reviews

5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

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One of the year’s best surprises so far was the animated Japanese romance epic Your Name., which felt like it came out of nowhere before jumping into shockingly wide American distribution. Audiences who closely follow Japanese popular media were probably a lot less surprised by the film’s stellar quality and critical word of mouth success, however. Not only was Your Name. the top-grossing film in Japan last year, anime or otherwise, but it’s director Makoto Shinkai had been praised as “the next Miyazaki” for at least a decade now, despite not having much name recognition abroad. What really should have telegraphed the arrival of Your Name., though, was Shinkai’s sophomore feature, 5 Centimeters per Second, which shared a lot of basic DNA with the director’s breakout hit despite being released a decade in the past. It’s not nearly as significant or as cohesive of a work, but it is certainly fascinating as a wind-up to the pitch.

Told in a series of three interconnected vignettes, 5 Centimeters per Second is a kind of romance anthology, adopting a format usually employed by the horror genre. A young boy named Takaki yearns for intimacy with a classmate who moves to the countryside, several gruelling trains transfers away. In the first segment Takaki journeys to meet her at the station. In the second, he’s slightly older and painfully unaware that his current highschool classmate has a crush on him. His mind is still wrapped up in his childhood crush. The third segment finds Takaki as an adult with a job as an office drone, still living in an unfulfilled life as he mentally searches for a childhood love that never saw its due. Much like Your Name., it’s a film about two romantics separated by time & distance who yearn for an impossible shared space where they can fully explore their feelings for each other. Unlike Your Name., this film feels like a series of loosely connected, lightly detailed sketches that never truly come together in a cohesive way.

The three segments that make up 5 Centimeters per Second are obviously differentiated by drastic shifts in time: Takaki’s life as a school age boy with a devastating crush, his year as a hunky but oblivious highschool senior, and his adult state as a depressed, unfulfilled office worker. What really differentiates between these periods, however, and what keeps them interesting, is their individual senses of pacing. The opening puppy love segment is shot rapid fire at the screen with the excited energy of a young child to whom everything means so much. The highschool episode slows things down significantly, making room for reflective stargazing, matching Takaki’s off-in-the-distance sense of mental wandering. The concluding segment oddly ties the whole thing together by starting with Takaki’s aimless descent into dull adulthood tedium, but then reigniting the excitement of the film’s romantic spark with a music video crescendo that incorporates imagery from Takaki’s entire life onscreen. Each individual part has a clear sense of how to match its story with a corresponding cinematic energy, even if Shinkai is much less deliberate in how he brings them all together.

You can feel so many of Shinkai’s pet obsessions just starting to take shape in 5 Centimeters per Second that it makes sense it would take a decade for them to fully form. The film not only plays with the same city boy & country girl sending messages long distance dynamic of Your Name., but anchors that romance to a lot of similar imagery: cityscapes glistening like natural formations, birds flying against outer space backdrops, travel by trains, teens staring into cellphones in anticipation, etc. However, Shinkai seems less confident in this earlier work how to incorporate supernatural sci-fi into its central romance and how to conclude a story that spans such a long distance in both space & time. 5 Centimeters Per Second does stand well enough on it own as “a chain of short stories,” but it often feels like the sketchbook plans of the much better feature to come. Fans enamored with Your Name. should be able to find a lot to connect with in that respect, even if the movie is a loosely defined experiment.

-Brandon Ledet

Okja (2017)

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In one of our very first posts as a website we declared Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi epic Snowpiercer the Best Films of 2014. My assumption is that it rose to the top of our list that year mostly because it was so much movie. As with a lot of Asian cinema, Snowpiercer never ties itself down to a single genre or tone. It constantly shifts gears from humor to terror to action spectacle to political satire to whatever whim it feels at the moment as its story progresses from one dystopian end of its train setting to the other. It was near-impossible to know what to expect from the director’s follow-up, then, except that it might similarly spread out its eccentricities over a bizarrely wide range of cinematic modes. Okja is just as deliciously over the top, difficult to pin down, and tonally restless as Snowpiercer, although it does not resemble that film in the slightest. If a movie’s main virtues rest in its ability to surprise & delight, Okja is an undeniable success. It’s not something that can be readily understood or absorbed on even a scene to scene basis, but its overall effect is deliriously overwhelming and expectation-subverting enough that it feels nothing short of magnificent as a whole.

Tilda Swinton & Jake Gyllenhaal star as the public faces of an evil meat industry corporation that’s attempting to improve its image with a new, falsely fun & friendly attitude. As part of this evolution within the corporation, they promise to breed a new form of domesticated animal to help maintain the world’s demand for (supposedly) non-GMO meat supply, a “superpig.” The unveiling of this superpig breed is structured as a kind of reality show contest and the movie follows one of 26 worldwide contestants within that frame. Okja, a superpig who has been raised free-range in the forests of South Korea, is officially declared “the best pig” (recalling titles like Babe & Charlotte’s Web), winning the dubious prize of being torn away from the little girl who raised her as a close friend instead of an eventual source for food. Before their separation, we get to know Okja as a kind, selfless animal with human eyes & a hyper-intelligent aptitude for problem-solving (not unlike the intelligence of a real-life pig). After she’s unceremoniously removed from her home and sent to face her fate as meat, we get to know the little girl who raised her as our de facto protagonist. The movie gradually reveals itself to be a coming of age quest to free Okja from her corporate captors, protect her from the well-meaning but idiotic animal rights activists who want to use her as a political pawn, and return her to her home in Nature. The rest is a blissfully messy blur of action set pieces, wild shifts in comedic tone, and a brutally unforgiving satire of modern meat industry practices.

