reviews

Nobody Knows (2004)

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Authentic child actor performances are as difficult to capture on film as it is to build a feature around the uncooperative selfishness of animals. The 2004 Japanese drama Nobody Knows deserves just as much credit for wrangling its incredibly young & convincingly genuine cast of performers as this year’s Kedi does for somehow constructing a narrative around the daily lives of Turkish street cats. Much of that achievement is attributable to director Hirokazu Koreeda’s dedication to a documentary-style verisimilitude while filming his insular cast of young, nonprofessional performers. With a narrative modeled after real life child abandonment cases of the 1980s, Nobody Knows focuses almost entirely on juvenile characters left to fend for themselves with few resources & few interactions with adults. After fifteen years of planning & revision, the story of four young siblings was shot in sequence over the course of a year, mostly held to the confines of single, three room apartment. Most recent stories about this kind of juvenile confinement — Room, Brigsby Bear, The Wolfpack, etc. — adopt the lyricism of a child’s imagination, but Nobody Knows values honesty over style. With very little score and largely improvised performances captured through obscured cameras, the film mostly concerns itself with watching its four central characters grow one year older in an enclosed, unsupervised space without the structure or discipline of adult influence. While sometimes exhaustingly quiet & unrushed, it’s a fascinating achievement in form & authenticity.

A young, single mother smuggles her four children into a three room apartment, claiming to her new landlord that her oldest son is her only child. As the rest of her kids emerge from their transporting suitcases, which they then use like furniture, you get the sense that there’s a nomadic routine to this ritual. She reminds them of the ground rules: remain quiet & stay indoors. Only the oldest boy, Akira, is allowed to venture outside so that he can collect groceries & other supplies while she’s out at work (and at play). The oldest kids’ responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, clothing, and homeschooling their younger siblings to maintain this off-the-books home is a heavy, adult set of obligations. Selfishly, the mother drinks out on the town and acts like an irresponsible child while they shoulder this weight. While she leaves the apartment to pursue external pleasures, we’re left holding our breath for how long she’ll be gone and the kids will be solely responsible for maintaining order within the home & keeping the family intact, out of the destructive hands of child protective services. Her absences are erratic, sometimes lasting a workday, sometimes lasting months, with little thought given to the money & supplies she’s budgeted the children with in her wake. The majority of the narrative unfolds in what feels like a year-long stretch of the mother’s absence, with no sign of return. The kids’ hair grows longer; dishes & garbage pile up; the utilities are cut; home-cooked meals backside into instant ramen & chewed paper. We see the truth of what children are capable of accomplishing when left on their own without a caring adult, a reality that can be both beautiful & tragic as the circumstances become more drastically isolating.

At 140 minutes of solemn reflection on the resilience of abused & abandoned children, Nobody Knows can be a little trying in its commitment to verisimilitude. Watching the kids’ state gradually devolve into disorder as they visibly age in front of the camera is fascinating as an artistic experiment, but maybe a little too academically thorough & a little too subdued for its own good as a feature film. Some of the film’s best moments come when this natural atmosphere is broken up by the kids finding joy in the transgression of venturing outdoors or innocently debating whether pop culture creations like zombies, UFOs, and Totoro are “really, really real.” That joyful release may not have meant as much without the solemn isolation that engulfs it, but I still found myself wishing certain sequences were trimmed in the editing room for the sake of practicality. I can see how after nearly two decades of work on a film with reflections of real life parenting horrors in its DNA, Hirokazu Koreeda may have been reluctant to lose any more of his footage to edits than he already did. Even when its merits as fictional entertainment are sacrificed to the authenticity of documentation of real life trauma, Nobody Knows still shines as a technical achievement in cinematic honesty. You’re not likely to see onscreen performances from children this genuine and this consistent in quality in any other feature, which alone makes the film a significant work. Knowing that there’s a reality to their year-long trial in isolation only makes those performances more hauntingly effective. Hirokazu Koreeda was likely smart for sticking to that honesty over the traditional entertainment value I personally longed for.

-Brandon Ledet

Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (2000)

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As a film series, Pokémon does little to bring outsiders into the fold, assuming all of the clueless parents & professional critics dragged into seeing its individual movies in isolation are familiar with the full canon of its various television series, trading cards, Nintendo games, manga, and so on. There’s a huge time jump in adventures between the first Pokémon film, Mewtwo Strikes Back, and this follow-up, Pokémon: The Movie 2000, that’s even more confusing than the jumbled inconsistencies in their titles. In the Missing Adventures between these two titles, gaps presumably filled by the televised anime series, our hero Ash has acquired far more pokémon & travel partners we don’t have any time to meet before the new plot kicks in. His worried mother is apparently now in the picture as well and the animation style has evolved to include more aid from CGI. The series’ dedication to a Just Another Adventure ethos is entirely baffling to those on the outside looking in and is doing me no favors as I attempt to get acclimated to its pocket monster-infested universe, but I’m sure 90s Kids™ who regularly watched the television show were stoked to see an extended episode of something they loved dearly projected large & loud with the reverence of a summertime blockbuster.

The plot in this uninclusive sequel concerns a wealthy pokémon collector who disrupts the balance of Nature when he starts hunting rare, big game pokétypes. After overreaching narration explains that fire, ice, and lightning are the elements that control the ocean (huh?!) the villainous collector is shown catching the corresponding pokémon that command those elements from their posts in a very specific set of small islands (Lugia, Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, all of which had significance in a recent rollout within the Pokémon Go game). Ash & his pokébuds happen to arrive on those same islands (the chances!), where they’re greeted by Princess Mononoke-style tribes who speak of a Chosen One (Ash, duh) who can restore order to their realm. With the help of a Team Rocket face turn and hoards of wild, free range pokémon who show up just to pitch in (due to being more in tune with the ebb & flow of Nature than humans, of course), Ash is able to fulfill his Destiny and free the captured pokémon to restore their balance of power over the islands and the oceans that house them. This isn’t as exciting of an obstacle as the mutated Mewtwo plot of the first film, but the evil collector & his sky ship poképrison do help establish an interesting pattern. In the first installment, a climactic fight between a stadium full of pokémon and their corresponding clones was met with a pacifist message about how violence is entirely senseless, despite “battling” being an essential aspect of pokémon culture. In Pokémon: The Movie 2000, the main evil is an act of selfish collecting of pokémon, despite “catching them all” being so essential to the series that it’s the hook of its theme song. My best guess is that the next film in the series will focus on the inherent evils of one of three possible topics: miniature monsters, naming kids Ash, or animated children’s media.

