reviews

Black Girl (1966)

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Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 feature Black Girl is mostly known for its historical context as the first film from a black filmmaker from Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve wide critical acclaim. Sembène adopted the black & white, handheld “immediacy” of the French New Wave to boost the likelihood of French audiences & critics taking note of his breakthrough/debut feature, a gamble that paid off immensely and solidified his legacy as an artist. What that legacy might not immediately convey until you actually engage with the film as an isolated work is just how deeply, unapologetically angry Sembène was as an artist & a political mind. Black Girl may be most remembered for its historical significance, but what makes it an exceptional work is how it uses its French cinema aesthetic & international attention to punch Sembène’s newfound audience in the gut with an angry political screed about modern colonialism & racial subjugation. Black Girl is important not only for the previously unseen wide reach it was able to achieve for African cinema on the world stage, but also for the fiery political message it delivers on that scale.

Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, is recruited by white, French tourists to nanny their children while on vacation. This short-term gig evolves into a full-time career as the woman emigrates to France to live permanently as the family’s employee. Her drive from the international steamship that dumps her into a sea of white faces is the last she’ll see of seaside France’s beautiful buildings, beaches, and leisure culture. Expected to confine herself to the few rooms of the family’s condo for a 24/7 work schedule with essentially no pay, Diouana finds herself to be less of an employee and more of a prisoner or a slave. The French family she serves are “cultured” yuppie colonizers who collect African people the same way they collect African art & travel stories. They cut Diouana off from the outside world with a promised fantasy of what life in France could be like, then gradually strip her of her identity & self-worth until all she has in the world is her uncompensated duty to serve and the often-repeated question, “Why am I here?” They talk about her like she’s not in the room, declaring her “useless” & “lazy” for not immediately obliging every whim. Their guests forcibly kiss her cheeks and vocally estimate her to be “like an animal.” Instead of giving in to this subjugation, Diouana protests with the only means that are available to her: allowing her body & soul to tragically break down so that she is no longer useful to her modern day slave owners.

I greatly respect Sembène’s choice to adopt the cinematic aesthetic of French intellectuals in his political screed railing against the colonialism of French intellectuals. However, Black Girl‘s seething anger steers its take on the French New Wave away from an imitation of the genre to something much more fiercely unique for its time. The dangerous-feeling voyeurism of French New Wave technique would later be adapted to the cheaply produced, often exploitative horrors of 1970s American grindhouse pictures; Black Girl is just rough enough around the edges to feel prescient of that cultural shift. It’s wobbly enough in its shocking jabs of sex & violence and overall political anger to feel predictive of the onslaught of violent horrors that would emerge from New York City just a few years later (which was likely more of a mutation of the erotica subgenre “roughies” than anything, admittedly). Black Girl is saturated in voice-over narration (almost to the point of functioning as a diary) that provides it a sense of well-behaved structure, but there’s an overriding D.I.Y. punk sensibility in its political anger that makes it feel more like an intrusion & an act of rebellion than a simple French New Wave devotee. At just an hour in length and entirely unconcerned with playing nice once it gets a foot in the door, Black Girl is much more in line with the political anger of a punk messaging piece like Born in Flames than it is with the artsy fartsy ennuii of a Jules and Jim or The 400 Blows. It’s a historically significant work both for its achievements in breaking through cultural/critical barriers and for setting political fires once those barriers were breached.

-Brandon Ledet

Play the Devil (2017)

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I was perpetually on the verge of allowing myself to enjoy the minor indie feature Play the Devil but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen the film before, except set in a different locale. Then it struck me: Play the Devil is essentially a queer retelling of the 2015 JLo “thriller” The Boy Next Door, except with most of that film’s campy humor & sex surgically removed. Besides reframing that one night stand-turned-stalker thriller within a same-sex dynamic & moving its location from the United States to Trinidad, the major difference is its central abusive romance is which character is asked to play the villain. In The Boy Next Door, Jennifer Lopez has sex with a teenage neighbor who becomes her tormentor once she calls off the affair. In Play the Devil, it’s the adult participant who’s tasked to play the villain, which changes the dynamic just as much as the added queer context. Unfortunately, I can’t say either change was especially beneficial to the film as an entertainment, as it both ruined the fun of the premise & made the film’s queer identity politics muddled & unintentionally uncomfortable.

A Trinidad high school student is stuck between his ambitions to pursue art in either drama or photography and his grandmother’s desire for him to attend med school. With the economic rut of his home life & his best friend’s burgeoning career in petty crime weighing heavily on his mind, he faces a coming of age identity crisis that gradually becomes intertwined with a struggle to negotiate a balance between his in-the-closet queerness and societal expectations of adult masculinity. All of this sexual & economic anxiety makes our troubled protagonist the perfect prey for a wealthy, married businessman who wishes to take him on a sexual concubine. Scared by the implications of this potential role as a wealthy man’s sugarbaby, he only allows himself one sexual encounter before backing away in fear. The predatory older man won’t take “no” for an answer and pursues the young student anyway, practically twirling his mustache as he stalks the poor kid as an over-the-top, effete personification of queer desire. Their dynamic is effectively uncomfortable, but not self-aware enough to justify its potential homophobia, especially as it barrels towards an inevitably violent climax.