The cuteness of Okja herself and the film’s occasional dedication to a kids’ movie tone (despite its constant violence & f-bombs) make it tempting to look to Babe as an easy animals-deserve-empathy-too comparison point. The truth is, though, that Okja more closely resembles George Miller’s terrifying action movie nightmare Babe 2: Pig in the City, where the grand adventure staged to bring its very special superpig home is a nonstop assault of bizarre imagery & comedic terror. There’s a constant threat of danger in Okja, ranging from car chases to meat grinders to stampedes through an underground shopping mall. The CGI in service of this spectacle is shoddy, but in a flippant, Steve Chow kind of way that is so irreverently cartoonish it could not matter less. Oddly, the performances work in much the same way. Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, and Shirley Henderson all stand out as intensely bizarre sources of nervous energy that exist far beyond the bounds of human nature, but in such a casually absurd way that it somehow fits the film’s ever-shifting tone. Gyllenhaal likely wins the grand prize in that respect, often resembling more of a rabid duck than an adult man. In any other context he’d be too broad or, frankly, too annoying to function as anything other than a distraction, but it’s somehow just the jarringly over the top touch the movie needs.

Okja is too much of an ever-shifting set of complexly self-contradictory tones & moods for it to be wholly described to the uninitiated. It’s both a scathing satire of modern meat industry & a slapstick farce poking fun at the activists who attempt to dismantle it. It’ll stab you in the heart with onscreen displays of animal cruelty, but will just as often giggle at the production of farts & turds. I can try to describe the film as an action adventure version of Death to Smoochy or a more deliberately adult reimagining of Pig in the City, but neither comparison fully covers every weird impulse that distracts & delights Bong Joon-ho as he chases his narrative across multiple continents. Just like with the similarly divisive Snowpiercer, I can’t promise all audiences will be onboard for the entire ride (Gyllenhaal in particular is sure to be a frequent point of contention), but Okja does offer something that’s increasingly rare in modern action adventures of this blockbuster-sized scale: the wildly unpredictable. You may not appreciate every individual turn in its impossibly twisty road, but oh, the places you’ll go.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beguiled (2017)

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Sofia Coppola’s remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood-starring thriller The Beguiled rings oddly like a synthesis of the defining aspects of my two favorite films from the director: the dangerously gloomy boredom of The Virgin Suicides & the playfully modernized costume drama of Marie Antoinette. The delicate visual beauty & intensely feminine modes of violence in Coppola’s The Beguiled plays directly into her most readily apparent strengths as a filmmaker. Even though she could have assembled this picture in her sleep, however, there’s a potency to its in-the-moment effect that makes it feel like a personal obsession instead of a more-of-the-same exercise. The question of the film’s overall effect isn’t whether it’s a great work or if it’s an indulgence in craft, but rather how it never existed before this year, why it’s arriving now. The Beguiled feels as if it’s already lingered in the ether forever, or at least as long as Coppola’s been making movies.

A Virginian school for girls struggles with the vulnerability & boredom of isolation during the American Civil War. Distant drums & cannons build tension in an otherwise serene soundscape of bugs, birds, and branches swaying in the wind. In this secluded pocket of peace, one of the younger girls discovers a wounded Union soldier in the woods. Despite being a firmly Southern, Confederate household, the women of the school take the soldier in and allow him to heal in their care. They purport this kindness to be an extension of their Christian charity, but their motivations are clearly more purient than that claim. As the women openly lust for the new, exciting, masculine sore thumb that invades their once quiet home, unspoken rivalries form and the atmosphere turns palpably violent. Suddenly, the distant sounds of war are dwarfed by the violent outbursts within their home, as the intimate presence of the enemy distorts their Southern belle reverie, giving rise to something much more menacing.

Before its violence becomes openly visible, the devilish fun at the core of The Beguiled is its barely-contained displays of lust. Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning (a staggeringly powerful trio of talents) stare down the soldier’s gradually healing body with held breath & blatant thirst. Colin Farrell is objectified without apology under this scrutiny. An unconscious sponge bath scene in particular is gleefully overwhelmed with close-ups of the actor’s hips, thighs, and chest hairs. Farrell also holds his own as the de facto prisoner of his seven female wardens, manipulating rivalries among them as a cowardly power play to establish a permanent place at the school instead of returning to the war. He’s the sole male presence in the house, though, a soldier deep in enemy territory. Any brief battles for power he can manage to stage only lead to temporary gains, sparks immediately snuffed by overtly feminine means. After a while, those lustful stares look a lot less like an opportunity and a lot more like a threat.