As with the first film, the pleasures & rewards of Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (or, in its more literal translation, Pocket Monsters The Movie: The Phantom Pokémon – Lugia’s Explosive Birth) are constant, but moderate. I was once again won over by the earnestness of the film’s music, especially in the opening banger “We All Live in a Pokémon World” (which includes a pokémon-themed rap breakdown) and the closing Donna Summer ballad “The Power of One,” which has since gained fame from being quoted at multiple Herman Cain political speeches (under the guise “A poet once said . . .”). Although both movies are mired in their mundane obsession over bad weather conditions disrupting travel, the sequel does make strides to develop some of its central relationships in a way that suggests narrative progress. The most prominent female character in particular, Misty, is constantly needled about her unspoken romantic feelings for Ash, much to her embarrassment. More importantly, Team Rocket is given plenty to do despite not being the central baddies. Not only do they have a role in saving the day, but Jesse & James are allowed throwaway lines about their not-so-secretly queer identities (referring to relationships with the opposite sex as “trouble”) and meta commentary about the ridiculousness of their even being a Pokémon movie: “Prepare for more trouble than you’ve ever seen. And make it double, we’re on the big screen!” The only thing this pokésequel can offer audiences is more of the same, but since “the same” is so (moderately) pleasant, that’s not so bad of a proposition.

I did walk away from Pokémon: The Movie 2000 with a new theory as to why these films were so hated by critics, however. I wasn’t previously aware that theatrical versions of these films were each proceeded by inane short films featuring fan favorite pokémon, the adorable electric rodent Pikachu. In these 20min shorts, Pikachu and other pokémon get into brightly colored hijinks with little human interference to break up their gibberish repetitions of their own names on loop (as is the pokéway). I can see how getting through one of these introductions, which play like an anime version of Teletubbies, would sour critics & parents on then following up the experience with an 80 minute adventure film that makes no effort to reach out to the uninformed. The Pikachu shorts that accompany the Pokémon movies are undeniably cute, but they likely didn’t help an already perplexed audience get in the proper, receptive mood.

-Brandon Ledet

Beach Rats (2017)

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When I was first saw trailers for the Best Picture Winner™ Moonlight last year, I was a little worried that the film was going to be yet another tragically queer coming of age story where a young, closeted protagonist struggles to be their true selves in an unforgiving world determined to propel them to an inevitably violent end. There’s certainly a real world validity to that narrative, but after decades of nearly every major instance of queer representation onscreen following that exact pattern, it’s becoming depressingly limiting to what queer cinema can accomplish as an artform. Thankfully, Moonlight sidestepped most of the Queer Tragedy pitfalls that dull many of its genre peers to deliver something much more transcendently tender & delicately beautiful. The film Beach Rats, which was developed simultaneously at an artist’s retreat with Moonlight by writer-director Eliza Hittman, was much less nimble. Beach Rats is a hyper-specific, wonderfully realized character study about a young queer man navigating the ultra macho beach bro culture that dominates his Brooklyn-based peer group. Its visual language, particularly in its focus on the movement & positioning of bodies, is impressively, subliminally effective. Unfortunately, the film is also stubbornly stuck in an Indie 90s mindset in its estimation of a queer cinema narrative, dimming its idiosyncratic delights in visually detailed culture-gazing to amount to something unnecessarily familiar.

British newcomer Harris Dickinson stars as the confused Brooklynite Frankie (much like how Australian actor Danielle Macdonald recently disappeared into a Jersey Girl persona in Patti Cake$). Pocketing the oxycotin prescribed to his cancer-ridden father, struggling to relate to his grieving mother & sister, and doing his best not to stand out among the Jersey Shore bros that populate his Brooklyn neighborhood, Frankie is unsure how to integrate his sexual interest in the (much) older men he flirts with online into his traditionally macho public persona. He attempts to maintain a romantic relationship with a girl he meets on the boardwalk and claims to the men he begins to hook up with, “I don’t really know what I like,” but his sexual intetests never seem to be in question. It’s clear to the audience (and likely to Frankie) what genuinely turns him on. Excuses why he can’t emotionally or sexually commit to the young woman who’s obviously into him range from having snorted too many pills, lack of condom access, and anxiety over his father’s health, but he seems to have no problem in getting revved up while cruising strange, older men in online chatrooms & on public beaches. As the pressure of maintaining his gym rat beach bro persona while pursuing these anonymous same sex hookups mounts, the movie barrels toward an inevitably dour conclusion that thankfully doesn’t reach for the horrifically violent tragedies typical to its ilk, but still feels overly familiar all the same.

As old hat as Beach Rats feels as a queer cinema narrative, the lived-in imagery of the world it captures feels both believably real & oddly beautiful. The amusement park & nightclub settings these beach bros invade when they’re not shirtlessly staring at the water are near-indistinguishable as neon-lit, electronica-soaked playgrounds, drawing an interesting thread in their continued adolescence even as they search for cheap, drug-fueled highs. The physical rituals of marijuana, handball, and masculine greetings are carefully detailed, especially in the fleeting moments when bodies are socially allowed to touch. While this is far from the explicit territory covered in Stranger by the Lake, Hittman’s eye for this physical communication is carried over to the mostly wordless hookups between queer men, with special attention paid to the strength in the subjects’ muscular hands & buttocks. In an erotic moment, the camera is drawn to the nearest crotch; when the tone turns violent, it lingers on the idle knuckles of potential abusers. This attention to physical detail is never as potent as when Frankie is posing for selfies while working out in his bedroom mirror, baseball cap carefully placed to obscure his face. The way the smartphone flash coldly reflects off greasy thumbprints on the glass is oddly beautiful as Frankie admires & advertises his own body. You can tell Hittman strived to capture a real world setting & culture in this imagery and her attention to its physical detail is what makes Beach Rats feel at all special or worthwhile.