The climactic sequence of Play the Devil is a gorgeous catharsis that’s so stunning it almost forgives the piss-poor acting & boneheaded homophobia of the movie’s villain. During a Carnival ritual known as “The Dance of the Blue Devil,” locals smear their bodies with blue & gold paint and rhythmically scream out the frustrations our protagonist has been bottling inside the entire film. The imagery of this emotional release and the tranquil forest sounds of men later washing off their paint under a waterfall in its denouement is undeniably powerful. I can’t claim that much else besides the brightly painted houses & intense Natural backdrops of the film’s Trinidad setting are as successful as the Carnival sequence. Play the Devil is effective in its evocation of a spiritual & cultural atmosphere, but the story it manages to tell within that frame is a disjointed mess. I assume that the movie was aiming to be a poignant coming of age drama and not the less fun The Boy Next Door remake with #problematic queer subtext in accidentally stumbled into, which is a total shame. The Carnival imagery almost makes up for it, but not quite enough to turn the tide. At least it can boast that it features the absolute worst villainous performance of the year; there’s a kind of honor in that dishonorable distinction.

-Brandon Ledet

Justice League (2017)

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Look! Up on the screen! It’s big! It’s dumb! It’s loud! It’s Justice League!

And it mostly works. Mostly.

The very first scene of Justice League does some good work walking back the problems—and they are problems, not merely criticisms—of the first few non-Wonder Woman films in this universe. We see Superman as children see him, which is also the way that this franchise keeps trying to retroactively force its audience into reconceptualizing him: as a true-blue (literally, given the lightening of his costume) hero and symbol of hope. He’s kind, sympathetic, and, you know, Superman, as he’s supposed to be. And then, just as his life was, the video is cut short. This leads into a beautiful opening credits montage, a strength of Zack Snyder’s as a director (even those who hate his Watchmen adaptation, which I surprisingly don’t, are all but universally pleased with its Dylan-composed credits sequence).

This sequence is not without contentious issues, of course. First, there’s a headline seen in a newspaper box mourning the loss of David Bowie, Prince, and Superman, but not Leonard Cohen, which is pretty disrespectful given that the whole thing is set to a really, really terrible cover of “Everybody Knows.” There’s also the issue that we’re supposed to be seeing a world in mourning for the space god who showed them some truths about themselves, but if you’re going to enjoy anything about this movie, you’re just going to have to accept this retcon.

Consider the speech from Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the first Richard Donner Superman film (and later repurposed for the trailer for Superman Returns): “They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you… my only son.” This same speech was actually echoed by Russell Crowe in his turn as Papa El in Man of Steel: “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” Unfortunately, this franchise has made zero effort to actually follow through on these lofty ideals of the Superman-is-Messiah beyond paying lip service and a couple of “subtle” images in Man of Steel. The problem is that this was never present in the actual text of the film, which presented us with a broody, angry, super-powered alien whose only affection for the beings of his adopted world were his love for his mother and an office romance. He was more Tyler Hoechlin’s Derek Hale in Teen Wolf than Tyler Hoechlin’s Clark Kent in Supergirl (he’s killing it, by the way), and that absence has been sorely lacking in this film series so far.

But. But. Justice League, for all the baggage that its carrying from three bad movies and one spectacular one, actually works if you ignore all that needless, pointless, and out-of-place GRIMDARK nonsense that preceded it in the earlier installments. And it’s not just with Superman either; the scene that immediately follows the opening montage shows Batman out and about being Batman, and even uses some passages from Danny Elfman’s previous work on Tim Burton’s 1989 film adaptation (but which will always be a keystone for me as the theme music for the Batman animated series).

This first Batman scene is both good and bad. Your standard Gotham City burglar is exiting onto a roof at night, sees Batman, attacks the Bat, gets his ass handed to him, and is dangled over the side of a building to attract a Parademon (the foot soldiers of the film’s villain), which can apparently smell fear. Bats traps the Parademon in a net, tests out a series of sonic disruptions on it, and it dies, leaving behind a clue about the three Mother Boxes. It’s so, so dumb, but the combination of the old Elfman theme and the absurdity of the whole thing makes it feel like the cold open of an episode of the animated Justice League, where Kevin Conroy’s Batman would do something just like this: lure, trap, find weird clue that matches something he’s already investigating, detective it up. It shouldn’t (and for most people won’t) work in a feature film with live actors that is supposedly trying to take itself seriously, but that narrative works for me on a certain level. On the other hand, there are other elements of this scene that are inarguably bad story choices, like Batman just kind of grappling away from the scene to do detective stuff, completely disregarding the theft he just interrupted and leaving the burglar to his own devices.

The overarching plot of the film concerns the arrival of Steppenwolf, one of the members of Jack Kirby’s cosmic DC creations The New Gods, on earth. Millennia ago, he attempted to invade the planet and turn it into a “primordial hellscape,” but he was repelled by an alliance of Amazons, Atlanteans, the tribes of Man, and a couple of others that we’ll explore in a minute. Steppenwolf carrier with him three Mother Boxes, pieces of advanced technology that, when combined, create the terraforming effect that will make the earth his new home (yes, this was the exact same desire of the villains of Man of Steel). Now, after several millennia, he has returned in the wake of Superman’s death because mankind’s mourning of that great symbol of hope has made it ripe pickings for the invader’s crusade, and Batman has to recruit five superheroes with attitude to repel his forces (yes, this is essentially the same plot as the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, and yes, I would love to see the trailer for JL recut with the opening narration of MMPR).