There honestly isn’t much to The Beguiled in terms of narrative complexity or immediate cultural significance, so Coppola must carry its weight on the back of her visual craft. The film’s natural lighting & period setting fall somewhere between The Witch & Daughters of the Dust in terms of both costuming & cinematographic tone. The sights & sounds of Nature permeate every moment, so that when they’re disrupted by the echoes of war (whether inside or out of the house) the effect is consistently jarring. The fog rising from the forest floor mirrors the steamy tension between Farrell’s soldier & his wanting captors. The heat of them being trapped in an old Southern home together is apparent long before the tension explodes. I can’t pinpoint any qualities of Coppola’s The Beguiled that suggest an immediacy or a necessity for its modern presence, but Coppola’s sense of visual craft & the tension she stirs between her actors make it feel at least somewhat timeless. It’s not one of Coppola’s very best works as a filmmaker, but it does share enough of those films’ DNA to re-conjure their potency & solidify what makes her one of the most consistently rewarding directors around.
-Brandon Ledet

Baby Driver (2017)

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In the few days since watching Edgar Wright’s latest at the theater, starting almost immediately after the screening, I’ve been suffering a very annoying case of swimmer’s ear. I can’t hear very well from the affected appendage, which is ringing slightly & swollen to the point of discomfort. I also can’t help but think that this sudden affliction is somehow cosmic retribution for not especially caring about Baby Driver, a film everyone seems to love without reservation, but only stirred apathy in me. In the film, a young twenty-something getaway driver with a heart of gold (named Baby, naturally) suffers from a near lifelong affliction of severe tinnitus. To ease the constant ringing in his ears, he choreographs his day around an endless stack of carefully-curated iPod classics, each loaded with just the right song selection to drown out the noise in his head & get him through his reluctant life in crime. Given how (mostly) great the soundtrack Baby selects for himself is (including tracks from artists as varied as T. Rex, Young MC, and The Damned) and the immediately apparent exuberance Wright shows behind the wheel, it’s downright sinful that I couldn’t manage to have fun watching this summertime exercise in action & style. Do not worry, though. My ear seems to have been struck down for the offense.

I don’t want to waste too much server space shitting on Baby Driver, since it’s bringing a lot of people a lot of joy. It’s easy to recognize what they see in it: stylized car chases, a killer soundtrack, playful action movie dialogue, etc. It’s just frustrating to me that a film with such an exciting premise (a babyfaced criminal timing his bank robbery getaways to pop music) ultimately feels so conventional & uninspired. It starts off sublimely committed to its central conceit too. Baby (played by real-life babyface Ansel Elgort) draws attention to himself by drumming on the steering wheel & lipsycing for his life to a blues rock diddy outside an in-progress robbery. His irreverence is immediately infectious. After establishing Baby’s skills behind the wheel in a show-off’s getaway, the movie establishes its main hook up front in the opening credits. While Baby strolls to a local coffee shop to cap off the heist, the music in his earbuds syncs up to the imagery onscreen, to the point where graffiti & street signs echo lyrics from the soundtrack. In this opening adrenaline rush, it’s easy to be seduced into thinking you’re watching a high octane, pop music-driven modernization of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a visually complex musical where every meticulously crafted detail in play is just an extension of the song developing in your ear. That’s why it’s such a letdown when the movie then reveals itself to be a much more conventional, instantly-familiar heist picture.

That’s not to say that a conventional heist picture can’t be a worthwhile mode of entertainment. Even while disappointing in ambition, Baby Driver features some exceptional performances from its actors. Lily James is absurdly sweet in her role as a diner waitress, feeling like a cartoolishly pure distillation of wholesome Americana. Jamie Foxx also steals attention whenever he’s allowed the opportunity in his role as the loose cannon criminal who can’t be trusted not to blow every heist apart into a bloodsoaked catastrophe, an unpredictable element of danger that helps the film’s “one last job” plot feel at least somewhat distinctive instead of mind-numbingly cliché. I’m a lot less hot on what Jon Hamm & Kevin Spacey are doing as Foxx’s criminal cohorts, which might get to the core of why I was underwhelmed by the movie as a whole. It’s not necessarily a fault with the performances, but more to do with Wright’s screenplay. Spacey & Hamm are tasked with delivering deliberately over-stylized, insincerely quippy dialogue that makes Baby Driver feel overall like a return to that deluge of mediocre mid-to-late 90s sardonic crime movies that followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs. Even back then those overly-jokey, scripted-to-death crime pictures were already exhaustingly redundant & flat. In a 2017 context the effect is even worse, feeling about as try-hard & unfunny as Deadpool.

It’s possible my mood was soured before Baby Driver even began, given Edgar Wright’s snooty pre-screening PSA about how going to the theater is an essential cinematic experience, as opposed to to the slackjawed dimwit slobs who watch Netflix on the couch (i.e. everyone alive). Mostly, though, I just felt let down that Wright abandoned his central Action Movie Cherbourg concept so quickly after following it to its furthest end in the opening credits. Whenever stray gunfire or gearshifts sync to the music in later scenes, it just feels like a distant echo of a better movie that could’ve been. Without its defining gimmick commanding every moment, Baby Driver feels alternately like post-Tarantino slick action runoff & a made-for-TV mockbuster version of the equally mythic, but infinitely more stylish Drive. I probably shouldn’t be saying these things aloud, though, just in case it’s risking hearing loss in my currently uninfected ear. I hope you, Wright, and the pop music gods in charge of my hearing will eventually forgive me for the transgression, lest I need to start shopping on eBay for some secondhand mp3 players.

