reviews

We Are the Flesh (2017)

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As much horror media as I routinely watch on an annual basis, I do tend to have a weak stomach for the so-called “extreme” end of the genre. Titles like Martyrs, Cannibal Holocaust, Inside, Salò, and so on typify a graphically cruel end of horror cinema that I tend to shy away from as I search for less emotionally scarring novelties like Frankenhooker & Ghoulies II. That’s not to say that there’s absolutely no value in “extreme” horror, a subgenre typically associated with French filmmakers in a modern context. Just a couple months ago I allowed myself to be swept up in the explicit, yet hypnotic cannibalism terror of the recent coming of age horror Raw, despite trumped up reports of the film eliciting vomiting and fainting spells during its festival run. The gimmick of distributing Raw along with accompanying barf bags to theaters around the country to play up its onscreen extremity actually did the film a disservice in a lot of ways, setting an expectation for shock value gratuitousness in a way the film, however violent, wasn’t especially focused on delivering. I’m not sure the same can be said of the recent Mexican-American co-production We Are the Flesh. We Are the Flesh is the taboo, explicitly cruel hedonism of extreme horror perversity that Raw was hinted to be in its advertising & early buzz. Its graphic, button-pushing sexuality and violence is typically the exact kind of horror cinema extremity I shy away from. I went into the film dreading the nihilistic ways it would attempt to dwell in trauma & brutality. What’s surprising is that I left it convinced it’s the best domestic release I’ve seen all year.

While both sexual & violent, We Are the Flesh never allows its extreme horror provocations to devolve into the sexual violence exploitation of most of the titles mentioned above. Instead, the terror in its sexuality commands a kind of cerebral, Cronenbergian quality that pushes its audience’s buttons through taboos like incest, necrophilia, and fucking in literal filth. While the explicit nature of its imagery is presumably intended to shock & disturb on some level, the film overall has a lot more in common with Luis Buñuel’s traditionalist surrealism than it does with Salò or Cannibal Holocaust, titles it risks being swept away with critically by choosing to deal in horrific extremes in the first place. The film lives up to the “flesh” aspect if its title, slathering the screen with writhing naked bodies, sometimes even documenting them in unsimulated acts of sexual intercourse. Unlike with something like Love or Shortbus, however, the pornographic aspect of that display is not the main focal point of its depiction. Instead, the camera (along with the dialogue) breaks down the human body to its most basic components: meat, flesh, spit, semen, menstruate, etc. Like with all worthwhile surrealist art, there’s a darkly humorous reflection of both political and existential unrest perceivable just behind the facade of these evocative images. The anxiety cannot be fully understood and is cheapened by any attempt to put it into words, but it drives the heart of the work beyond the basic effect of shock value into much stranger, more transcendent terrain.

Two siblings emerge, hungry, from a post-apocalyptic cityscape to an industrial space where a total stranger has been seemingly going mad in his isolation. His madness initially takes the form of nihilistic displays of violence that would be right at home on something like The Eric Andre Show: destruction of furniture, off-kilter beating of a drum, nonsensical experiments involving large quantities of bread & eggs. Patterns & purpose eventually coagulate in this chaos, however. He uses the bread & eggs, provided from a mysterious source behind a concrete wall, as pay meant for the brother & sister duo to aid him in his work. Together, the three create faux organic spaces that eventually look like art installations in their now-shared squat. Broken furniture is arranged in geometric lines that recall crystal formations or spider webs. Walls & ceilings are carpeted over with flattened cardboard boxes until the rooms they create resemble ancient caves. The madman describes his creation as “the ultimate memorial of a rotten society.” He condemns the siblings for not fully believing in his work, exclaiming, “You wallow in your youth, though you’re nothing but rotting flesh.” Their initial caution towards his madness gives way to militaristic & cult-like religious devotion. He encourages them to engage in acts of incest, drugs them with a mysterious chemical dropper, imbues them with a fanatical reverence for eggs, and promises that devotion to the cause will lead to a transcendent epiphany, explaining, “Your skull unfolds and blooms like a gorgeous flower.” The whole thing plays out like an extended stream of consciousness nightmare. It’s unnerving, but strangely beautiful.