I’m not going to lie to you: this movie is clearly half-baked and it makes a lot of mistakes. Beyond the fact that Bats uses a street level criminal as bait and then ditching him without even notifying the police, there are other mistakes both big and small. For instance: the janitor working at Star Labs is seen bidding Dr. Stone good night, and it’s obvious (at least on the big screen) that the ID he’s wearing is for a different person, as he has dark hair and is clean-shaven, while the picture on the ID is of a man with a big bushy head of white hair and a glorious Mark Twain mustache. You can imagine sitting in the movie theater and thinking, like me: “Oh, he must be a spy who stole this ID, that’s a neat clue.” But no, it’s just a mistake; later, after said innocent janitor has been kidnapped by the villain, we see his belongings left behind in a pile, including an ID with an accurate photo. That’s this movie in a microcosm: when you think that it’s being clever, it’s actually just a goof.

When I was a kid, the DC comics characters were much dearer to me than Marvel’s. Although becoming an adult and becoming more socially aware has meant that I’m less inclined to love Batman uncritically (i.e., he’s kind of a fascist who spends most of his time attacking poor people out of his own sense of morality, rarely actually inspecting the causes of poverty and crime and trying to correct the problem at the root, although some of the best Batman writers have taken note of this and written him accordingly), he’s still the first character I think of when I think of superhero comics. The aforementioned Batman animated series was a defining piece of media for young Boomer, as were reruns of Superfriends, and I loved visiting the one aunt whose cable package included FX, as that meant I would get to see an episode of the Adam West Batman and, if I was very lucky, Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. It’s for this reason, and not because I am a “Marvel fanboy,” that I’ve been pained to see this franchise handled so, so poorly in the past few years. Wonder Woman was not just a step in the right direction, but a wholehearted plunge into how to to this whole thing right (Alli may have given it a mere 3.5 stars, but that was a 5 star movie for me personally).

Justice League is having a harder time straddling that fence, seeing as it has to undo the immense damage done to the franchise as a whole by Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. Sure, Suicide Squad was a terrible movie on the whole, but at its core it was a C-grade movie dressed up as a blockbuster, which is an aesthetic that I’m always a little bit on board for in spite of myself, especially when the actors really commit to the nonsense; additionally, the backstory and arc of Jay Hernandez’s Diablo contain far and away the most effective emotional beats of the first three films. It certainly didn’t fracture the fans in the same way as BvS, which some people are still defending for reasons that are unclear to me. Still, JL is trying hard to course correct, and the job that it’s doing is admirable, even if it stumbles every ten minutes or so. It works as a cartoon about the Justice League that just happens to be live action and have a tonally dissonant visual aesthetic from the text of the actions on screen.

The most important thing I can tell you if I’m trying to give you an idea as to whether or not you should see this film is this: Justice League works, if you accept it not as part of this franchise, but as an entry into the larger cultural understanding of Superman specifically and DC in general. What I mean by this is that the story it’s trying to tell, about a world without a Superman, does not work as a piece of the DCEU divorced from the context of the DC animated universes, or comic books, or even the earlier Donner and Burton films. But within that larger conversation, in which we do have a Superman who is a beacon of hope, truth, and justice, it does.

Additional notes:

  • I, too, saw all of the photos of Henry Cavill’s uncanny valley face online before I went to the theater, but I never noticed it when actually watching the movie. Maybe it says something about how my brain works that I completely overlooked it, but I’d wager it has more to do with the fact that if this were real life, Superman would have had to keep telling me “My weird face thing is up here.” You know what I’m talking about.
  • This has been addressed in other reviews that I’ve read and heard, but it is super weird that no one is at all concerned about maintaining their own or other’s secret identities in this movie. Aquaman calls Bruce Wayne “Batman” in front of a whole bunch of villagers, and Lois calls the newly awakened Superman “Clark” in front of several Metropolis police officers, which is only going to make it more obvious when he shows back up at work after having disappeared and reappeared at the exact same time as Supes did.
  • Ezra Miller’s Flash is charming, and I liked him a lot. A lot of his jokes fell flat, but I liked that they were overlooked in universe as well. I think that he’s probably the best addition to this universe since Wonder Woman.
  • Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is given almost nothing to do other than to be the machina that the deus exes.
  • All the stuff that you heard about Wonder Woman being more sexualized in this film is true, as I noticed the lingering shot of her rear, but she’s still Wonder Woman and still the best thing about this movie. I can’t wait for WW2.
  • The design for Steppenwolf is terrible. A stop-motion Starro would have been better, and would have made for a better villain overall anyway. Can you imagine a film where Starro the Conqueror appeared and tried to terraform the world into something more suitable to himself (i.e. covering the whole earth with the ocean)? There would be no need for the cliche sky beams, and instead there could have been the opportunity to discuss the rising oceans that are the result of climate change and Starro’s need to barely push humans into doing his will. The insistence on doing the New Gods stuff right out of the gate, especially after the imagery and ideas of Jack Kirby were so much better utilized in Guardians 2 and Thor: Ragnarok earlier this year, was a bad decision.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Disaster Artist (2017)