-Brandon Ledet

Disturbia (2007)

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The world of Rear Window riffs & remakes is a strange, fascinating realm that defies much of what you might expect from Hitchcock-inspired cinema. Outside of a few straightforward Rear Window riffs that keep the original’s story firmly housed in the thriller genre, films like the 1998 made-for-TV remake starring Christopher Reeve or De Palma’s Body Double, a lot of works that pull influence from the Hitchcock classic stray far from its murder mystery roots. What Lies Beneath hammers the film’s obsessive voyeurism into the shape of a ghost story. Addicted to Love and Head Over Heels focus on its gender politics humor and forge the unthinkable: the Rear Window romcom. Perhaps most oddly, though, the 2007 Shia LaBeouf vehicle Disturbia rehashed Rear Window into a late-in-the-game version of the late 90s slasher typified in titles like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend. In fact, the movie was pitched in those films’ heyday, only to be pushed back when word got out that the Christopher Reeve version of Rear Window was in production. Although the idea of rehashing Rear Window as a late 90s slasher is just as absurd as molding it into a romcom, Disturbia is strangely the only one of these Rear Window riffs that was sued for infringing on the rights of the short story “It Had to Be Murder,” the source material for the Hitchcock classic. The case was ultimately dismissed because the similarities were too broad, which is actually indicative of how Disturbia matches the power & the humor of the Hitchcock work: barely, if at all.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Shia LaBeouf as an actor, so I can only recognize him working in one of two modes: American Honey mode and Transformers mode. In American Honey mode, LaBeouf is a Serious Artist who uses his natural charisma as a sleazy snake oil salesmen to find something a little ugly, but very true in his character onscreen. In Transformers mode, he’s a gross clown who asks you to laugh along & identify with that sleaze instead of cringing in recognition. Disturbia firmly boasts a Transformers-flavor LaBeouf, a falsely macho teenage clown who asks you to continually exclaim, “What a goof!” as he lazes around watching Cheaters, plays video games, and lustily spies on the girl next door through his trusty (and likely crusty) binoculars. It’s clear that the macho teen boy audience is when Disturbia is aiming to make its money. Early on, LaBeouf gets a supposed Big Cheer moment when he punches his (presumably underpaid, overworked) high school teacher in the jaw and lands himself on movie-long house arrest. What follows is a PG-13 version of an American Pie-style comedy where he woos the Next Door Hottie by openly drooling/spying and But I’m a Nice Guy!-ing her. It eventually works and just when they’re about to have their Big Kiss, character actor David Morse swoops in as a creepy next door slasher villain who steals their attention, nearly saving the film single-handedly. Morse is effectively, undeniably creepy as the possible serial killer these teens spy on and attempt to expose to skeptical adults. As he’s on house arrest, all LaBeouf can do is watch in horror as the evidence against Morse builds and more potential victims wander into harm’s way. He’s just like a wheelchair-bound James Stewart in Rear Window (just 10x more annoying).

To be fair, my frustration with Disturbia is not entirely LaBeouf’s fault. Were the film actually released in the late 90s when it’s nu-metal slasher mode wasn’t yet stale and I was a teenage shithead myself, I likely would’ve been onboard. Even now, David Morse’s expert work as the cold-hearted killer is almost enough for me to forgive the film’s mid-00s hard rock braggadocio and lame, teen-friendly bro humor. In essence, though, this is frequently a comedy where the jokes just didn’t work for me and only rarely the Rear Window slasher I desperately wanted it to be. The most interesting aspects director DJ Caruso, who’s also responsible for this year’s xXx: Return of Xander Cage of all things, brings to the table here are the ways the film updates & perverts the original Rear Window dynamic. There’s something less pathetic & more understandable about a teen creep spying on his neighbors through his house’s windows than Stewart doing so as an adult man. Technological updates like Internet search engines & video recordings also change the dynamic of LaBeouf sleuthing around for info on his killer next door. If you’re curious about the ways Rear Window has been reshaped & reimagined since Hitchcock’s heyday, Disturbia is a must-watch, especially for David Morse’s terrifying presence and the novelty of that seminal classic being filtered through a generic PG-13 slasher that should’ve been released in the days when KoRn was king. Once that novelty wears off, however, you’re left with a lowbrow teen comedy that seems to think it’s hi-larious to watch a teenage Shia LaBeouf construct towers made of unwrapped Twinkies and stomp out flaming bags of dog shit. Just know what you’re getting into.

-Brandon Ledet

RoboCop (2014)

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One of the stranger trends to emerge from major studios scrambling to remake every past success has been the push to re-imagine Paul Verhoeven films as PG-13 commodities. The recent announcement of an upcoming Starship Troopers re-imagining makes three Verhoeven remakes in the past few years that seemingly are determined to strip the iconic director’s work of all the satirical cruelty that made it successful in the first place. Did the world really need a version of Total Recall with no Schwarzenegger and no trips to Mars? It’s doubtful. I can’t imagine a modern version of Starship Troopers’s war propaganda satire will fare much better and it’s starting to feel like only a matter of time before we get an updated version of Verhoeven’s Showgirls with all of the camp and the nudity surgically removed. The biggest disappointment in this trend so far, though, might just be the 2014 remake of Verhoeven’s privatized police force satire RoboCop, arguably one of the greatest films ever made. The PG-13 RoboCop reboot is especially frustrating in the context of modern, sanitized Verhoeven remakes because it threatens to actually be a decent film with its own interesting ideas for its opening half hour. No other Verhoeven bastardization so far has ever had a chance of being half as interesting as the recent Robo-reboot did, which makes it all the more tragic that the film crashes and burns in such a dull, uninspired manner.