I’m in love with the way We Are the Flesh disorients the eye by making its grotesque displays of bloodshed & taboo sexuality both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to pin down. The subtle psychedelia of its colored lights, art instillation sets, and unexplained provocative imagery (a pregnant child, close-up shots of genitals, an excess of eggs, etc.) detach the film from a knowable, relatable world to carve out its own setting without the context of place or time. Its shock value sexuality & gore seem to be broadcasting directly from director Emiliano Rocha Minter‘s subconscious, attacking both the viewer & the creator with a tangible, physical representation of fears & desires the conscious mind typically compartmentalizes or ignores (like a poetically surreal distortion of Cronenberg’s Videodrome). Within the film, the man-made, artificially “organic” environments become “real” caves without explanation, both recalling Plato’s Cave and calling into question the inherent artifice of film as a medium in the first place. The isolation of the central three characters in this space makes it seem as if they’re the only people left in the world, evoking a Waiting for Godot style stage play existentialism. Militaristic chants and national anthems conjure similar anxiety surrounding modern politics and bloodsoaked history. We Are the Flesh didn’t exactly unfold my skull so my mind could bloom like a gorgeous flower, but the overall effect wasn’t all that dissimilar. Its dedication to explicit sex & violence was a means to a much greater, more intangible end instead of being the entire point of the exercise. I greatly respect the overreach & surprising success of that ambition.

I wish I had seen We Are the Flesh in the theater with a live audience like I had with the last gratuitous cinematic provocation I’d fallen this in love with, Wetlands. Not only would it have been a joy to see its gorgeous camera work large & loud in a proper cinematic setting, but there’s also something special about squirming with discomfort in unison with strangers when confronted with taboo sexuality. I got a little tease of how that might have felt when I first saw The Neon Demon last summer, but only for fleeting moments. We Are the Flesh is a long, sustained deep dive into violence & sexual discomfort that should likely come with a laundry list of content warnings for the typically squeamish. However, speaking as someone who doesn’t usually find much value in this extreme end of horror cinema, modern or otherwise, I found it to be the exact balance of discomforting moral provocation and intellectual stimulation through abstract thought that makes the times I tried, but failed to find similar fulfillment in films like Martyrs or Baskin feel retroactively worthwhile. I can’t say in concrete terms why the film resonated with me so solidly, because it’s not the kind of work that deals in tangible, measurable absolutes. I can say that it pushed me far outside my comfort zone in a uniquely rewarding way, which is all you can really ask for from surreal art & “extreme” cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

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The gang is back with a few new faces this time around in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, with director James Gunn returning to the helm of the weirdest series in the MCU franchise. Although there are a few missteps this outing, including a lack of screentime for some of your old favorites, violence that is at turns disturbingly unexamined in its brutality when it’s not cartoonish, and hit-or-miss emotional resonance, this second installment reminds us that Guardians is still the funniest and most charming Marvel property currently being produced.

After a flashback opening sequence that shows a CGI de-aged Kurt Russell planting a strange alien plant on Earth in 1980s Missouri while romancing Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) mother, the film finds the team performing a mission to protect the extremely powerful batteries of a race known as the Sovereign from theft by a gross, fleshy tentacle monster (its essentially Caucasian flesh tones and stubble make the thing quite nauseating to gaze upon, as it looks like a scrotum come to life). This first action sequence felt a little off to me, as the obsession Rocket (Bradley Cooper) has with getting Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) music ready before they fight seemed a rather on-the-nose tip of the hat to the popularity of the first movie’s soundtrack. As the action primarily occurs in the background, the camera follows Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) around the platform in a one-shot that’s impressive despite being largely CGI.

We then meet our decoy antgonist, the High Priestess of the Sovereign (Elizabeth Debicki), as she presents the Guardians with their payment for the successful defense of their batteries, a captured Nebula (Karen Gillam), who is to be taken back to Xandar by her sister Gamora (Zoe Saldana) for the bounty on her head. The team is pursued by the Sovereign as Rocket, unable to control his kleptomania, made off with Sovereign tech; as a result, the team is forced to crash land in a forest after taking heavy damage and ultimately being rescued by Ego (Russell) and his servant Mantis (Pom Klementieff), an empath who helps the powerful being sleep. After revealing his familiar connection to Peter, Ego offers to take him, Gamora, and Drax (Dave Bautista) to his planet to explain his abnormal existence, and present Peter with a unique opportunity.

Elsewhere, Yondu (Michael Rooker) faces an existential dilemma when it is revealed that he and his squad are outcasts in the greater Ravager community, in a way that ties back to his essentially having raised Peter after abducting him, moments after the boy watched his mother die. He accepts a bounty for the Guardians from the Sovereign, but when his crew learns that he did so in order to protect them rather than hunt them, they mutiny, taking over his ship and freeing Nebula, who goes after Gamora in pursuit of revenge. Rocket, Groot, and Yondu must then attempt escape, with a little help from everybody’s favorite Stars Hollow weirdo (Sean Gunn, whose character’s name is irrelevant, and we all know it).