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Recent theatrical releases of movies are sometimes accompanied by short intros from casts or directors thanking the audience for coming out to see the picture. Edgar Wright recorded a really snooty one for the release of Baby Driver where he took an unnecessary potshot at the concept of Video on Demand distribution. The casts of X-Men: Apocalypse & Resident Evil: The Final Chapter recorded damage control intros that made a point to put human faces on what felt from the outside to be soulless, corporate products. James Franco’s highest-profile directing gig to date, The Disaster Artist, breaks new ground by making this cloying, self-congratulating mode of introduction an actual part of the picture, not just a tagalong video package. The Disaster Artist opens with Franco’s famous friends ironically praising Tommy Wiseau’s toxic trashterpiece The Room as if it were the most important picture ever made. The tone of this intro feels more fitting for the opening notes of an SNL sketch than a feature film, as does Franco’s lead performance as the enigmatic, vaguely European monster Wiseau. Later, there are isolated comedic bits and moments of genuine drama that transcend the tackiness of this intro, but then the movie slips right back into that mode in its final moments, featuring real-life footage of book signings & The Room screenings with Wiseau beaming over his own ironic adoration. In a way, these bookends are a welcome warning that although The Disaster Artist is Franco’s most legitimate, respectable work as a filmmaker to date, it still allows him to indulge at length in his worst impulses, which includes advertising for his own movie as you’re watching it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the amusingly bizarre/misshapen cult classic The Room or the excellent book that details its production (also titled The Disaster Artist), it’s unclear how appealing Franco’s film will be to you. Although The Room is a deeply misogynistic, poorly crafted mess, it has a strange allure to it that invites multiple re-watches, as evidenced by its regular midnight movie circuit screenings, complete with Rocky Horror-style call & response rituals. The book The Disaster Artist only makes The Room more fascinating as a found object, leaving you with more questions than answers about the strangely vampiric millionaire who wrote, financed, “directed”, and starred in it: Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau claims to be “from” my hometown of Chalmette, Louisiana, but has a heavily slurred, Eastern European accent that defies that explanation. He also claims to be decades younger than he very visibly is and skirts all inquiries into how he came to make millions selling counterfeit blue jeans in San Francisco. The more you dig into who Wiseau is as a historical figure and what The Room reveals about his psyche as person, the more fascinating he becomes as an enigma. With his big screen adaptation of The Disaster Artist, it’s unclear exactly how interested Franco is in these mysteries. He breezily skims over many themes & details of The Room’s backstory that could be rewarding if explored at length, but instead fail to register as anything significant as they fly by in a rapid procession. It’s like trying to get to know a popular band through their Greatest Hits collection instead of diving into their album cuts.

Without a strong thematic foundation or point of view, The Disaster Artist plays a little like its worst possible self: an excuse for famous people to play dress-up as a funny looking weirdo who made an infamously bad movie. The good news is that if anyone deserves to be mocked by famous people for their moral & artistic shortcomings, it’s Tommy Wiseau. James Franco’s impersonation of Wiseau may be more fitting of a Celebrity Family Feud sketch on SNL than a feature that supposedly has Oscar-contender ambitions, but he does (occasionally) make a point to highlight his subject’s dark, abusive streak. Hostile temper tantrums that selfishly drag people down to his level and deeply unsettling attitudes towards women & sexuality surface as Wiseau becomes frustrated with his own shortcomings as an artist & a friend. Much like the film’s better comedic bits (an extended sequence where Tommy forgets his own line for so many takes the entire crew knows it better than he does comes to mind), however, these moments of darkness & drama feel isolated & ultimately lead nowhere substantial. This is especially frustrating in a spark of critical thought where the movie highlights how hurtful it is to laugh at an undeveloped artist’s passionate work while also being honest about The Room’s enjoyability solely being a “so-bad-it’s-good” proposition. It’s a thought that’s floated only for an isolated scene or two before Franco quickly moves on to the next Spark Notes-style bullet point on The Room’s legacy, trying to make room for as many of the film’s touchstone details as he can without exploring any in particular at length. I’m not sure that finding a part for every host of the How Did This Get Made? podcast or playing exact recreations of scenes from The Room side by side with their source material was more important than critically or thematically engaging with Wiseau as a toxic enigma, but Franco often slips into that kind of indulgence, to the film’s detriment.

As insane as it is that people are comparing The Disaster Artist to the triumph of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, it does occasionally impress or delight in the same way that classic celebrates the minor victories of an artist ill-equipped. Because Franco doesn’t dive much deeper than that in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it engagement with the darkness of Wiseau’s psyche, there isn’t much more to the movie than that simple idea and the minor pleasures of watching famous comedians mock the failings of a deeply flawed, aggressively amateur auteur. Brigsby Bear is the superior 2017 release that explores the darkness of an emotionally wounded, amusingly eccentric amateur filmmaker creating art directly from the depths of their subconscious. Lady Bird better details the follies of a selfish brat making constant mistakes in an early 00s period piece. Any meticulous recreations of specific scenes from The Room are far more amusing when experienced in the source material. Any questions of Wiseau’s history & character are more thoroughly, thoughtfully explored in Greg Sestero’s book by the same name. So, what exactly does Franco’s The Disaster Artist offer as a work on its own terms? I suppose there are enough successful comedic bits & dramatic moments that feel impactful enough in isolation to be worth your time, but ultimately don’t lead anywhere significant. And since the movie is bookended highlighting Franco’s worst impulses as an artist & a storyteller (the concluding side-by-side recreations from The Room are especially self-indulgent), its best moments aren’t even the first impression that comes to mind.