I’d forgive anyone for being fooled that the 2010 RoboCop “gets it” based on its opening sequence. Samuel L. Jackson kicks off the film as the host of a primetime news shoe that’s half CNN, half Dianetics DVD. There are no comedy sketches interrupting this opener as “commercial breaks” like in the Verhoeven film, but the satire in the sequence is still palpable. Jackson’s fake news show profiles a private American company that makes billions of dollars selling weaponry to the military. In demonstration of the power & efficiency of the company’s military-grade robots, which include past RoboCop villain ED-209 working in tandem with Star Wars prequel-type droids, a Middle Eastern terrorist cell is dismantled by American troops. The raid bleakly concludes with the execution of a child, a detail the news program conveniently cuts from its live feed. Jackson’s host then asks his audience why a “robo-phobic” America is so cautious about bringing these private sector androids into urban law enforcement, needling, “What’s more important than the safety of the American people?” This opening efficiently conjures modern concerns of trading freedom for safety, the morality of drone warfare & the surveillance state, and the terrifying business practices of privatized military & police forces, all while maintaining at least some of the sly humor of Verhoeven’s source material. Unfortunately, its minor successes are short-lived. There’s a national debate about the ethics of a roboticized police force that, of course, eventually leads to the titular cyborg solution of a half-man/half-machine (all cop) compromise. The movie remains mildly interesting as RoboCop is built by a futuristic prosthetics company and adjusts to his new Robo-body, but immediately crashes into a wall of modern PG-13 action tedium as soon as he blossoms onto his complete Robo-self. It never recovers.

The hard-R violence of the 1980’s RoboCop feature meant that each bullet, every blow delivered by RoboCop or his supercriminal enemies were significantly brutal. In the remake, the violence is much less impactful, much easier to shake off. The film’s CGI-aided fantasy violence doesn’t help that point much either. RoboCop leaps weightlessly like a superhero in this version, sharply contrasted with the limited mobility in his heavy hydraulic systems of the past. Outside of a couple production details like RoboCop having one human hand and one Robo-hand to accentuate his dual, self-conflicted nature, the film more or less runs out of ideas as soon as its titular hero is actualized. It’s an aggressively conventional work that fully loses track of why it even exists, to the point where callbacks to the Verhoeven classic in lines like “I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar,” feel absurdly out of place. With the violence muted and the satire almost completely drained, this RoboCop rehash feels entirely devoid of a sense of purpose, as if it were a down-the-line sequel of a Jason Statham or JCVD property that surfaced on VOD long after its origins had been forgotten. You can feel it reaching to reclaim its opening spark in its political mockery, which posits old-timey Republicans as the opposition to the RoboCop initiative and forward thinking leftists, including Michael Keaton in full Steve Jobs mode, as the ones pushing for the innovation. By the time Sam Jackson’s news anchor returns to usher in the end credits, though, the game had already been lost and nearly everything in-between feels like a generic 2010s shoot-em-up. Something about that wasted potential feels even more dispiriting than it would if the movie were just bland from the very beginning.

RoboCop is one of those remakes where you could change just the title and a couple minor plot details and avoid purchasing the rights to the intellectual property altogether. That, of course, would have hurt ticket sales, but it would also have lowered expectations of the quality comparisons to the original Verhoeven film, which it seems disinterested in matching in tone or content. The worst part about RoboCop is that the idea it initially presents it is interested in continuing & adopting Verhoeven’s weird vision to a modern context. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure it was interested in saying anything in particular at all, a distressing attribute seemingly shared by all of these unimaginative “re-imaginings” of this great director’s greatest hits.

-Brandon Ledet

Icaros: A Vision (2017)

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It’s usually preferable to enter a movie devoid of background context & extratextual information, but the recent psychedelic drama Icaros: A Vision is one of those major exceptions that benefit greatly from knowing their production history. Upon recovery from a near-fatal bout with breast cancer, visual artist Leonor Caraballo traveled to Peru to seek therapeutic guidance from the country’s local ayahuasca clinics, specifically the infamous Anaconda Cosmica, to help emotionally process her unexpected confrontation with mortality. While participating in the religious ritual of ingesting the psychotropic plant with the guidance of shamans, Caraballo saw a vision of her own death and returned to her home in Argentina convinced of two things: 1) that she was going to die of the cancer’s soon-to-come aggressive return and 2) that she had to make a film about her experience with the ayahuasca plant. The result of these convictions, Icaros: A Vision, partly serves as a therapeutic processing of dread & grief personal to Caraballo’s story. However, the film also strives to capture the religious reverence Peruvian people find in plants like ayahuasca and to poke fun at outsiders who retreat the ritual that helped the filmmaker through her darkest hour like a colonialist act of tourism. Unfortunately, Caraballo did not live to see the completion of her own film; she guided much if its post-production decision making from her death bed with the help of her co-director Matteo Norzi. What she left behind, though, is a visually striking, peacefully meditative look at the culture surrounding ayahuasca rituals, something much more significant than the humorous take on the yuppie adoption of its use depicted in comedies like While We’re Young.

