murderer of young girls on the island, due to a similarly guarded secret from his own past. They’re mutually unsure whether to trust or fear each other after being drawn together though intense desire, as their volatile passions & separate histories with lethal violence can only mean their romance will end in bloodshed. Beast is partly a murder mystery concerning the missing young girls in this isolated community, but mostly a dark romance tale about two dangerous people who can’t help but be pulled into each other’s violent orbits. Issues of class, self-harm, domestic abuse, and never truly knowing who to trust run throughout, but the film mostly mines its intensity from the unavoidable pull of Natural impulses, whether violent, romantic, or otherwise.

What’s most immediately impressive here is the tone director Michael Pearce acheives in this debut feature. There’s a distinctly literary vibe to Beast, nearly bordering on a Gothic horror tradition, that almost makes its modern setting feel anachronistic. The intense, primal attraction at the film’s core (sold wonderfully by actors Jessie Buckley & Johnny Flynn and the seedy murder mystery that challenges that passion’s boundaries make the film feel like Wuthering Heights by way of Top of the Lake. It’s the same dark, traditionally femme side of romantic literary traditions I’ve recently fallen for in both Marrowbone & Never Let Me Go, a cinematic vibe I wish were afforded more respectful attention. Pearce makes this undercelebrated tone his own by clashing the Natural imagery of Beast’s violent instincts with the modernity of neon-lit nightclubs and the ominous soundscapes provided by Jim Williams (who also scored last year’s coming of age horror Raw). The distinct nightmare logic of its protagonist’s stress dreams also justifies the horror genre label implied by the film’s (barely existent) advertising, even if its overall tone is close to a modern take on Beauty & the Beast (except with two beasts). Beast is an overwhelming sensual terror as much as it is a twisty murder mystery with a romantic core, an incredible accomplishment for an unknown’s debut feature.

Of course, by reading this review you’re guaranteeing that you cannot replicate the going-in-blind experience I personally had with Beast. That’s the nature of engaging with this stuff on the internet. All I can do is report is that I was happy to have a relatively context-free experience with the picture, which I believe deserves to be seen as big & loud as possible based on the strength of its imagery & sound design. I want more people to experience that pleasure for themselves before it disappears from theaters entirely. The more I promote its merits the more I’m diminishing its chance for an expectation-free audience, though, which is why this entire mode of communication is so inherently imperfect & self-conflicted.

-Brandon Ledet

Show Dogs (2018)

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Show Dogs is the most bizarrely problematic talking animal film I’ve seen in theaters since the Kevin Spacey talking cat pic Nine Lives two summers ago. It’s so problematic, in fact, that its own studio has since censored scenes of the film deemed dangerous for children’s well-being, something I learned was going to happen a mere hour after I left the cinema. Dangerous, censored, transgressive art is far from the first descriptor that leaps to mind when you set expectations for a children’s movie starting Ludacris as a rapping Rottweiler, but the original unedited version of Show Dogs is now effectively a renegade, outlawed production officially deemed morally unfit for public consumption. Its uncensored form, which screened in theaters nationwide only for the span of a week, has been orphaned as a lost art scene moment, a cinematic event. Banishing its real-world evil back into the pits of Hell was a necessary action Global Road Entertainment should be proud of taking, as the message its deleted footage was sending kids was genuinely risking their safety. Its deletion is also beneficial to adults looking to the ill-advised production for a stray whiff of absurdism, raising the film’s value from sub-Air Bud atrocity to a The Day the Clown Cried type Holy Grail. Show Dogs is now one of the premier cinematic events of 2018, if not only for what footage it’s lost.