Sometimes, devotion to real world detail is a detriment for the film’s purpose. The dedication to hiring non-professional actors to flesh out its cast feels authentic, but also a little flat. Beach Rats is entirely empathetic to the ultra macho gym bro culture it captures so well onscreen, without a trace of irony in its depiction, but it is a little difficult to suppress laughter while watching Frankie sad-vape or play sad-handball in the rain, as true to life as those images may be. However, that objective approach works well enough while keeping a knowing distance from acknowledging the correlation between Frankie’s thirst for older men & his father’s absence or the vulnerability of identifying as queer in a culture where, “When two girls make out it’s hot; when two guys make out it’s gay.” It’s monstrously unfair to compare Beach Rats & Moonlight solely due to the professional proximity of their creators & their respective depictions of beachside, same sex hookups, but Barry Jenkins’s successes really do exemplify where Hittman missteps. If Beach Rats shared Moonlight‘s narrative instinct in knowing where to pull away from real world tragedy to explore more rarely seen modes of queer representation, it could have been a modern masterwork. As is, it functions just fine as a culturally specific character study with an intense focus on the physicality of its subjects’ social rituals, from the blatantly erotic to the purely fraternal. It’s totally recommendable for those virtues alone, even if it falls short of the transcendent experience it could have been.

-Brandon Ledet

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

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The opening gag of Bridget Jones’s Baby is the entire movie in a microcosm. Alone on her birthday, Rene Zellweger’s now middle aged romcom anti-hero opens this years-late sequel on the exact note where she started the first film in the series: blowing out a single candle on a cupcake & lip-syncing to Celine Dion’s “All By Myself” in an amusingly over-the-top moment of self-pity. She asks her series-sparking diary “How in the hell did I end up here again?” in voice-over and as an audience I can’t help but breathe a much-needed sigh of relief. Even with all of the uncomfortable weight-cataloging & desperation to land a husband, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary holds up nicely as a smart, darkly funny romcom that modernizes & subverts the Jane Austen classic Pride & Prejudice for the hard-loving, hard-drinking thirty-somethings of its era. As a protagonist, Bridget Jones is a little dopey & off-kilter, but personifies for her audience the Inner Idiot we all feel like we come off as whenever we’re anxious in public. 2004’s follow-up, the inexplicably titled Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, completely misinterprets the character’s appeal and makes her out to be an Actual Idiot in one of the most insultingly vapid romcoms I can ever remember seeing. That’s why it’s such a relief, over a decade later, to see Bridget Jones return to square one: drunk, alone, and once again personifying our collective Inner Idiot in a recognizably human way. It’s even more of a relief when this familiar beat is interrupted by Bridget switching the track to a modern pop song and deciding to celebrate her current middle age state instead of moping about her apartment, a welcome taste of what’s to come.

As necessary as Bridget Jones’s Baby was in undoing the damage wrought by Edge of Reason, it doesn’t find much else purpose for its existence besides transporting its protagonist to a modern context. The movie’s plot is centered on a simple “Who’s the father?” mystery as Bridget finds herself pregnant & caught between two potential lovers: Colin Firth’s eternally uptight Mr. Darcy from the first two films & the out of nowhere addition of an American billionaire played by 80s TV heartthrob Patrick Dempsey. I suppose as an audience we’re supposed to fret over which beau she (and her titular baby) will end the film with, but it’s difficult to care too much about that dilemma (especially since Mr. Darcy has been a kind of recurring inevitability since film one). The true conflict here is in watching Bridget navigate the 2010s, now a total outsider to the youth culture she drank her way through exiting in her original appearance. Surrounded by *shudder* millennials, Bridget weighs in on the cultural evils of music festivals, man buns, “ironic” beards, brand managers, “vegan condoms,” and (in an extended featured cameo) Ed Sheeran. I despised the trailer for this film for its regressive fretting over the fear of dying “alone” as a single mother, but the movie is much less concerned with the baby of its title than it is with ribbing a young, inauthentically hip culture it’s getting too old to understand. Bridget Jones is an awkward & as dopey as ever, but as a relic of the past she’s become a kind of Gen-X anti-hero tasked with cutting through the bullshit of modern culture in the name of middle aged women everywhere. That’s a huge step up from her blithering idiot persona who “hilariously” doesn’t know how to snow ski or navigate Thailand’s prison system in the miserable Edge of Reason.

There’s a comfort in familiarity to romcoms as a genre that Bridget Jones’s Baby delivers expertly. Rescuing its protagonist from the Idiot Plot screenwriting hell of Edge of Reason, this damage control sequel makes everything pleasantly familiar again. Bridget is back in her proper apartment, surrounded by her same cast of friends (including the always-welcome Shirley Henderson), and back to worrying about her same self-defeating anxieties over romance, her career, and her body. This return to normalcy is the cinematic equivalent of an electric blanket in a cold snap, to the point where any developments in Bridget’s romantic or professional life almost don’t matter at all. At its very last opportunity, Bridget Jones’s Baby introduces a plot twist that leaves the door open for a sequel that sounds pleasant, but unnecessary. Now that the damage from Edge of Reason has been undone there isn’t much a fourth Bridget Jones movie could possibly offer besides more comforting familiarity. At least that’s far from the worst thing a movie could accomplish. I’ll admit I was even tickled in this sequel by seeing Emma Thompson seemingly reprise her irreverent natal physician from Junior as Bridget’s smartass doctor. It didn’t really improve or even alter what I’d already seen her do before, but it was still a familiar, comforting reminder of a past pleasure. Bridget may despondently ask, “How in the hell did I end up here again?,” at the start of this movie, but her audience couldn’t possibly want to be anywhere else. Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t attempt to disrupt or subvert the romcom formula like recent bomb-throwers Wetlands, Obvious Child, Sleeping With Other People, Appropriate Behavior, etc., but it does feel essentially redemptive for restoring a beloved character who deserved so much better in her previous outing to a comfortably familiar place.