An American woman arrives at Anaconda Cosmica unsure of how ayahuasca rituals can help her process her fear of death and whether she even has the courage to find out. Other patients paying for the privilege of the retreat are addressing issues varying in severity from addiction & self harm to alleviating a stutter to improve an acting career. The mood of the retreat is decidedly peaceful, a tone commanded by the always-present sounds of the jungle. Invading thoughts of technology, particularly MRI scans of the American woman’s cancer, interrupt the reverie on occasion, but don’t fully elbow out the serenity of the jungle until the night time ayahuasca rituals start & end. During the routine ceremonies, a shaman-in-training peers into the various hallucinations of his patients (or “passengers,” in the movie’s parlance) as if he were literally switching channels on a television. The spiritual difference between natural & technological imagery could not be clearer, as the young shaman attempts (through the ritual of meditative breathing & song) to save the paying customers from invading dark thoughts that could spoil their trip. Early on, the film is about his efforts to save the protagonist from the crippling fear of death sparked by her cancer diagnosis. However, at some point that dynamic flips. The American woman, now strengthened by the psychedelic therapy sessions, helps the shaman face his own fears of an incurable medical diagnosis. It’s interesting to see the service industry aspect of their relationships subvert itself as they naturally become better acquainted through the deeply intimate ritual of ayahuasca ingestion, but more importantly the film uses their tender interactions as a purposefully humanist window into a culture that could be depicted as all meditative chants and visual hallucination if not treated with enough open-minded empathy.

Icaros: A Vision is a quiet, still, meditative piece that fully lives up to the visual focus indicated by its title. Everything from muscular river dolphins & the green of the Peruvian jungle to video game imagery & bright florescent piss shape the film’s all-encompassing meditations on life & death. Somehow, the overall effect is more hypnotic than it is showy or gimmicky. Leonor Caraballo’s background as a visual artist shows in the way she carefully frames each isolated hallucination, but her vulnerability & ultimate mortality as a human being is what affords the work a solemn, but rewarding purpose. Humor at the expense of “passengers” who treat the Anaconda Cosmica like a luxury hotel and its (non-actor) employees/residents like servants are slyly made fun of in a social politics-minded undercurrent of humor. That comedy is just one thread in a larger tapestry, though, and the overall picture includes a hypnotic, but encyclopedic catalog of plants that are important to Peruvian culture, an ethnographic documentation of ayahuasca rituals’ adoption as tourist industry fodder, visual attempts to capture the vivid hallucinations triggered by those rituals, etc. Caraballo clearly intended to encompass the entirety of ayahuasca’s cultural & (to her) personal significance in what ended up being her sole feature film. She was smart to tackle an idea that ambitious by centering the story on an intimate two-person partnership within that larger culture, an act of humility in what easily could have been a (justifiably) self-centered film about her her own internal dread & grief. Ayahuasca is a drug that directly invites humility. Those who trip hardest on it often experience immediate attacks of vomiting & diarrhea (the cleaning of which is addressed by the film’s service industry critique), which leaves little room for huffy self-importance. Maybe that humility & small-scale, intimate empathy that come through so strongly in Icaros is something Caraballo learned in her own therapeutic sessions of ayahuasca ingestion. It’s sad that she’s not around to answer questions like that, but the work she left behind is remarkably dense, complex stuff. I doubt we’ll ever see a better film on the subject.

-Brandon Ledet

47 Meters Down (2017)

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As The Shallows & 47 Meters Down have stalked American theaters like so many bloodthirsty shark movies past in two consecutive summers, it’s been exciting to think that we’re in the midst of another post-Jaws sharksploitation boom, one where we’ll see a new woman-vs-shark horror pic every year. 47 Meters Down‘s voyage to the big screen is unconventional in the modern distribution era, following a path that feels more appropriate for horror’s straight-to-VHS days in the 80s & 90s. 47 Meters Down was actually released the same summer as the Blake Lively-vs.-shark surprise money-earner The Shallows, except that it went straight to VOD & home video under the title In the Deep. A bigger production company then bought the rights to the film, changed its title, and pulled it from the market for a proper nationwide theatrical release. The thinking there might have partially been that The Shallows was a surprise financial success that could easily be repeated, but I think that decision actually had a lot less to do with its genre than it does with its star: Mandy Moore. A year ago, Mandy Moore was a has-been pop star whose career as an actor died with long forgotten titles like A Walk to Remember & (my personal favorite) Saved!. Since then, she’s re-entered the public consciousness as the star of the hit NBC melodrama This Is Us, raising her profile just enough that it’s believable she could at least sell Blake Lively levels of theater tickets fighting off a shark or two. The problem is that, while Mandy Moore may have been ready to make the jump to the big screen again, 47 Meters Down was not; the movie still carries the stink of VOD chum no matter how large or loud it’s projected.