The rapping Rottweiler voiced by Ludacris is an undercover cop from a confusing universe where animals can talk, but humans don’t understand them. Their flapping CGI mouths form full sentences and they hold real jobs in offices and everything, but humans just hear barks & meows and so on. At one point a dog even complains, “Why can’t people understand what dogs say?” I don’t know; you tell us. It’s your confusing universe. Anyway, the toughest cop on the force is assigned to go undercover as a show dog (Hey, that’s the name of the show) in a heist plot to rescue a stolen, abused baby panda from underground dealers of rare & exotic animals. Keeping with the tropes of every buddy cop movie ever, he’s teamed up with another hard-ass hothead (Will Arnett in full TMNT mode), a human partner who must learn to collaborate with the canine cop & trust his instincts. The reluctant partners build a heist team meant to prepare the undercover pup for passing as a primped & groomed show dog, most notably including Natasha Lyonne as a pet stylist (with an incredible sense of style of her own; she looks fantastic here) & Stanley Tucci as a former Best in Show champion chihuahua with a snotty French sensibility. The team pull through to save the day, never discovered as frauds, and return the stolen baby panda back to its family (in captivity, weirdly). They even learn a few life lessons (and scar a few thousand children who caught the film early enough in its run) along the way.

The thread that has been removed from Show Dogs is one about grooming, but not the kind you might expect given the film’s setting. One of the cop-dog’s biggest hurdles in remaining undercover as a show dog is the Judge’s Inspection segment of the competition, in which dog show panelists must physically handle the dogs’ genitals. A street-tough police dog, Ludacris’s canine lead Max struggles to endure this indignity without instinctively turning around to bite the person invading his privacy. He’s coached out of this instinct by Arnett & Tucci, who train him to “go to his happy place,” mentally dissociating while his “private parts” are being handled without his consent. The climactic triumph of the film is a sequence in which he mentally transports to a psychedelic Eden where Arnett & Lyonne tell him he’s a good boy and reenact the climax of Dirty Dancing with him against a background of kaleidoscopic fireworks . . . all while his genitals are being inspected by a stranger. Can you see why this might be a dangerous life lesson to teach impressionable children? It wasn’t lost on the concerned parents of the mommy blogosphere. One (rightfully) alarmist piece written by Terina Maldonado of East Mesa Macaroni Kid gained enough traction to have Global Road Entertainment pull the footage from the film. The “happy place” tactic is explained in that piece to be a very real method that real-life child molesters use to “groom” their young victims into unquestioning compliance, a factoid I can’t believe I typed without vomiting. Maldonado’s account of Show Dogs is extremely (and understandably) fixated on this aspect of the film’s plot, making me assume it was going to be a consistent throughline throughout the film. Instead, it is (or was) contained to a single training montage & a climactic exchange with the dog show judge. At first, the limited amount of “private parts inspection” footage made me question just how potentially impactful the film’s grooming message really was. When the judge’s inspection is met with a dead-silent horror atmosphere where the soundtrack is overwhelmed by the dog’s pounding heartbeat, however, there’s nothing you can qualify the exchange as but a rape scene. In a kids’ movie. About talking animals. Evil, but also incredible that it ever screened at all.

The dark truth about Show Dogs is that even with the genital molestation/”happy place” narrative thread removed, the film is still deeply flawed on a moral level. At its heart, this is a film about toxic masculinity (You thought it was about adorable talking animals? Fool!), but it’s also a perpetuator of toxic masculinity. Max is “a street dog with a temper” that has to learn life lessons like “Maybe it’s not the worst idea to get some help,” which is a much more adorable sentiment to convey to kids than the one that’s been censored into oblivion. What’s uncomfortable about his gradual change of heart is the way this “alpha” dog (speaking of canine terms that have evil cultural contexts elsewhere) is characterized in opposition to the implied frivolity & vanity of the show dog world, something more femme than his masc sensibilities can handle without embarrassment. It’s weird enough that other dogs allude to the size of Max’s dick, that a lady-pigeon (voiced by Kate Micucci) fawns over his gruff masculinity in lines like “He can flip this bird any day,” and that he’s taught humility in a scene where Arnette & Lyonne wax his anus (again, without consent). What’s really fucked is where he & Arnett finally bond when the owner chooses to not force him to breed against his will with an over-the-top flamboyant pup voiced by RuPaul. Now, in-film, RuPaul’s character is gendered as a female dog, but the gag plays as bizarrely homophobic anyway, as his over-the-top vocal performance (which includes a number of Drag Race catchphrases) disgusts Max in a way that reads distinctly as gay panic humor. Like with all of Show Dog’s sins against good taste & morality, its homophobia & toxic masculinity are bizarrely complex to the point of absurdity.