-Brandon Ledet

Wexford Plaza (2017)

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Sometimes, the best a small-scale indie can do is surprise you. It’s always impressive that any film ever gets made at all, so when a micro budget indie feature with an ambling narrative & blatantly non-professional actors even makes it to a festival run in a completed form, it’s impressive to me than it even exists. The stories told on that scale can be predictable & routine at best, though, which is understandable when considering the limited means that produced them. What I most appreciated about the micro budget indie Wexford Plaza is the way it surprises its audience by playing directly into that predictability and then completely subverting expectation. It’s not an impressive feat of slick, hyper stylized filmmaking craft, but it is an impressive act of small-scale storytelling made fresh.

A young, bored 20something white girl picks up a go-nowhere security guard job at a desolated strip mall. Listless, she drifts through the endless summertime doldrums of the job in the exact way you’d expect someone just leaving their teens to: wolfing junk food, playing on her phone, drinking, smoking pot, masturbating, wasting time. A misinterpreted sexual pass from a coworker eats up a lot of her time on the job, as she fails to flirt back and eventually ends up making herself vulnerable & hurt. This all sounds like a typical no budget indie comedy narrative, except that the same story is then inverted & retold from the perspective of the older, PoC coworker our listless antihero failed to flirt with in the first half. Things get much darker from there, shifting from a small-scale stoner comedy to a smartly calibrated gut punch focused on the tension between privilege & economic desperation.

At its heart, Wexford Plaza is a dark comedy about the difference between treating menial service labor as a consequence-free playground in your 20s and the way it becomes an escape-free economic rut you depend on for sustenance in your 30s & beyond. The movie can be frivolously funny in the aimless stoner comedy moments of its opening half, but evolves into a much more surprising, rewarding watch as its story unfolds onscreen. There are probably more stylistically impressive examples of this humorous service labor drama to be found out there (Patti Cake$ & Party Down come to mind). The movie’s absence of a proper budget also shows at the seams (especially when the blatantly green actors are tasked with comically playing drunk or high), but the movie does manage to surprise & subvert expectation, which is no small feat given the scale of its production.

-Brandon Ledet

Geostorm (2017)

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I was saddened to hear from early critical response that the ludicrous environmental thriller Geostorm does not contain nearly as much geostorming as the marketing promised. Indeed, Geostorm features an official “Countown to Geostorm” at its climax that Gerard Butler’s alpha male hero cuts off early all by his lonesome to save the world from the titular global disaster, thus blocking the audience from receiving the payoff promised. There’s plenty of cheap CGI simulations of extreme weather leading up to that anticlimax, however, so it’s not like Geostorm cheats its audience on climate change action entirely. What most surprised me when I finally caught up with the movie, though, was that its over-the-top fretting over extreme weather was not at all what made it entertaining. Geostorm‘s entertainment value doesn’t lie in its titular threat at all, but rather in its Info Wars/Alex Jones style paranoia about governmental control over the daily lives of self-sufficient macho men.

From Geostorm‘s opening vision of a climate change-riddled 2019 in which the world is nearly destroyed by a series of floods, droughts, landslides, and so on, you might expect the film to be a kind of left-leaning warning to change our ways along the lines of a The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. Instead, this “extreme weather” dystopia is more in line with the Individualist, Conservative fantasy of Michael Bay’s Armageddon. An international team of scientists & a UN type coalition of governments are reported to have worked together to invent a satellite network that can control the weather to prevent this global crisis. Geostorm has no interest in celebrating this international collaboration & governmental triumph. Instead, it pits a tough guy American badass (played by a sleepwalking Butler) against the Big Bad Government, who he suspects of weaponizing the satellite system to create extreme weather events in a bid for world domination. Butler barges in to take over command of the international crew, stopping at nothing to get to the bottom of which US government entity (because America is all that matters) is threatening to destroy the world. Skepticism of surveillance, beaurocracy, and even the President of the United States swirls to such a ludicrous crescendo of Info Wars/Coast to Coast AM-style, conspiracy-minded paranoia that you almost forget the main draw of the film was supposed to be video game-level CGI simulations of manmade “Natural” disasters.

As amusing as Geostorm‘s Armageddon-style politics can be, the film is desperately lacking the collective charisma of Armageddon‘s cast, which featured outsized personalities as wide ranging as Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, Ben Affleck, Live Tyler, William Fichtner, etc., etc., etc. By contrast, Gerard Butler is a cardboard cutout of a leading man action hero, with exactly none of the charisma needed to carry the film on his back. The rest of the cast has a kind of CSI Miami vibe in their aggressive forgettability, underselling what could potentially be some fun, over the top dialogue. The space alien wording of “That I am calling bullshit on,” & the understandably incredulous “Hold on, what now?” response to the first utterance of the term “geostorm” (which is then amusingly defined at length) tickled me in particular, but could have been much more fun in sillier hands. Gerard Butler’s black hole of a personality is far more damaging to the entertainment potential of Geostorm than its deficiency of geostorms. The movie could have been a much better time with an action star like Schwarzenegger or Stallone in the lead role.