-Brandon Ledet

Laser Mission (1989)

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I discovered the late 80s action cheapie Laser Mission as a thrift store purchase of what appears to be a DVD bootleg transferred from a straight-to-VHS release. The absence of a legitimate production budget is apparent as soon as its opening diamond heist sequence. The “most precious and largest” diamond ever mined in Africa is stolen from a banquet hall while masked villains gear up & load ammo against a black background. The effect feels like cutting between amateur camcorder footage of a VFW hall wedding and a TV commercial for car alarms. An 80s rock ballad recorded by Dire Straits co-founder David Knopfler wails, “In the violence of the night, his heart beats like a hammer, like the backbeat of a song. And the fire burns in him. He knows he don’t belong. Mercenary man, mercenary man, mercenary man,” before reaching its inevitable crescendo of a saxophone solo. It’s the film’s sole soundtrack selection and will repeat endlessly until the end credits. Laser Mission is Everything Is Terrible action cinema, a genuine VHS era version of Neil Breen’s weirdo vanity projects or Tim Heidecker’s Decker series. It’s flatly acted, looks like it was filmed in a backyard, and does not at all earn the confidence needed to pull off its sub-Commando sense of bravado. There’s something infectious about its constantly apparent cheapness, though, and by the end credits I found myself singing “Mercenary man, mercenary man, mercenary man” along with its one-song soundtrack while reaching for more box wine. It’s a “bad” movie, but it wasn’t a bad time.

Years before he went goth (and tragically died) for The Crow, Brandon Lee stars in his first deviation from the early career martial arts schlock that relived the legacy of his father, Bruce Lee. He appears here as the smartass superspy action hero Michael Gold. Lee lacks any of the charisma that makes the Stallone & Schwarzenegger characters he’s aping work on the screen. He’s also not nearly as physically imposing as those towering meatheads, so any direct attempts to make him look like a super cool, tough-talking badass fall humorously flat. When he shows up for secret meetings at US embassies wearing only an undershirt, he looks like a joke. When he calls a woman he meets for the first time “bitch” for turning down his sexual advances, he sounds like a chauvinist monster. Attempts to disguise himself for acts of espionage range from pathetically applying a fake mustache in a makeup mirror to monstrously adorning brownface & the rags of a crippled beggar. It also doesn’t help that Lee’s sub-Schwarzenegger one-liners are embarrassingly weak. Exchanges include the awkward, “Are you acquainted with theoretical physics?” “No, I specialized in recess and girls,” “Ha, very funny,” and a disgruntled “You know? You guys really know how to win friends & influence people.” The only thing that prevents Laser Mission from being a total embarrassment is Lee’s undeniable skill with martial arts. Practically no money went into producing this disposable schlock, but what little was there was all poured into its gun violence, explosions, and endless supply of nameless baddies for Lee to mow down with ease. The action is the only semi-legitimate element at play in Laser Mission (besides maybe its phenomenal theme music), which honestly wasn’t the worst choice it could have made in terms of VHS era craft. There’s nothing wrong with playing to your strengths.

Laser Mission‘s surface pleasures are so slight that it doesn’t even treat the audience to its titular lasers. Michael Gold is tasked by US special forces to retrieve a Russian scientist (Ernest “What Am I Doing Here?” Bornigne) famed as “the world’s leading expert in laser technology” before the KGB can nab him first. The race against the clock is especially dangerous because of the KGB’s possession of the comically oversized diamond from the opening heist, which they supposedly want to use to create the world’s most powerful laser cannon or some such nonsense. We, of course, never get to see said laser cannon because the movie can’t afford to depict it. Instead, we watch Lee evade capture from two bumbling Scooby-Doo level goons as he works his way closer to Borgnine’s laser scientist, eventually teaming up with that target’s daughter to complete the mission. In between disposing of baddies with liberally fired bullets & casual karate chops, he openly gawks at his new partner for her ability to fire guns & drive a getaway truck in heels even though she’s a woman. They eventually fuck, the scientist & the laser diagmond are recovered, and a few go-nowhere twists are revealed in a dry fart of a finale that sets up Michael Gold’s next mission, obviously never to come. Besides not delivering on the lasers it brazenly promises, it’s not too bad of a cheap action plot; at least, it wouldn’t be if the jokes were actually funny and the bravado was actually earned.

Laser Mission is mildly enjoyable as a late 80s curio. It’s at least amusing to see what happens when the Stallone/Schwarzenegger formula falls flat in less capable hands, even if the embarrassment for Brandon Lee’s failings as a leading man are palpably awkward. I can’t recommend the film at face value as a legitimately well-made action flick, but as a real world example of the kinds of VHS schlock Decker & Neil Breen are calling back to, it’s both fascinating & adorably campy. The only thing it’s missing, really, is a few lasers.

-Brandon Ledet

Utopia (1951)

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I picked up a dirt cheap, used DVD copy of the Laurel & Hardy comedy Utopia (aka Atoll K, aka Robinson Crusoeland) thinking it’d likely be as good of an introduction to the comedy duo’s 23 film catalog as any. I’ve done my best to catch up with comedy staples like Charlie Chaplin and Abbott & Costello over the years,  but somehow the filmography of Laurel & Hardy has always escaped me. This was an ill-advised point of entry as an outsider, as it turns out that Utopia was the final film in Laurel & Hardy’s catalog, a misfire that put an end to their career. It’s difficult to even know which version of the film is the definitive one, since they’re are four separate cuts with four different runtimes, none of which were positively received. Filmed in Europe with a blacklisted American director years after the comedy duo’s heyday, Utopia was engineered to function entirely as last gasp cash grab. It was anything but. The shoot was supposed to take twelve weeks, but instead lasted an entire year, dragging out any chance to make a quick buck off the shriveling Laurel & Hardy legacy before it disappeared entirely, with no chance to financially succeed. You can feel that labor in every dull frame of the picture too; it plays more like a hostage video than a slapstick comedy.