There are plenty of standard, cheap camp thrills to be found in Show Dogs’s minor joys as a 2010s, theatrically released talking-dog movie, a leftover relic from another time. I could try to sell this movie to you as an absurdist joy for watching Ludacris’s talking cop-dog perform impossible acrobatic maneuvers through cheap CGI or deliver hacky one-liners like “This is ludicrous!” or “I’m about to take a bite out of crime.” The truth is, though, that minor pleasures like Shaq voicing a Zen sheepdog named Doggy Lama or CGI dogs dabbing are just background noise for the film’s main draw: its propensity for real-world evil. Even with its “private parts inspection” narrative rightly removed, Show Dogs still has a genuinely menacing, toxic undertone that’s impressive in both its audacity & its cluelessness. Although its absurdist joys are minor, it’s a movie that must be seen to be believed (especially its original, intact “grooming” cut), as it’s tough to fathom how this many people, from the executives at Global Road down to the on-set catering crew, allowed it to happen. It’s more of a man-made disaster than a feature film in that way and all we can do as audiences is rubberneck at the wreckage. Don’t allow children to gaze at this atrocity, however; what they see could be scarring.

-Brandon Ledet

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

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Sometimes you find yourself in a dark, nearly empty theater screening the newest Star War on a Tuesday afternoon less than a week after its release and you find yourself asking Big Questions. Questions like: Will I never again pass through a calendar year without seeing one of these? Should I stop getting these giant blue raspberry slushes and a hot dog every time I come to the movies, knowing that I’ll spend the next 90-150 minutes regurgitating and swallowing that liquid and solid matter like a cow chewing cud? (I am a human garbage disposal, and like all disposals, sometimes things . . . splash around.) Was Thandie Newton paid as much for this film as Anthony Hopkins? Why aren’t there more people here? Would anyone have really noticed if I got nachos as well, or am I just being paranoid about people’s hatred of fat people like me? (See above, re: being a human garbage disposal.) How many hours long is this Venom trailer, anyway? Wait, there’s a new Jungle Book movie? Wasn’t there another one just, like, two years ago? (The answer to this one is easy: yes. There will be a mere 928 days between the respective premieres of Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book and Andy Serkis’s Mowgli.) Is that the voice of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of Crashing fame and the creator of the recent smash hit Killing Eve, which everyone should be watching? But most importantly: Why does this exist? And, hey is that Warwick Davis? (It is!)

I don’t think anyone in the world was clamoring for this movie to be made. No one asked for Solo: A Star Wars Story, but it’s here now, and we all have to live with that fact, so get used to it.

Solo, naturally, follows the story of lovable (YMMV) rogue Han “I ain’t in this for your revolution” Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) as he escapes the hellhole slums of his homeworld, becoming separated from his childhood love Qi’ra (the Khaleesi herself Emilia Clarke) in the process by the cruel vicissitudes of fate, swearing he’ll return to save her one day. After a brief stint in the Imperial Forces, he joins a ragtag team of thieving scoundrels led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), meets up with his future bromance partner Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), and has his first fateful meeting with galactic playboy Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and Lando’s assistant/common law wife/sidekick L3-37 (Waller-Bridge). Along the way, he runs afoul of a gang of outlaws led by Enfys Nest, and is opposed by sophisticated crime boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany, taking over for Michael K. Williams). It’s got everything you ever wanted in a sequel that shouldn’t exist: battles atop trains that traverse icy wildernesses, betrayals, giant tentacled space monsters, sacrifices, Wookiees rarrarr-ing at each other, holograms, monochromatic 2-D displays, hover cars with impractical and impossible physics (when banking left, shouldn’t the vehicle tilt left instead of right, as if it had thrusters and not wheels?), and Paul Bettany somehow simultaneously phoning it in and chewing the scenery. Truly, he is one of the great living actors of our time. Also, hey look everybody, Clint Howard’s here!