Butler is undeniably a bore as the film’s leading man and there certainly could have been more onscreen global disaster to help pass the time, but I still found Geostorm to be an adequately silly time at the movies. Its right-wing political paranoia, scenes of scientists dodging fireballs in Smart Cars, and basic premise of a weaponized, weather-controlling satellite network all help cover up the boredom threatened by its cast of non-characters. Watching Geostorm in New Orleans, where it was filmed, even has its own built-in entertainment value. The exact two buildings where I work being passed off as Washington, DC and the Superdome being blurred out in the background of a sequence set in “Orlando” were pleasant distractions from the placeholder dialogue they were decorating between whatever paranoid rants or monumental disasters bookended them. “Cheaper, dumber Armageddon” obviously isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun time at the movies, but I was at least moderately sated by the oddly geostorm-deficient Geostorm, Butler warts and all.

-Brandon Ledet

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

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Thor: Ragnarok marks the third Marvel release of the year that focused on fun and adventure, and all for the best. After last year’s kinda-dreary Civil War and the visually arresting but narratively empty Doctor Strange, the film branch of the House of Ideas was in top form this year, churning out an equal sequel with Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the delightful Spider-Man: Homecoming. Although Guardians 2 may have leaned a little hard on the beats with its humor (kind of like your friend who tells great jokes but is also a little desperate and always ends up laughing too hard at himself) and Homecoming was an out-and-out comedy with intermittent superheroing, Marvel brought it home with a good balance of strong character moments, spaceships flying around and pewpewing at each other, new and returning cast members with great chemistry, and a hearty helping of the magic that is Jeff Goldblum.

After visiting the fire realm ruled by Suftur (voiced by Clancy Brown), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns to Asgard after a few years galavanting about and looking for the Infinity McGuffins, only to find Loki (Tom Hiddleston) still disguised as Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and ineffectually ruling Asgard while propping up the myth of the “dead” “hero” following Loki’s supposed sacrifice at the end of The Dark World. Thor enlists Loki in helping him seek out the real Odin on Midgard (Earth), but events conspire to release the long-imprisoned (and forgotten) Asgardian Goddess of Death, Hela (Cate Blanchett).

Her return to Asgard to take the throne leaves Thor and Loki stuck on the planet Sakaar, ruled by the Grandmaster (Goldblum), who offers the space- and time-lost denizens of the planet their proverbial bread and literal circuses in the form of massive gladatorial games. As it turns out, this is where our old buddy the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) ended up after his exit at the end of Age of Ultron, and he’s the champion of the arena after having stayed in his big green form since we last saw him on screen. Also present is Scrapper 142 (Tessa Thompson), a former Asgardian Valkyrie who likewise found herself on this bizarre planet after being defeated by Hela before her imprisonment. Meanwhile, Heimdall (Idris Elba) is hard at work putting together a resistance and biding his time until Thor and company can return to Asgard, stop Hela and her new lieutenant Skurge (Karl Urban), and prevent Ragnarok.

Despite apparently being no one’s favorite Avenger and being overshadowed in virtually every installment by inexplicable (to me) fan favorite Loki, Thor has experienced a lot of growth in the past six years since he was first embodied by Hemsworth, and so have his films. The Dark World was, in many ways, the nadir of the MCU franchise as a whole (until Doctor Strange came along), where it felt like everyone was just going through the motions after having a lot more fun with the surprisingly pleasant balance between the fish-out-of-water humor and royal family drama of the first film. I quite like Natalie Portman, personally, and I would have loved to see her continuing to have a role in these films, but she was sleepwalking through that last film with so much apathy that she made Felicity Jones look like an actress.

Here, however, everyone is totally committed to the job, which is probably easier under the guiding hand of the bombastic and colorful Taika Waititi, who seems to be the embodiment of Mr. Fun, than it was in a film helmed by Alan Taylor, whose work tends to be more grim, if not outright melancholy. This is a movie with setpiece after setpiece, all in different realms and on various planets with their own palettes and aesthetic principles, which lends the film a verisimilitude of scope, even though each conflict (other than the opening fight sequence) comes down to something much more intimate and personal: the friction between selfishness and the responsibility to something greater than oneself. The wayward Valkyrie forsakes her desire to drink herself to death while running from the past in order to defend her home once again, Bruce Banner risks being completely and permanently subsumed by the Hulk in order to lend a hand when Asgard calls for aid, Skurge finds a strength he didn’t know he had when faced with the extermination of his people, and even Loki ends up making a decision that helps others with no apparent direct or indirect benefits to himself. The oldest being in the film, Hela, has never learned this lesson despite having nearly an eternity to do so, and it is her ultimate undoing (maybe), and it’s a strong thematic element that comes across clearly in a way that a lot of films from the MCU do not.

There are some mitigating factors, as there always are. Those of you hoping for a Planet Hulk adaptation are going to be mightily disappointed, although you should definitely check out Marvel’s direct-to-video animated version, which is not only the only unequivocally good animated film Marvel produced before ceding that realm to DC, but also has a starring role for my boy Beta Ray Bill, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as one of the faces carved into the Grandmaster’s tower. There are also some character deaths earlier in the film that I think are supposed to be shocking in a meaningful way, but come on so suddenly and have so little effect on the plot that it feels kind of tasteless. I would have loved to see more of Sakaar’s arenas as well; it’s hard not to feel cheated when a movie promises some gladiatorial combat and ends up giving you only one match-up.