The main problem with Utopia is that it works way too hard for way too long to establish what should be a simple premise. Laurel & Hardy inherit a rickety yacht & an uncharted island from a deceased uncle, where they intend to establish a paradisal version of Mortville to ease their economic troubles. It takes an absolute eternity for them to reach that goal, as the movie wastes tons of time in unnecessarily expensive sight gags suffered by their traveling ship for more than half the runtime. It takes a solid 40 minutes for the plot to fully set up Laurel & Hardy alone in the island with two other dirty men & one beautiful lady. It takes a full hour before that crew decides to establish their own country, Crusoeland. That only leaves 20 minutes for the film’s basic premise to play itself out, which really wouldn’t be a problem if the lead-up were shorter or less labored. I was simply too exhausted by Utopia’s narrative mechanics of setting up the political follies of a small island country to be amused by the inhabitants of that island treating a lobster like a pet dog or trying to pile into a single bed. Instead of achieving the knee-slapping energy of a light-hearted farce, Utopia presents a frustrating existential crisis where everyone from the (multiple!) directors to the actors to the audience has to work way too hard for laughs that never arrive or feel worth the effort.

As poor of a Laurel & Hardy introduction as Utopia turned out to be, it at least thematically clued me in on some of the duo’s charms. They way they function like a married couple (“Don’t I always take care of you? You’re the first one I think of.”) and turn their dire economic peril into (sometimes literal) gallows humor is endearing, at least. I can also get behind their central goal to establish a country with “no passports, no prisoners, no taxes, no laws, and no murder.” It’s a shame that those sentiments are buried under a film so visibly tired & directionless. Every potential is wasted, from Laurel & Hardy’s vaudevillian energy to the absence of a performance from French singer Suzy Declare, the only female performer of note onscreen. By the time previously absent narration intrudes halfway through the runtime to summarize the young country’s efforts to tame the island they inhabit the whole thing feels like a mess that should have been cancelled the first month it fell behind schedule. No one steering the ship wanted to be there and I didn’t want to be watching them go through the motions, especially not as a first time audience for an iconic comedy duo I’ve never witnessed in their prime.

-Brandon Ledet

IT (2017)

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One of the more exciting trends in the last few years has been the significant uptick in artsy fartsy horror productions. Our last two Movie of the Year selections for this site, for instance, were It Follows & The Witch, with plenty of titles like It Comes at Night, Raw, The Babadook, and The Neon Demon filling out the ranks below them in what’s starting to feel like a legitimate low budget horror renaissance. With this embarrassment of riches on hand, it’s easy to lose track of the few stray successes that have cropped up in mainstream horror production, since it’s easier now than it has been in a very long time to favor the underdog pictures over their major studio competition. The most recent adaptation of Stephen King’s 10,000 page novel IT is an excellent wake-up call to the value of mainstream horror filmmaking done right. IT is an Event Film dependent on the jump scares, CGI monsters, and blatant nostalgia pandering (even casting one of the Stranger Things kids to drive that last point home) that its indie cinema competition has been consciously undermining to surprising financial success in recent years. What’s impressive is how the film prominently, even aggressively relies on these features without at all feeling insulting, lifeless, or dull. Even more so than well-received franchises like The Conjuring, Sinister, and Insidious, IT fulfills the major studio promise that big budget horror filmmaking can still be intense, memorable, and above all else fun. While indie filmmakers search for metaphorical & atmospheric modes of “elevated” horror, IT stands as a declarative, back to the basics return to mainstream horror past, a utilitarian approach with payoffs that somehow far outweigh its muted artistic ambitions.

Seven middle school dorks suffer the worst summer of their lives when their problems balloon larger than the usual abuses laid on them by bullies & villainous adults to include a hundreds-of-years-old curse that haunts their small, suburban town. IT converts the childhood nostalgia pangs usually reserved for the 1950s to a more currently appropriate 1980s setting. Inconsequential references to New Kids on the Block, “Where’s the beef?” commercials, and Tim Burton’s Batman slightly update the material’s Scary Stand By Me aesthetic, but its sense of small town Americana feels timeless, mostly untouched by then-contemporary pop culture. The Losers Club avoids contact with their school’s feral teen bullies and their homes’ emotionally & physically abusive adults by hiding out at The Quarry or in the library. Their inner circle is a protective shield against the evils of bigotry, sexual trauma, physical violence, etc. that haunt the larger world, but struggles to stand up to the more metaphysical evil that drives those real world terrors, the titular “It.” A centuries-old demonic force responsible for generational catastrophes that befall the same town’s children every few decades, “It” shows itself in this 1980s context in the form of missing, abducted children. Adults remain in a daze as their children disappear, content to paper over each “missing” poster with the next one down the line, showing no enthusiasm for determining the source of the epidemic. As the ancient evil creeps closer to abducting their own members, The Losers Club are compelled to defeat “It” on their own without the help of clueless adults in a climactic Good vs. Evil showdown. They even find a physical manifestation of “It” they can focus their energy on destroying: a sewer-dwelling birthday clown named Pennywise.

Pennywise The Dancing Clown (a heavily CGI’d Bill Skarsgård) crystallizes The Loser Club’s childhood fears into more tangible iconography than the larger-looming traumas that haunt their private & public lives: clowns (duh), basements, darkness, isolation, and so on. His individual scares work with the routine precision of a rotary dial. Children slowly approach personalized manifestations of their respective fears with a cautious, quiet curiosity until a jump scare releases the tension and the rotary wheel is dialed back for another tense build. IT is a collection of haunted house attractions (sometimes literally) in this way, relying more on the thrill of individual scares & set pieces than overall atmospheric dread. The demonic clown that personifies these horrors with a familiar, if grotesque face is an excellent anchor for its more general, community-wide evils that would usually take several hours of mini-series sprawl or (in King’s case) hundreds of pages of exposition to fully cover in a satisfying way. Smartly, IT doesn’t afford much screentime to mythology outside some light library research & examination of old town maps. Instead, it builds the collective friendships & flirtations of The Losers Club as a single group unit and then cyclically breaks down their ranks into weakened, individual members through the routine of its jump scares. There’s an impressive efficiency in this approach that allows room for isolated scares to properly breathe without sacrificing the pace of the group narrative, with Pennywise’s Evil Clown antics & red balloon calling card serving as an essential lynchpin to the whole enterprise. As fascinating as the more intangible horrors of IT can be, it really helps that the story is also streamlined as a Children vs. Killer Clown narrative to keep things relatively grounded.