There’s no Infinity Stone MacGuffin here, and it’s a real break from the MCU’s usual storytelling machine that the narrative of GotG 2 isn’t motivated by set pieces, action sequences, or even plot, but by character. The only real example of this in the franchise thus far has been Winter Soldier, which was motivated by Cap’s desires to save one friend and avenge another, but even that film was organized around the plot of a conspiracy thriller as much as (if not more than) character motivation. Here, however, every choice and conflict is about character. The conflict between Peter and Rocket centers around Rocket’s insecurities about whether or not he deserves to be part of a family, even if that family is a group of outlaws who found each other. The violence Nebula seeks against Gamora comes from an obsession with besting her sister out of misplaced jealousy and rage, without realizing that they are both survivors of the same abuse but who have allowed that past to push them in different directions. The interaction between Peter and his father gives rise to the film’s climax (although it feels the weakest to me, despite being the primary conflict). Yondu’s desire to right the moral failings of his past give him the longest character arc of the film, and even the comedy bits between Mantis and Drax, both fish out of water but from very different worlds, is display of character, rather than the needs of pushing the narrative forward.

This is an elegantly constructed movie, and it moves with such precision and humor that you’ll never feel bored. Still, it is odd that this is a movie with a protagonist character who readily admits to a lust not only for violence, but specifically of killing others, and he’s never really called out on it. I’m not necessarily opposed to the whimsical way one particular scene of what’s essentially a mass murder is treated, since this is a James Gunn movie that we’re talking about, but it feels odd, if not exactly wrong. The fact that this sequence follows another that has a distinct Looney Tunes feel to the violence simply makes it feel like something is out of place.

I’ll save my thoughts on the more spoilery content and the way that this film interacts with the rest of the MCU for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. review, but Guardians 2 gets an endorsement from me. It’s still the weird sci-fi comedy that you can recommend to your friend who doesn’t like superheroes. Also, be on the lookout for a cameo from Ben Browder, who portrayed the protagonist of Farscape (which was mentioned as a spiritual predecessor of Guardians in our Agents review), playing a member of the Sovereign and using his best Peacekeeper voice.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swagger (2017)

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Music video director Olivier Babinet borrows a deliberate style over substance ethos from his preferred medium and brings it to its most unlikely onscreen home: the documentary feature. With Swagger, Babinet profiles the lives & personalities of eleven school age immigrants living in French housing projects, some first generation and some second. He offers their musings on topics as wide ranging as love, death, pop culture, poverty, and the surveillance state as mostly raw information, free of context, only stepping in to add music video style visuals as onscreen flavor. Swagger is like a Rodney Ascher film in this way, broadcasting instead of editorializing, except that it focuses on humanizing disadvantaged communities living under the radar in France instead of exploring more trivial topics like The Shining and sleep paralysis. It’s an approach that’s sure to be as divisive here as it is in Ascher’s features, The Nightmare & Room 237, but if you’re onboard with the formula it feels like a new, exciting kind of postmodern filmmaking.

One of the more alienating aspects of Swagger is its lack of a narrative structure. The eleven children interviewed speak in meandering, conversational tangents with no real story to tell other than who they are and how they see the world. Some of these tangents include insightful information about their daily lives in the insular housing projects communities: how lookouts inform drug dealers of encroaching police scrutiny, how outlandish fashion affords them a sense of self identity, how they’ve never seen a “person of French stock” in their entire lives – living entirely among “blacks & Arabs.” Some tangents are much less informational, including musings on the Obamas, the Fast & Furious franchise, and a lengthy recital of seasons’ worth of American soap opera plotlines. When considered as a whole, the interviews offer a detailed portrait of what a school age immigrant looks & sounds like in modern France. That may not immediately seem like the kind of political documentary filmmaking that challenges cultural hegemony, but the way it humanizes and gives voice to a section of the population that’s usually ignored or vilified without a second’s thought is nothing short of radical.