I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. review, but I’ll say this for now: this is a fun summertime Thor movie that somehow ended up being released in November, but it’s nonetheless a delight. Check it out while it’s still in theaters, as you should never pass up the opportunity to see a live action depiction of that ol’ Kirby crackle on the big screen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tom of Finland (2017)

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I can probably count on one hand the number of biopics that have struck me as phenomenal, formally impressive cinema. Stray examples like Ed Wood & Kinsey leap to mind as I attempt to recall biopics I’ve instantly fallen in love with, but for the most part the genre feels like an endless line of passable-but-unremarkable exercises in filmmaking tedium. Tom of Finland has joined the ranks of biopics that have transcended that mediocrity for me. Depicting the adult life of the Finnish illustrator/pornographer Touko Valio Laaksonen as he drew his way into queer culture infamy, Tom of Finland excels as a kind of filmmaking alchemy that turns an unlikely tonal mashup of Cruising & Carol into the feel-good queer drama of the year. Its high class sense of style & lyrical looseness in narrative structure feels like the best aspects of Tom Ford’s features, but without his goofy storytelling shortcomings. While its sexuality isn’t quite as transgressive as the leather daddy-inspiring art of its subject, it’s still a passionate, celebratory work that sidesteps the typical pitfalls of queer misery porn dramas, yet still manages to feel truthful, dangerous, and at times genuinely erotic. It’s hard to believe the film is half as wonderful as it is, given the visual trappings of its subject & genre, but its leather & disco lyricism lifts the spirit and defies expectation. The only disappointment I have with Tom of Finland is that most audiences don’t seem to be on its wavelength, dragging my enthusiasm down with bafflingly unenthused reviews.

Part of the reason Tom of Finland is so impressive in its transcendence of biopic tedium is that it entirely forgoes the birth-to-death trajectory of that genre’s traditional narrative structure. Glimpses of the artist as a successful older man, a reluctant young soldier, a closeted adman living with his sister, and a smitten middle age romantic who happens to generate pornography, mix in a cyclical, sublimely lit intersection of vignettes that play like sardonically funny paintings in motion. The domestic softness of Laaksonen’s home life mix with the transgressive, leather-clad brutes of masculine sexuality that define his pornographic artwork and invade his daydreams as horny, in-the-flesh hallucinations. War-related PTSD becomes inextricable from the erotic, as he fetishizes a handsome soldier he killed in battle as a young man. Orchestral sweeps find divine beauty in the danger of cruising men in public & producing illegal, sexually charged art. Tom of Finland jumps time & skims consequences, trusting its audience to follow along without being held by the hand. It’s a delicately sweet portrait of an artist that’s often interrupted by queer disco reveries & seas of hairy men posing in the leather getups that turned Laaksonen on so much that his depictions of them inspired an entire spectrum of sexual fetish. If arranged in a linear order or stripped of its playfully hallucinatory erotic fantasies, Tom of Finland could easily be the middling biopic its critical consensus reports it to be. Instead, it’s a gorgeous, dreamlike drift through the life of an artist with one of the mostly highly dedicated, specialized cult audiences imaginable.

I might understand the complaint that Tom of Finland isn’t brutish or sexy enough to fully convey the transgressive spirit of its subject’s work if it at all seemed like Laaksonen was as wildly over the top as his drawings. The tension between his mild-mannered demeanor and the over-sexed aggression of his art is one of the film’s more rewarding charms. He’s far from a sexless character, shamelessly flirting with men and discussing his work in blatantly honest terms like, “My cock is the boss. If I have a hard-on I know it’s good.” Like most people, though, Laaksonen is portrayed to be not nearly as wild as his sexual fantasies might suggest, which makes it all the more amusing when he’s delighted/dazed to see his work come to life in the “heavy leather” queer kink communities they inspired in New York City & San Francisco. The sudden deluge of this dedicated fandom hits the audience with the same jolt of surprise, its accompanying disco soundtrack feeling just as surreally out of place as the imagined sexual fantasies that intrude on the physical spaces of his daydreams. The contrast between this playfulness and the high art cinematography & production design make for one of the more exquisite biopic experiences I can ever remember having in my lifetime. Normally, I’d worry if the fact that I saw this at a New Orleans Film Fest screening made me more enthusiastic because of the excitement of the environment, but a faulty stop & start projection and a fussy late night audience was actually more of a distraction than an enhancement. Given the less than ideal screening where I watched this beautiful film, it’s a miracle I enjoyed at all, much less instantly fell in love. Now I just need to figure out exactly why so few people seem to be on the same wavelength.

-Brandon Ledet

Love and Saucers (2017)

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There was an audible wave of giggling in my audience with the opening line of dialogue in the documentary Love and Saucers. The subject of the doc, visual artist David Huggins, explains directly to the camera, “When I was 17 I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial. That’s all I can say about it.” It’s somewhat understandable that an audience would titter at the outlandishness of that claim and the movie that parses out the details of David’s stories is often content to find humor in its absurdity, but I was personally more struck by the confession’s supernatural terror. David Huggins is entirely sincere about his reports of hundreds of encounters with space aliens, which are mostly sexual in nature. His impressionistic paintings that illustrate these encounters are more art therapy than ironic kitsch, and you could hear the terror & the sadness in his voice as he recounts the stories behind them. There’s inevitably going to be a contingent of viewers who view Lovers and Saucers as a “Get a load of this weirdo!” line of humor at David’s expense, but the truth is that both the movie and the artist are tragically, horrifyingly sincere.