It takes 45 minutes (aka “not quite enough time to sober up”) by bus to get from the bar nearest my office to the Galaxy Highland theater, but those 45 minutes were much better spent than the first three quarters of an hour of this movie. There are jokes in this movie that land and others that don’t, while some do nothing but induce pure cringe. The cringe-inducing ones are peppered throughout, but the bulk of them (the most notable–although not the worst–being how Han gets his surname) appear in these early scenes; there are terrible jokes that come later, of course, but by then they’re spread out enough that you don’t seem to mind. I joked about this on my Facebook, but Solo may be the only movie I’ve ever seen that got better as my sobriety increased, but I was coherent enough throughout to be able to tell that this was because the movie improved over time. After you get through the joyless opening chase scene, the melodramatic and treacly faux-Casablanca separation at the spaceport, and the out-of-place D-Day-esque battle wherein Han meets Beckett for the first time, Han and Chewbacca have their meet-cute and escape together and it’s all pretty fun from there, even if Donald Glover’s performance feels more like Troy Barnes is doing a (very funny) Lando impression than Glover is playing the character outright.

To sidetrack for a minute and revisit Star Wars history, lets talk about Phantom Menace. My issues with the film (and the guy who wrote “As for your issues with the prequels in general, I will let someone else address those because honestly, I don’t know where to begin” – I still think about you and want to know who hurt you, other than George Lucas while grooming you to accept shovelfuls of shit and call it ice cream) aside, there’s a moment in the 1999 film that I thought about a lot while watching The Last Jedi back in December. And no, it wasn’t Anakin’s “Now this is podracing!” line while Finn and Rose rode those stupid CGI chihuahua horses to freedom, although I also couldn’t stop thinking about that. No, it’s this scene, that comes at about hour 14 of Phantom Menace, right around the time you’ve stopped wishing you were dead and started to accept that you already are and that this is hell.

ANAKIN. I had a dream I was a Jedi. I came back here and freed all the slaves… have you come to free us?

QUI-GON : No, I’m afraid not.

And . . . that’s that.The scene moves on quickly to Qui-Gon blah-blah-blahing about Coruscant and trade agreements and then Jar Jar says “Wit no-nutten mula to trade” (no, really, see for yourself, in case you forgot–or are too blinded by the warmth of your childhood nostalgia to realize–that this movie is a crime against humanity). This is something that’s always been a problem with the Star Wars universe: no one really gives a damn about the existence of slavery. First of all, leaving aside the debatable sentience/sapience of droids and thus whether their servitude could be considered “slavery,” (which comes up in Solo and which I’ll get to later), the idea that anyone would be using organic life forms for manual labor when mechanical alternatives are so omnipresent, widespread, and affordable (even Luke’s aunt and uncle can afford one) is absurd. On the other hand, as long as there are backwater planets with little resources and abstinence-only sex education–as I assume Tattooine must, given that Shmi has a virgin birth and doesn’t seem awed by that fact at all (again, from the PM script: SHMI : There was no father, that I know of…I carried him, I gave him birth…I can’t explain what happened.)–there will always be mouths to feed, bills to pay, and Dickensian childhoods that can only be escaped by becoming a Storm Trooper.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But the Rebellion/Resistance is fighting for freedom for all from the Empire/First Order!” you yell at your phone reading this on the toilet at work, frightening an accountant and generating a solid afternoon of work for poor, sweet-faced Devan in HR. Yeah, sure, but slavery was a fact of life on non-Senate worlds during the prequel trilogy, and we never hear bleeding heart Amidala or cartoon rabbit minstrel show Jar Jar arguing for the Senate to intervene on worlds like the one where Anakin was born, not with the carrot or stick, with neither olive branch or lightsaber. In the Orig Trig, perfectly constructed straightforward sci-fantasy that it is, none of that is important. But come The Last Jedi, the audience is expected to be thrilled that our heroes liberated a bunch of racing animals while also leaving behind a not-insignificant number of children, still in the “employ” of slave masters. This would be so easy to do.

ROSE: It’s a pity that our roles in the Resistance and the need to return to the fleet means we have to leave these children behind.

FINN: Every life is important. As soon as we get back to the ship, we’ll tell General Organa about this place, and we’ll rend the shackles from every child in this place.