Moore stars as a young woman vacationing in Mexico while recovering from a significant romantic breakup. Her more adventurous sister urges her to be daring and live it up while away from home & freed from romantic shackles. The movie’s pre-shark narrative set-up mostly follows the pair as they club with cute boys until dawn to painfully generic dance music. This urging to try new things & stray from her normal, boring life leads Moore’s protagonist to risk her life with an illegal, unlicensed tourist attraction that submerges SCUBA divers in a steel cage & baits the water with chum to attract sharks. Huge sharks. While submerged, the two sisters are inevitably dropped by the rusty, rickety crane that was hoisting their cage and plummet to the ocean floor. What follows is a combination of a tag team steel cage straight from a pro wrestling PPV and an aquatic version of Gravity where the women have to find their way to the surface of the water while avoiding getting eaten, oxygen depravation, and the bends. I suppose there’s some interesting visual play with the endless voids of vast ocean settings and the dispersal of red liquids that could attract predators: blood, chum, sugary cocktails. For the most part, though, the movie plays out exactly as you’d expect a cheap summertime sharksploitation to until its concluding ten minutes, when it expends all of its creative energy on its one distinctive idea. At the last minute, 47 Meters Down decides it wants to play with the narrative potentials of nitrogen narcosis, introducing the paranoia of hallucination to its already tense underwater hell of circling sharks & dwindling oxygen. In a way, it’s disappointing that the movie bothers to distinguish itself with that weird energy so late in its runtime, since it already felt like a decidedly generic affair. All the film’s last minute hypnotic rug pull does is make you wish those ideas had come through weirder, stronger, earlier, and more often.

There’s not much substance to 47 Meters Down in terms of the variety & brutality of its shark attacks. The film seems more invested in building tension in confinement and staging its last minute toying with underwater psychosis than it does in its shark content. This might be a blessing in regards to distracting the audience from the VOD quality of the sharks’ CGI, but as an air-headed sharksploitation pic with only one or two unique ideas it could have easily made more room for a few more shark attacks. Whenever the sharks are out of view and the submerged sisters are fretting over their oxygen supply & the bends, the film’s inherent cheapness becomes blatantly obvious. Underwater & communicating via walkie talkies, much of 47 Meters Down is propelled by dubbed-after-the-fact dialogue. There’s some amusing irony in lines like, “Trust me, once you get down there, you’re never gonna want to come back up” before the cage breaks free & plummets, but much of the dialogue feel like treading water between the sparse shark attacks. 47 Meters Down is an almost-decent summertime horror cheapie that leaves you on a bizarre high note just before the end credits roll, but I have to admit I’m ultimately more fascinated with its path to theater screens than I am with what it did once it got there. For instance, how did a nobody director negotiate the title card “Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down” as if his name meant something to audiences? That small act of self-promotion feels just as oddly archaic as the film’s unconventional distribution path. Since its shark attacks brutality & third act imagery weren’t pushed far as they could have been, it’s those kinds of production details that jump out at you as oddly significant to the film’s basic unlikely existence. I did not appreciate 47 Meters Down as much as the campier & more distinctly violent The Shallows, but I did find it at least mildly interesting as a kind of cultural object and if another female-led sharksploitation piece pops up in theaters next summer, I’ll certainly be returning to the well.

-Brandon Ledet

Band Aid (2017)

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Band Aid is one of those intimate indie comedies that are easy to advertise in trailers as Sundance-flavored quirk fests packed with cutesy flights of whimsy, but deliver something much darker & more painfully honest once they get butts in seats. The last time I watched a film this tonally contrary to the light-hearted romcom romp it was advertised to be was last year’s Joshy: a darkly funny, yet emotionally devastating reflection on themes like grief, addiction, repression, and suicide. Band Aid similarly sweeps genuine emotional trauma under the rug until it can no longer be ignored, but sweetens its bitter medicine with even more of a quirk-friendly premise than Joshy‘s rogue bachelor party shenanigans: the formation of a novelty punk band. The film offers the same exciting swell of watching a fresh musical collaboration come together that was such a joy in last year’s Sing Street, except with a lot more focus on the stop & start failures necessary to make that magic work and a constant Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? mode of bickering romantic cruelty that consistently sours the mood. It’s much more of a personal, slyly devastating work of deep hurt & genuine pain than its quirk-focused advertising (understandably) makes it out to be, a kind of tonal sucker punch that arrives early & often enough to feel like an outright pummeling.

Writer, producer, and first time director Zoe Lister-Jones stars as a failed author & moderately successful Uber driver who’s stuck drifting through a joyless haze. Painfully conscious of her peers’ seemingly successful marriages & constantly bickering with her lazy stoner husband (Adam Pally, who was also in Joshy), she suffers every slight to her confidence, her independence, and her social status as a motherless wife as if it were a violent stab to the heart. Being around friends’ children seems especially painful for her, an anxiety she barely keeps at bay with the help of marijuana & old-fashioned emotional suppression. Couples’ counseling is not working. She seems to be stuck reliving the same fights with her husband over menial bullshit like doing the dishes & not having enough sex while more drastic elephant-in-the-room issues are allowed to fester, unspoken. While stoned at a friend’s kid’s birthday party & avoiding questions like, “When are you guys gonna make one of these things?” from cultish parents her age, she finally rediscovers the one healthy way she can still interact & collaborate with her husband without bickering & wanting to die: art. Music, specifically. As an act of self-actualized therapy, the couple decide to start a band (with the help of their wide-eyed creep of a neighbor, played by Fred Armisen) and turn all of the topics of their daily bickering into playful punk songs. Things get much better from there . . . for a while.