While director Andrés Muschietti does succeed in boiling a strange, sprawling narrative into a manageable mainstream horror package, he also allows himself to indulge in IT‘s more surreal, intangible menace in the background details. Pennywise’s drifting irises, the paradoxical positioning of background extras, and a peripheral television broadcast that encourages children to play in the sewers with their friends all subvert the more routine, by the books horror thrills of the jump scares in the foreground. One scene involving a malfunctioning slide projector in particular fully delivers on Pennywise’s potential as a metaphysical being, allowing “It” to take an outsized physical form through a distorted beam of light in what has to be one of the most striking images from any feature film this year, mainstream or otherwise. The movie also impresses in its R-rated willingness to deliver on its children-in-peril threats, tearing out young tykes’ limbs and sinking knives & fangs deep into their flesh. This onscreen violence nicely counterbalances coming of age hallmarks like a flirtatious skinny dipping sequence & a team-building housecleaning montage lifted directly from IT‘s 80s reference points to create something both warmly familiar & genuinely dangerous-feeling. While certainly a straightforward, mainstream horror affair built more on elaborate scare mechanisms than artsy fartsy atmosphere, IT doesn’t just function as a middle school-set slasher featuring a creepy clown with endless rows of sharpened teeth & red balloons. The movie’s more adventurous, unnerving touches may lurk in the background, but they’re essential to the overall effect. Its Scary Stand By Me veneer is deceptively simple, but highly effective, leaving plenty of room for more ethereal horror to creep in at the edges. If nothing else, IT is a succinct, revitalizing argument that Big Budget Horror might be dormant, but is neither toothless nor obsolete.

-Brandon Ledet

Girls Trip (2017)

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In a summer when many comedies fell flat & promptly disappeared, Girls Trip excelled as a surprise runaway success lingering in theaters for months longer than its closest competition (Rough Night, Fun Mom Dinner, etc.). It’s not at all difficult to see why the film would carry a wide appeal & resulting financial success. As a star-studded broad comedy (featuring heavy hitters Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Queen Latifah among pop music celebrity cameos from performers like P. Diddy & Estelle) that caters directly to black audiences, Girls Trip taps directly into a criminally underserved market desperate to see its POV properly represented on the big screen. In a more idiosyncratic sense, it also cast an impossibly wide net in terms of tone. Girls Trip is an unashamedly maudlin comedy about adult sisterhood that drowns its audience in melodramatic cheese in its reflections on motherhood, religious Faith, adultery, betrayal, and falling out of touch with loved ones. It’s also one of the bawdiest, most aggressively horny comedies of the year, with a turn from breakout star Tiffany Haddish steering the ship out of its Hallmark Channel waters towards the prankish filth of Divine’s turn in Pink Flamingos every opportunity she’s allowed at the helm. These two warring halves– the raunchy & the sentimental– make for a wholly unpredictable, tonally chaotic summertime comedy that’s bound to grab the attention of anyone within earshot. Very rarely is something with commercial appeal this vast is so energetically strange & memorable for its grand scale acts of depravity.

The four leads of this corny/raunchy comedy feel as if they were grown in a lab to appeal to every quadrant of middle aged women in 2010s America. Queen Latifah is a skilled journalist whose talents are going to waste writing click bait hit pieces on celebrity gossip. Regina Hall is billed as the second coming of Oprah, a successful woman who seemingly Has It All in public, but struggles to keep her family together in private. Tiffany Haddish is a nuclear element of chaos, an overgrown childhood id in an adult woman’s body. Jada Pinkett-Smith is an uptight Party Mom, a “nurturer”, which is in direct contrast to her real life persona fronting a nu-metal band (!) & raising America’s most adorable space aliens. Self-described as The Flossy Posse, this meticulously crafted crew reunites after their post-college fall-out for an extravagant trip to New Orleans, where they attend Essence Fest & generally raise hell. Half the plot concerns mending emotional wounds between Latifah & Hall’s estranged besties as they try to save face in discussions of their personal lives. The other half is a group-wide mission to get Pinkett Smith’s hopelessly milquetoast Mother archetype laid. Haddish operates entirely outside either concern, ensuring the film’s immortality in her Freddy Got Fingered levels of depravity. Haddish’s lengthy tangents about ripping men’s hearts out & storing drugs in her “bootyhole” are paired with acts of mimed fellatio & a firehose of sprayed urine to completely pervert & subvert all of the film’s more heartfelt reflections on betrayal, reconciliation, and True Friendship. Haddish is not the only Flossy Posse member with blue material; every character gets their fair share of one-liners about giant dicks, camel toe, etc. Her performance just pushes the material into all-timer territory in its commitment to depravity & its freedom to exist outside concerns of realism or grounding melodrama.

New Orleans is the perfect backdrop for these sordid/maudlin shenanigans, but I have to admit I was often distracted by the way my city was depicted onscreen. The laws of movie magic dictate that I cannot nitpick the logic of the Hotel Monteleone’s carousel bar being near-empty on a festival weekend, the convenience of cabs & hotel rooms opening out of nowhere, the inhuman ability for the Flossy Posse to down consecutive Hand Grenades™ without exploding into piles of vomit, or the lunacy of a character having their morning coffee at the Topical Isle daiquiri chain. I can let these minuscule details go. The sanitized amusement park look of America’s infected bootyhole, Bourbon Street, was laughably unrealistic, however, and as a local it’s always sad to see one of the most vital, dynamic cultures on the planet reduced to off-season Mardi Gras beads & public flashing. From a tourist’s perspective, this view of the city might right true, though. There’s genuine admiration for the city in the film’s loving shots of the Superdome and local music touches like a twerking-flavored bounce show or a brass band rendition of a Bill Withers classic. Essence Fest also plays a huge role in Girls Trip‘s basic appeal. Not only does it allow for pop music acts to break up more labored stretches of emotional conflict; it also leads to weird novelties like this being the only film you’re likely to ever see where Ava DuVernay & DJ Mannie Fresh are both featured in prominent cameos. On some level, Girls Trip works as a dual commercial both for New Orleans as a lawless playground and for Essence as a concert experience. I just hope that anyone who takes the bait is aware that they won’t have as effortless of a time with it as The Flossy Posse, even with Regina Hall money to throw around.