Speaking of things that are rad, the most striking aspect of Swagger is the way it frames these kids’ musings in a music video context. They strut their fashion in slow motion as if the doc were an update of the historical piece Fresh Dressed. Drone shots of the housing projects and the nearby suburbs look too good to be real, with one especially smooth transition from the exterior to the interior of one of the kids’ bedrooms looking like MCU-level CGI. Nature footage of owls and bunnies contrast with an industrial dance sequence involving welding masks & The Robot choreography. In an opening Facebook post of a fashion-conscious selfie, one of the kids describes themselves as “too stylish for your eyes.” Babinet’s visual style lives up to that promise, framing Swagger more like a narrative feature than a digital age documentary (because of its subject matter it feels like Girlhood in particular). He often allows this imagery to overpower the interviews that populate the audio. In one particular sequence, he even turns the film into a glimpse of a sci-fi dystopian future, solely because the kids’musings took him there. Some audiences are going to be turned off by those choices early & often, but as someone who values a style over substance ethos in almost all cases, I find it to be a bold, satisfying vision.

The lack of a narrative structure at the center of Swagger is only amplified by the way Babinet refuses to rigidly segment his interviews, allowing the reaction shots of one kid to seep in to inform the dialogue of another. I think he finds an interesting common ground between his subjects in this way and Swagger ultimately does offer a modern immigration portrait, even if flashy & loosely told. Its main goal is not necessarily to inform. It’s likely no surprise to most people that these kids help their parents translate & navigate their official correspondence or that their large housing buildings are eyesores that lead to massive white flight (along with other factors like, I dunno, racism & xenophobia). If Swagger were more interested in that kind of informational diatribe it would likely have included talking heads interviews with adult activists, urban planners, historians, and so on. Instead, it chooses to allow the kids to speak for themselves without offering an editorial analysis on what they report. I don’t have a term to describe this documentary style yet outside Ascher-esque, since it is so new & so foreign to the way these stories are typically told, but its highly stylized, Anthropology-style reliance on oral history documentation has me excited for the future of the medium.

-Brandon Ledet

Things to Come (2016)

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As far as recent movies where Isabelle Huppert is isolated and callously mistreated by her family, colleagues, strangers, and a cat go, Things to Come is certainly a more enjoyable viewing experience than the miserable provocation Elle, one I’d be a lot more likely to return to. However, this muted, dryly funny rumination on the loneliness of middle age is not nearly as ambitious or as rawly vulnerable as Verhoeven’s gleeful sexual assault button-pusher, as grotesque as I found that film to be. It’s much more likely to fade into the ether than that career-revitalizing work, like so many pleasant, but disposable indie dramas of decades past. As insignificant as the film can feel in a larger pop culture impact sense, though, its pleasures are always immediately recognizable & agreeable, Huppert’s lead performance being chief among them.

According to Huppert’s protagonist, “After 40, women are meant for the trash.” Things to Come seemingly builds its entire sense of narrative conflict around that idea. Huppert begins the film as a successful academic with a rich family life and an unhinged, but caring mother. Gradually, time and social convention strips each and every one of her personal connections away from her until she is left entirely alone, with the exception of a cat she never wanted to adopt. Her kids are grown. Her publishers are looking to update or replace her textbooks with something flashier & easier to sell. Her husband’s passion for her has similarly been diverted to new pursuits. She’s essentially left alone with her mountainous stacks of academic books on Philosophy, her life’s calling, convinced that intellectual stimulation alone is all she needs to live a fulfilled life. It’s doubtful that could be possibly be true.

Oddly enough, this is the second film I’ve seen recently that addresses middle age romance complications between somewhat wealthy Philosophy academics. Where Things to Come aims for subtle humor and restrained drama, Rebecca Miller’s film Maggie’s Plan goes loud & broad, echoing the traditionalist comedic beats of Old Hollywood screwball humor. Julianne Moore’s performance in that film is a much more immediately entertaining version of what Huppert pulls off here, although it’s arguably more caricature than Huppert’s character study. Things to Come certainly has its own moments of blatant punchline and situational humor. It’s just a much more subdued, melancholy look at the isolation and abandonment even the most successful, beautiful women to tend to suffer at middle age. As an audience with no particular affinity for subtlety in my pop culture entertainment, I much preferred the simple pleasures of Maggie’s Plan, but I could easily see others feeling differently on that point.