(They could even disagree, with Rose noting that they have to get back to the ship while Finn, with his background of having been a child soldier, would be more resistant to the idea of leaving the kids behind. It would make for a stronger emotional beat than “That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love” anyway. Nobody in the Resistance ever even pays lip service to the idea that they have a moral responsibility to fight back against the First Order because slaves need to be liberated. But I digress.)

Solo finally does . . . something with this problem, even if it makes no real definitive statements or even takes a clear moral stance. Although I have no doubt that there will be many who disagree with me and take offense to everything that she says, L3-37 is one of the best characters that this franchise has produced, and she was the highlight of the film for me. We meet L3 for the first time in a wretched hive of scum and villainy (’cause it’s Star Wars) as she pleads with a couple of droids duking it out in a ring, Battle Bots style, to not let themselves be reduced to fighting like dogs for the entertainment of organic onlookers. In a later heist scene on Kessel, she helps create chaos by attempting to instigate a droid rebellion in the film’s best sequence. Waller-Bridge is one of the funniest people on Earth, and her timing and inflection are comedy gold; there’s one scene where she climbs into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and complains of the equivalent of joint pain and tells Lando he’ll “have to do that thing later” while Glover makes the perfect expression, and it’s simply fantastic. Often for better and at times for worse, this is a franchise that has encompassed some truly uncanny inhumanity (whether it be due to bad CGI, weird puppetry, or just wooden acting), and this earnestly human and relatable moment was the point where I thought, “Hey, this movie’s actually all right.” And that’s not even getting into the fact that someone finally remembered to give a shit about ethics with regards to forced servitude here, although I’m never quite sure if the text is mocking L3 just as much as it is agreeing with her.

Alden Ehrenreich, despite all bad press to the contrary, does a good job here. From the first moment I saw him in Hail, Caesar (other than in the Supernatural episode “Wendigo,” but that was a dark period in my life of which I dare not speak), I thought “This guy looks like a movie star.” And here he is, defying the odds (insert “never tell me the odds” joke here) to pull off one of the most well-known characters in the history of Western cinema. Opting to simply play “charming rogue” instead of aping Harrison Ford was a wise choice, which was counterbalanced by Glover’s more self-aware acting choices. Harrelson could have sleepwalked through this role given that it’s not very original, but he showed up, which is more than can be said of most people’s erstwhile father figures in the crime business.

That’s the good, but the bad . . . is bad. On an older Simpsons commentary (I want to say it was “Bart Gets Famous” but don’t quote me on that), the writers joked that they would know they would have gone to the well of ideas until it was dry if they ever did an origin story for Bart’s red hat. The idea is laughable, but that’s also kind of what’s happening here. We get an origin story/explanation for Chewbacca’s nickname, Han’s blaster, how Han was able to make “the Kessel run in 12 parsecs” despite that being a unit of distance and not time, and even Han’s last name. It’s embarrassing and drags the movie to a halt every time the film has to wait for the hypothetical shameless applauders in the audience to sit down and stop providing their children with therapy fodder for decades to come. This dependency upon references to past material (and presumably planting seeds to be reaped in future Star Wars stories, every year from now until you’re dead, so just shut up and give Disney your money already you pathetic fleck of lint) drags this movie down. Although it’s occasionally buoyed back up by strong performances and jokes that actually land, and it somehow manages to stick the landing, there’s just so much here that you’ll want to forget. There’s almost a good film in here, but there’s also definitely a pretty bad one. If you happen to miss the first thirty minutes, you’ll likely have a much better time, but there’s no guarantee.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mohawk (2018)

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Two Indigenous people and a British solider, all in a polyamorous relationship, flee American militia in the wooded battlefields of the War of 1812. Nothing about that premise particularly signals that Mohawk functions as a horror picture, but as soon as the menacing synths and flickering projection bulb of the film’s opening credits set the grindhouse-reminiscent tone, its choice of genre is undeniable. Directed by We Are Still Here’s Ted Geoghegan, Mohawk creates a kind of reverse-engineered version of a creature feature where white American men are the monsters hunting down its protagonists, emerging from behind trees as a kind of supernatural intrusion on an environment where they don’t belong. On a formal, financial level, the film lacks the attention to craft that elevates similar-in-tone projects like Ravenous, The Revenant, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful 8, but its choice of an Indigenous POV in both a historical and a horror genre context affords the film distinction as a cheaply produced curio. Mohawk’s recurring nightmare imagery, synthy crescendos, and washes of impossibly bright red acrylic blood all feel familiar to horror cheapie territory, but its historical narrative told through the perspective of the Mohawk tribe is a different matter entirely.