There are plenty of reasons why Girls Trip shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Besides its depiction of a pristine, non-existent New Orleans, the film is overlong, dramatically labored, and embarrassingly cheesy. You get a whopping taste of that cheese in its introductory stretch, which heavily features a lazily Photoshopped group portrait of The Flossy Posse standing in front of a green screen Superdome and (I kid you not) opens with a record scratch sound effect. It’s somehow easy to even be charmed by that opener, however, thanks to how a look back to the crew’s college days allows for open 90s nostalgia (a hot commodity right now, another reason why Latifah’s casting was perfectly calibrated). If Girls Trip is indeed a movie-by-committee proposition engineered to appeal to as many people as possible, I’ll admit I was not at all immune to its scheme. The film’s gleeful participation in overt, oversexed filth plays directly to my raccoonish tastes. Even if the massive runtime or clueless sentimentality had entirely soured me, I still would have walked away a fan of Tiffany Haddish, whose Jerri Blank-esque presence elevates the material immeasurably. I wasn’t necessarily negative on the film’s emotionally manipulate half either, though. Not every story beat about motherhood anxiety or the struggle to maintain the integrity of Christian Faith & public brands did something for me, but the film’s overall celebration of female friendship is undeniably infectious. It may be a story that could have been told more honestly & more succinctly, but the way its genuine pathos is perverted by the chaos of bar fights, hallucination, and male frontal nudity made for a delightfully subversive summertime comedy. I just won’t shed a tear if Girls Trip 2 happens to be set in another city, so I can focus less on setting & more on whom the Flossy Posse is banging, pissing on, giving a sincere heart to heart to, etc.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wiz (1978)

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While still feeling the high of seeing The Wizard of Oz projected on the big screen earlier that morning, I took the opportunity to catch up with one of its stranger cultural echoes. Return to Oz inspired many childhood nightmares and Wicked sparked plenty a backseat singalong, but the legacy of The Wiz is much more difficult to pinpoint. The most expensive movie musical ever made (at the time of its release), The Wiz was a massive critical & commercial flop. Star power as potent as Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor all working in their 1970s prime did little to save it from pans & lackluster receipts in ’78, but did afford the film a cultural longevity. A Wizard of Oz-based musical with an all-black cast is a fascinating concept with instant cultural appeal, a memory many children of the ’70s remember fondly even if its reputation at the time was dogshit. Many cite The Wiz‘s financial failure as leading directly to white movie producers killing the era’s blacksploitation boom, believing black-led media to no longer be profitable. After all, if a musical spectacle starring former members of The Supremes & The Jackson 5 directed by one of the most well-respected filmmakers of his time can’t make money at the box office, what black-marketed film could? The problem, of course, was not a lack of interest in the market, but a legitimate deficiency in the product being sold. To put it lightly, The Wiz is a total fucking mess.

Besides the typical energy & passion deficiencies that haunt all cynical cashgrabs with ludicrously bloated budgets, the main problem The Wiz struggles with is authenticity. The film’s superstar cast and association with Motown Records (including a Quincy Jones soundtrack), suggest a black culture authenticity at first glance, but its white producers & filmmaking team undercut that perspective significantly. Directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) and written by Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin, Flatliners, The Number 23), The Wiz often feels like an embarrassing, borderline offensive approximation of black culture. Sequences involving sweatshop workers & humanoid crows in particular feel dangerously close to a minstrel act (with the crows being no less embarrassing than the ones depicted in Disney’s Dumbo four decades earlier, sadly). Even the film’s Motown-flavored soundtrack feels watered down & whitewashed for a wider (read: whiter) audience. The Wiz also can’t help but feel like an oddly cheap knockoff of the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, because of its rights issues. Based off a musical stage play that shares the same source material with the Technicolor classic, The Wiz was legally allowed to reference the L. Frank Baum books, but not elements of the original film. Dorothy can click her slippers, but they have to be silver, not ruby red. She can journey across the yellow brick road, but she has to “easy on down,” not “follow” it. Everything about The Wiz just feels slightly off in that way. Its basic hook is fertile ground for an amazing Wizard of Oz adaptation (and a lot of people very much enjoyed the recent NBC broadcast staging of the same play), but every odd step in its production amounted to a massive miscalculation. The fact that it could be great with a different creative team and less of a Studio Notes ethos makes the experience of watching it all the more frustrating too. I really wanted to enjoy it.

Diana Ross stars as Dorothy Gale (duh), a twenty-something school teacher who spends nearly her entire life couped up inside her family’s Harlem apartment. Ross plays Dorothy as scared & fragile, with none of Judy Garland’s awe-filled excitability. Her stress dream about traveling to Oz is triggered more by her fear of leaving the safety of her home than anxiety over her dog & the weather, although Toto does venture outside just in time for the two to be swept up in a tornado (snownado? snowclone?) in the Harlem snow. Unlike in the 1939 picture, Oz is an enclosed environment. Dorothy smashes through the ceiling and lands in a giant bowl of grits (*eyeroll*). The story doesn’t deviate much from the source material from there, except in its production design & characterization details. Characters have a tendency to speak exclusively in slang (or Joel Schumacher’s estimation of slang) and the world they populate had a grey, concrete “urban” look instead of the 1939 film’s vibrant Technicolor atmosphere. Michael Jackson plays the scarecrow, protecting a sunflower patch outside NYC housing projects. Comedian Nipsey Russell plays the Tin Man as a theme park automaton attached to a Coney Island rollercoaster. The lion starts as a concrete statue; the Munchkins are animated graffiti; the poppy fields are a corner of street hookers, etc. etc. etc. Only Lena Horne’s presence as an astral version of The Good Witch & Richard Pryor’s befuddled version of The Wizard aren’t marinated in Urban Flavor to “modernize” the material, but the relative blandness and the movie’s interminable 130min runtime raise questions audiences should probably never had to ask, like “Will this ever end?” or “Is Richard Pryor funny?” Anyway, Dorothy & her pals ease on the road, get an eyeful in Emerald City, defeat an evil witch, and then magically will themselves back to Harlem after learning about the wisdom, compassion, and courage they had in themselves all along or whatever.