Huggins lives a mostly solitary life, holed up in his Hoboken apartment/art studio with piles of sci-fi & horror themed VHS tapes & paper backs providing inspiration for his illustrations. He proudly displays titles like The Day of the Dolphin, Sssssss, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Thing From Another World, and Son of Frankenstein for the camera, explaining why the sci-fi genre and the VHS format are so important to him. At 72 years old, he’s stuck in his ways: working a menial job at a nearby deli, keeping his stories of alien abductions private outside his family & follow paranormal enthusiasts, and painting Impressionist illustrations of his memories interacting, erotically, with the space aliens that have targeted him throughout his life. There’s a wide variety of species within these alien tormentors’ ranks, including the classic “greys,” a bigfoot-type “hairy guy,” the humanoid aliens David fucks, their hybrid offspring, and a voyeur mantis who enjoys watching their copulation. Whether or not audiences cosign belief in the creatures’ existence, David has to live & cope with that reality daily and there’s a tragic sense of terror in that isolation & grief.

Love and Saucers follows the same approach to oral history documentary filmmaking that Rodney Ascher employs in his docs about sleep paralysis & The Shining-inspired conspiracy theories. David is allowed to tell his own story directly to the audience with no editorial judgement made on his personal account of the facts. He’s an endearing man with an unshakable smile, so this is far from a portrait of a Henry Darger-type recluse. Still, his stories of repeat sexual encounters with an alien species have a distinctly menacing tone underneath them, one the film accentuates by intercutting them with images from David’s illustrations, like a nightmare intruding a wandering thought. The matter of fact way David explains things like, “This is my other body,” and the fact that his illustrations are genuinely fascinating works on their own leave the film with a sincere sense of heartache & menace. I understand the temptation to treat Love and Saucers & David’s accounts of his personal history with alien sex as a goof or a lark, but much like its subject’s art this movie mostly functions like a strangely beautiful nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Young and Innocent (2017)

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When Gus Van Sant attempted a shot-for-shot remake of the Alfred Hitchcock proto-slasher Psycho in the late-90s, he found it frustrating that recreating exact moments from the original frame by frame zapped the magic from the horror he was staging. Early on in the process of remaking Psycho, Van Sant had to abandon the shot-for-shot gimmick to allow his actors more freedom to perform and his film more room to stand on its own. It was a smart decision, as the more interesting aspects of the 1998 Psycho were where it strayed furthest from the Hitchcock original: the vibrant colors, the in-stereo Danny Elfman score, the surrealist dream imagery that invades the various kill scenes, etc. The main problem with Van Sant’s Psycho is that it didn’t deviate further from Hitchcock, that it was precious about being blasphemous to its source material. The no-budget indie Young and Innocent plays much, much looser with the Hitchcock roadmap in its own Psycho revisionism, to the point where it even transforms the original’s genre from horror/thriller to lowkey romcom & coming of age drama. Young and Innocent obviously can’t compete with the slickness of Van Sant’s production, considering the scale of its financing, but its willingness to play around with the basic components of their shared source material instead of letting them be is much more artistically admirable & worthwhile.

Although it cribs its title from an entirely different Hitchcock thriller, Young and Innocent’s debt/homage to Psycho is apparent fairly early in its first act. A teenage girl named Marion is spurned by a summertime fling, who happens to be a counselor at her Emily Dickinson writing camp. Miffed, she makes off with the camp’s debit card and takes the first available bus out of town. If you’re not already seeing the Psycho parallels while Marion listens to imagined catty criticism of her character & her poetry on this rebellious bus ride to nowhere, they should be unignorably blatant by the time she rents a motel room from a young weirdo named Norman, who makes incessant small talk about his mother & offers her dinner in his office (this time pizza delivery instead of sandwiches). The movie keeps you guessing from there, teasing the infamous shower scene & heavily implying that Norman might just be the murderer you’d expect, but allowing Marion to live far longer than she did when she did when she was played by Vivian Leigh. A lot of the same elements from the original Psycho persist even as Marion continues to be alive, including investigations from her sister & local law enforcement. Mostly, though, Young and Innocent plays like a summertime hangout film that finds awkward comedy in an unlikely romantic spark between Norman & Marion, so it’s actually not like Psycho at all.

Young and Innocent is a little stilted by its student film production values & depends heavily on audience familiarity with Hitchcock’s original film, but it plays so loosely with Psycho’s basic DNA that it generates a tense sense of mystery & dread all of its own. More clever than outright hilarious, Young and Innocent’s awkward romantic tension is endearingly cute, while still maintaining the original film’s sense of impending doom through surrealistic violence in its dream imagery and the basic vulnerability of following a runaway teen protagonist through a series of risky decisions. It’s interesting to see how much it differs from 1998’s much higher-in-profile Psycho remake, especially in terms of tone & genre, while still capturing the spirit of certain details from Hitchcock’s original more accurately. Gideon Shil’s Norman Bates stand-in, for instance, is much more convincing as a nervous weirdo than Vince Vaughn’s estimation of the same Anthony Perkins role, despite his status as a crazed killer being much more of an open-ended question. By dwelling on Marion’s vulnerability in a world full of potentially dangerous men for a much longer stretch of time, the film also feels more revelatory of Hitchcock’s original intent than the more faithful carbon copy of Van Sant’s efforts. Young and Innocent finds endearing, quirky coming-of-age humor in a classic work that should not be able to support that light of a tone, which is a very admirable distinction for a film with its undeniably meager means.

-Brandon Ledet