Although its three central characters’ polyamory might stick out as a peculiar detail in the historical context of the War of 1812, Mohawk treats it with a casual, matter of fact dismissal. The much more pressing issue is how the throuple’s Mohawk tribe is caught between two warring white man governments, the Americans & The Brits. While most other Native peoples have chosen sides in the conflict, the Mohawk tribe remains deliberately neutral, leaving themselves vulnerable to violence from both ends. The presence of the British soldier disrupts this balance and invites even more violence, especially once our three leads find themselves surrounded by a small band of seethingly racist American combatants. The two sides bitterly fight out the conflict of the war at large in a wooded microcosm, trading vicious blows to each other’s already dwindled, wounded ranks. As the violence and stress-induced nightmares escalate in the days leading up to the inevitable bloodshed of the climax, the film drops the pretense of its function as a war movie entirely. The cheap synths, woodland sets, and bright red stage blood of its tension-building violence feel distinctly tied to the rhythms & tropes of horror cinema, which is an interesting lens for telling this kind of wartime story.

Unfortunately, Mohawk’s sense of craft can’t quite match the interest it generates as a corrective in POV from what’s usually depicted in clashes between American settlers & their Indigenous victims. The film finds a tone & perspective far preferable to the ones of superficial correlatives like The Revenant, but its flat digital cinematography is far from Emmanuel Lubezki quality. As confidently casual as Mohawk can be about its themes of polyamory, it drives home other topics with awkward tactlessness in lines like “From my experience, it’s the white man who does the scalping.” I suspect the film’s shortcomings are mostly on the shoulders of Geoghegan, whose previous haunted house picture was similarly frustrating in its stubbornness to live up to its full potential. I greatly respect his choice of perspective & casting in Mohawk. Besides the inclusion of always-welcome genre film character actor Robert Longstreet & wide-eyed beardo pro wrestler Luke Harper among the American monsters, the film also commits to casting actual Native actors Kaniehtiio Horn & Justin Rain in its central roles. That casting reinforces the fascinating specificity of the film’s choice in POV, but it’s a little disappointing that Geoghegan couldn’t do better by the opportunity for greatness created in that collaboration.

I’m always down for a horror cheapie with a killer premise set in the creepy (and affordable) world of the woods, but I can’t help but wish that Mohawk had done just slightly more with its visual language & sound design within that genre context. Its novelty as a historical horror film with an Indigenous, polyamorous POV puts a lot of pressure on the final product to deliver something memorable & impactful. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see this exact set of circumstances & qualifiers coexist onscreen again. Mohawk is easy to recommend for the specificity of that context alone and can be forgiven for many of its sins against objective quality in consideration of its exceedingly modest budget. I would much rather report that it was a knockout masterpiece that fully fulfilled the promise of its premise, but the truth is that it’s a fairly standard woodland-set indie horror with a killer hook. There’s obviously value to that kind of minor pleasure, even if the temptation is to wish for better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Phantasm’s Looming Shadow Over All Animated Batmen

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We’ve been singing the praises of the 2010 animated Batman feature Under The Red Hood this month for giving viewers something they’re not used to from most Caped Crusader cinema. Forgoing the obligatory origin story opening that weighs down every other Batman reboot and skipping far enough ahead into the lore that it can support two! Robins the Boys Wonder, Under the Red Hood feels remarkably unique in the modern comic book adaptation zeitgeist for its confidence in viewers’ familiarity with its central characters, allowing it a larger freedom in storytelling. The film feels much less unique, however, when you consider the obvious debt it owes to Batman: The Animated Series, particularly the show’s feature film debut Mask of the Phantasm. I’ve written previously about how Kevin Conroy’s voice work as the Caped Crusader on The Animated Series has been the defining standard for all animated Batmen, leaving Under the Red Hood/Gotham By Gaslight voice actor Bruce Greenwood very little room to leave a distinct mark. (The same could probably be said for Mark Hamill’s deranged voice work for The Joker as well). That’s not where The Animated Series’ looming influence stops, though. For all of Under the Red Hood’s narrative details that feel unique to cinematic Batman storytelling, the broader picture of what it accomplishes more than vaguely resembles Mask of the Phantasm. In fact, it follows Phantasm’s template so closely that you wouldn’t have to change many character details around for it to function as a remake.