One of the most rewarding aspects of Band Aid is that it doesn’t allow for easy answers in what’s clearly an emotionally complex situation. At first it appears as if the couple’s cheeky songs about diminished sex drives & unwashed dishes are going to magically fix all of their deep-seated emotional pain in a convenient, only-in-movies release of pressure. That infectious spirit of creating art together eventually crumbles, though, and when they inevitably end up fighting again it’s over something much more significant & severe and they go about it in a much crueller way. But that’s okay. This is a film much less about mending a broken relationship than it is about embracing your right to fail. Bands, marriages, and all other kinds of intimate partnerships are difficult collaborations to negotiate, ones where successes can be less frequent than the failures necessary to make them possible. Band Aid is a film about that interpersonal push & pull just as much as it is about internal grief & despair.

Zoe Lister-Jones was not only ambitious in imprinting her auteurist personality in nearly all levels of production on her first feature as a director; she also set out to experiment with the general gender dynamics of a typical film production, indie or otherwise. Band Aid boasts an all-woman crew behind the camera, which has to be some kind of a rarity in film. Although gender dynamics is certainly high on the list of subjects tackled by Band Aid, I’m not sure you can clearly detect a tonal difference in the effect that atypical crew has on the final product. It is an idea worth celebrating & exploring, though, and it’s likely only Lister-Jones herself would be able to fully articulate the difference that dynamic made on bringing her script to life. There’s an undeniable omnipresence of the director’s personal voice throughout the work, not only because she plays the main character & sings all of her on her own songs. Dark humor about ISIS, Nazis, and mental disability offset a lot of the film’s potential twee whimsy. Its focus on the failures inherent to art & romance feels so much more relatably human it should in a film with this kind of a comedic premise. I guess it’d be easy to dismiss Band Aid as the quirky romcom it’s advertised to be if you only engage with its novelty songs & scenes of Armisen doing his usual post-Andy Kaufman schtick, but the film is so much more honest & nakedly sincere than that. It’s an impressively vulnerable work that often transcends its financial means and recognizable genre tropes by exposing an obviously raw nerve, then repeatedly attacking it with joking song lyrics & power chords. If nothing else, I very much respect it for that emotional ambition alone.

-Brandon Ledet

Rough Night (2017)

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There’s a distinct brand of mainstream comedy that somehow gathers together every single comedic performer you’d ever want to see in a movie, but fails to deliver on the promise of their shared presence. Rough Night is an enjoyable, mildly amusing comedy that’s biggest fault is proving to be less than the sum of its parts. There’s no reason a film helmed by the writers of Broad City that features performances from people as bizarrely funny as Jillian Bell, Ilanna Glazer, Kate McKinnon, and Eric Andre should be half as tame or restrained as this movie often feels. This goes doubly so considering the film’s letting-loose plot of a bachelorette party weekend that turns deadly. There are plenty of violent, absurdist, and over-sexed impulses simmering in the background of this hard-R summertime delight, but none are pushed to the extremes you’d hope for based on the level of talent involved. The result is still amusing, but it’s difficult not to be disappointed over what could have been.

Scarlett Johanson stars as a total nerd running for political office in what seems like a mild send-up of the Clinton/Trump campaign trail (with a little Anthony Weiner thrown in for flavor). She breaks away from her election effort for a single weekend to meet up with college friends she hasn’t see all together in years for a bachelorette party in Miami. While her fiancee’s bachelor party is a hilariously lame, muted affair, her own last gasp of freedom feels like the hedonistic free-for-all we never got to see in Bridesmaids because of the incident on the plane. Cocaine, apple bongs, and gallons of top shelf cocktails fuel the small group’s debauchery while anxieties over past romances & friendship dynamics inevitably bubble to the surface like a loud & proud belch. Eventually, the party spirals out of control when the women accidentally kill a stripper & attempt to dump the body to avoid arrest, making the whole feel a little like a gender-flipped remake of Very Bad Things remake that absolutely no one asked for. It’s all fairly amusing, but also a little over-familiar and, ultimately, disposable.

It’s possible that I would’ve been able to better enjoy the minor successes of Rough Night with a more enthusiastic audience. The crowd I watched it with were quiet enough for me to clearly hear the ceiling leak in the auditorium and the Tupac biopic screening on the other side of the wall. Even with that muted reaction, I especially enjoyed its callbacks to mid-00s pop culture, including Borat Halloween costumes and a dance routine set to Kelis’s “My Neck, My Back,” which were amusing reminders that I am gradually becoming an old man. I’d also consider the film a solid victory in the noble cause Operation: Make Jillian Bell A Star. Her militant distribution of dick-themed bachelorette merch & maniacally sincere delivery of lines like, “It would mean so much to me if we could do a little cocaine together,” made Bell out to be a clear scene stealer, no easy feat considering the talent that surrounded her. Still, Rough Night could’ve reached much more memorable heights if it has just cranked the volume on the violent, dangerously horny, occasionally absurdist touches that were already hiding in the shadows. The movie’s biggest fault is that it sets up jokes & payoffs you can see coming from an hour away and waits until the last possible second to pull the trigger. If its payoffs were more immediate there’d be more room for them to also be more plentiful (more weirdness! more sex! more accidental fatalities!) and the only thing it really needed to be special is more of what it was already working with.

-Brandon Ledet