As The Wiz is an eternal limbo of white men misinterpreting black culture into an overproduced, bafflingly boring mess of a late 70s musical, the best modern audiences can hope to mine from it is novelty as a cultural relic. The music is just as soulless & forgettable as Diana Ross & Richard Pryor’s asleep-at-the-wheel performances; Nipsey Russell’s robotic one-liners about STDs & his ex-wife get lamer by the minute. That essentially just leaves Michael Jackson’s scarecrow to carry the weight of making this exhausting display of oddball decisions feel at all worthwhile. He does okay. The costume designers rob him of his youthful beauty by drowning him fleshy neck & chin prosthetics, but he’s still a consistently magnetic presence with a golden voice. My favorite image in the entire film is a subway-set scene where two sentient trash cans attempt to eat Michael Jackson alive. That pretty much sums up the entire enterprise. I was frequently impressed with the massive scale of The Wiz‘s production design; the disco number set at The Emerald City was especially gorgeous in that respect (before it had time to outlast your patience). Its look is much more drab than the Technicolor dreamscape of its 1939 predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The dour look of the film echoes its more decidedly tragic tone, at least in the way Ms. Ross chose to play it. The problem is that the story its visual achievements serve is both punishingly boring & embarrassingly miscalculated. I’d love to see what a modern black filmmaker could do with this same material (and it sounds like I should at least catch up with its recent The Wiz Live! revival), but Lumet’s film ultimately amounts to a fascinating misfire at best. As is, it likely shouldn’t even exist.

-Brandon Ledet

The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)

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In professional wrestling, when a performer is incredibly talented in the ring but lacks the public speaking skills necessary to succeed in the business, promotions will usually pair them with a “manager,” a hype man who can do the talking for them. Paul Heyman currently fills this role for WWE champion Brock Lesnar, who looks like an absolute beast when he wrestles, but can’t match a fraction of the gusto conveyed by Heyman’s world class shit-talking skills on the mic. Movie producer Robert Evans could use a pro wrestling manager. A hotshot maverick who helped transform the cinema landscape as a Paramount Pictures executive in the New Hollywood era, Evans has an incredible story to tell, but few of the skills necessary to tell them well. In short, he’s an unlikable blowhard, one who barrels through his own boardroom war stories as if he’s vacuuming up rails of coke. His fast-paced, monotone voice-over delivery does no favors for his objectively fascinating anecdotes, besides maybe keeping them succinct. The history of Robert Evans’s professional life is a wild tale, but it’s likely one that should have been delivered by anyone else in the world besides the asshole who lived it, who’s so rushed & incomprehensible he borders on requiring subtitles to be understood. At one time in the 1970s, Robert Evans had everything he could want in the world, but to this day he lacks the one thing he needs most: a hype man, a manager.

The documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture makes the ill-advised decision of providing a platform for Bob Evans to tell his own story, read from his autobiography, despite his goddawful mic skills. Not only does this skew the truth behind what ends up being a great story anyway; it also constantly reminds you that it could not have happened to a bigger schmuck. It’s a testament to just how unlikely & compelling Evans’s E! True Hollywood Story is on its own merits that the documentary remains intensely watchable throughout, despite the giant asshole it’s meant to mythologize constantly getting in the way. Evans was the Vice President of a NYC sportswear company before being “discovered” as an actor poolside in LA. He’ll be the first to admit that he was only a “half-assed” actor, cast entirely for his looks instead of his skills, but the few roles he landed gave his business-minded brain an unignorable hunger for the movie industry. He used the publicity generated from his unusual entry into Hollywood to maneuver his way into a position as producer for Paramount Pictures. At the time, the studio was struggling for survival as the 60s were dying out & younger audiences were desperate for the New Hollywood adrenaline that was soon to come. Evans helped drive this Hollywood revival, developing a string of smash cultural hits that revitalized his studio: Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Harold & Maude, Paper Moon, Chinatown, etc. According to Evans, he personally had to fight to make sure every picture survived, explaining to the studio why they needed Roman Polanski to direct, how Sicilian mobster films could possibly be a hit, and so on. You’d think he was the greatest genius of all time by the way he tells it, but that didn’t prevent him at all from succumbing to the downfalls of cocaine, lawsuits, criminal cases, and having romantic partners wooed by Steve McQueen that end all tragic Hollywood stories. He’s a lot more stingy with the details on those particular anecdotes, but they do color the credibility of his all-out success stories.

I’m being very hard on Evans here, but after listening to him philosophize about “dames,” “Pollacks,” and the differences between Sicilians & Jews for 90 minutes, I couldn’t help but think of him as tacky at best, a raging asshole at worst. The Kid Stays in the Picture is a special kind of vanity project that not only glorifies its subject as The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived, but also operates as a sort of CliffsNotes advertisement for his autobiography by the same name. I suppose Evans is somewhat charming in his old-fashioned brand of assholery. At the very least, I appreciate the abrupt, ornery way the movie concludes with a “I’m still here, you fucks!” sentiment. Directors Brett Morgan & Nanette Burstein also do an excellent job of assembling archival footage & photographs, not only of Evans hamming it up for the press, but of backstage gems like Mia Farrow dancing in her Rosemary’s Baby costuming. Digital cinematography detailing Evans’s New Hollywood mansion unfortunately has a cheap, television-grade quality to it, but otherwise the doc has a fantastic collage-in-motion effect that matches its subject’s energy nicely. I especially admire the way it assumes the audience recognizes every film & celebrity referenced onscreen and uses their imagery for artistic effect without over-explaining their cultural significance. Really, the only problem with the film is Evans himself; he really could have used a hype man as a narrator to cut down on his monotone bravado. However, the story is too good to toss aside just because it details the life of a schmuck and a blowhard.

-Brandon Ledet