To be fair, Under the Red Hood’s story about superhero vigilantism gone too far is a fairly common one within comic book lore. In our initial conversation on Under the Red Hood, I wrote, “Now that there are roughly a dozen major superhero releases annually, the stories are more varied, but for a while it felt as if the majority of them were hinged on the moral conflict of what, exactly, separates the masked vigilantes from the masked criminals.” However, the details of how that story is told onscreen in these two films are similar enough to push Under the Red Hood’s parallels to Mask of the Phantasm beyond general adherence to storytelling cliché. Both the titular Red Hood & Phantasm vigilantes challenge Batman’s moral code by pushing their dedication to crimefighting too far, specifically by assassinating mob bosses that control Gotham’s crime rings. The identities of the mysterious people from Batman’s past who mask as these vigilante personae in both films are also presented as impossibilities, as they are both dead. In Under the Red Hood, we see (the second, younger) Robin murdered brutally at the hands of the Joker in the first scene, but presume that The Red Hood could only be him in disguise, somehow resurrected. Similarly, recognizable voice actor Stacy Keach is obviously voicing The Phantasm in the earlier film, but the character he plays is shown to be dead long before The Phantasm arrives, making it an impossibility. The strange circumstances that make these transformations possible are doled out in staggered flashbacks in both films, one to a story of an early romance and one to Robin’s pre-crimefighting youth. The stories also reach their respective climaxes by deploying The Joker as an outside element of chaos in a last-ditch effort to save mobsters’ lives, creating total chaos that reveals the mysteries of the two vigilantes’ secret identities. Some of the individual characters have been swapped out and the animation style of these productions has changed drastically from the 90s to the 2010s, but in narrative terms The Mask of the Phantasm & Under the Red Hood are practically the same movie.

What’s left to distinguish them, then, is a question of aesthetic, for which I’ll always be biased to affording Mask of the Phantasm the upper hand. The action sequences of Under the Red Hood are an impressively complex mix of traditional and computer animation, but they have nothing on the tactile mat painting backdrops and Art Deco designs of The Animated Series, which is about as gorgeous as crime detective noir ever got. Mask of the Phantasm also drives to a much more distinctive climax than Under the Red Hood, staging the final showdown between Batman and The Joker in a sprawling miniature of Gotham at an abandoned, Atomic Age World’s Fair exhibit. The play with scale in that climactic battle makes the two forever-foes appear to be kaiju-size, which is an absurd effect unmatched by anything mustered in Under the Red Hood (or most live-action Batman flicks for that matter). Mask of the Phantasm is the definitive animated Batman move, its influence looming over every one of its successors. Story-wise, the only notable improvement Under the Red Hood holds over it is in skipping the origin story plotlines for Batman & The Joker, which are told uniquely in Mask of the Phantasm, but likely don’t need to be told at all. Otherwise, it follows a very faithful pattern established by that Animated Series offshoot, which becomes blatantly apparent if you ever watch the two films back to back. I don’t intend to point out these similarities to diminish Under the Red Hood’s significance; I was impressed by the film in a way that’s exceedingly rare for DC animated features. I just continually marvel at how influential The Animated Series and, by extension, Mask of the Phantasm were on the entirety of the animated Batman canon. Even one of the most uniquely independent entries into the franchise is still very closely tied to that series, both structurally and tonally, speaking to its staying power as a foundational work.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the animated superhero thriller Batman: Under the Red Hood, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this profile of its Caped Crusader voice actor, Bruce Greenwood, and last week’s look at how it uses the voice talents of Neil Patrick Harris.

-Brandon Ledet