I’m possibly doing a disservice to Things to Come by comparing directly to other works like Elle or Maggie’s Plan, which only bear a passing resemblance to the film, but the truth is that it doesn’t do an especially great job of a distinguishing itself from the indie drama gestalt, leaving little room to discuss it on its own terms. Besides Huppert’s undeniable magnetism, the most distinctive aspects of the film are its broadcasting of philosophical readings and its attention to images of pure Nature: trees, water, mountains, flowers, a dead mouse. If I weren’t eternally bored by Philosophy as a subject or if the Nature photography had taken more of starring role in shaping the film’s narrative & tone, I might have been a lot more willing to allow Things to Come to sweep me off my feet. The film doesn’t seem all that interested in eliciting that reaction, though, and what’s left onscreen is mostly a melancholy character study about a woman whose age had relegated her “meant for the trash.” Huppert finds a worthwhile performance in that exercise, but not a particularly memorable one.

-Brandon Ledet

Orlando (1992)

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The phrase has recently devolved into something of a critical cliché, but I find myself becoming increasingly possessed by the idea of “pure cinema.” In the modern pop culture push to blur the lines between what is cinema and what is a video game, television series, or “virtual reality experience,” I find myself receding into the comforts of art that can only be expressed through the medium of film. “Pure cinema” titles like The Neon Demon, The Duke of Burgundy, and Beyond the Black Rainbow, with their hypnotic tones & basic indulgences in the pleasures of sound synced to moving lights, have been the movies that captured my imagination most in recent years and I often find myself chasing their aesthetic in other works. Sally Potter’s 1992 fantasy piece Orlando delivered my much-needed pure cinema fix with such efficiency and such a delicate hand that I didn’t even fully know what I was getting into until it was maybe a third of the way through. Initially masquerading as a costume drama with a prankish dry wit, Orlando gradually develops into the transcendent pure cinema hypnosis I’m always searching for in my movie choices. It pulls this off in such a casual, unintimidating way that it’s not until the final scene that the full impact of its joys as a playful masterpiece becomes apparent. This is the exact kind of visual and tonal achievement that could only ever be captured in the form of a feature film, a cinematic reverie that’s nothing short of real world magic.

I’m not sure why Tilda Swinton kept making films after she already found her perfect role in 1992. Orlando is essentially a one-woman show that finds Swinton navigating the only place where her unearthly presence makes any sense: the distant past. Playing the titular role of Orlando, a fictional (male) royalty from a Virginia Woolf novel of the same name, Swinton looks all too at home in her costume drama garb, as if the actor were plucked from a 17th Century painting. Orlando is a nervous little fella, often breaking the fourth wall with Ferris Bueller-type asides to the camera to alleviate his anxious tension. Early on, he finds himself squirming under the seductive scrutiny of Queen Elizabeth (played by an ancient Quentin Crisp, another genius choice of gender-defiant casting). The Queen promises that Orlando may retain possession of and lordship over his family’s land as long as he obeys a simple command, “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” He keeps this promise through an unexplained triumph of the will & fairy tale logic, living on for centuries in his youthful, androgynous state. The only change in Orlando’s physicality is that after a brief experience with the masculine horrors of war, he transforms into a woman. She explains to the camera, “Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex.” This shift is treated less like a huge rug pull and more like an internal, gender specific version if the identity shift in Persona. It’s a casual, fluid transition that leads to interesting changes in how Orlando experiences love, power, and property ownership, but had little effect on her overall character. Time continues to move on from there, decades at once, and the movie shrugs it off, concerned with much more important issues of identity & sense of self.

Besides the refreshing way it casually disrupts the rigidity of its protagonist’s gender, Orlando is impressive in the way it’s narrative structure more like a poem than a traditional A-B feature. Segmented into sequences titled (and dated) “1600: DEATH,” “1650: POETRY,” “1750: SOCIETY,” etc., Orlando reads more like a collection of stanzas than a period piece or even a fairy tale typically would. Its isolated meditations on topics like “LOVE,” “SEX,” and “POLITICS” shake it free from any concerns of having to fulfill a three act structure, allowing characters like Queen Elizabeth or a sexed-up Billy Zane drift through Orlando’s life without any expectation of achieving their own arc. Each piece is a contribution to the larger puzzle of Orlando’s curiously long & gender-defiant life. When seen from a distance, the big picture of this puzzle is pure visual poetry. Scenes are short, amounting to a hypnotic rhythm that allows only for a visual indulgence in a series of strikingly beautiful images: Swinton’s impossibly dark eyes, Sandy Powell’s world class costume design, love, sex, war, heartbreak. If you had to distill Orlando down to an image or two, there’s a scene where a living tableau is staged on ice as dinner entertainment and a soon-to-follow dramatic performance featuring traditional Shakespearean crossdressing that’s disrupted by loud, but oddly beautiful fireworks. They’re entertainments created solely for the sake of their own visual beauty, a spirit the movie captures in its sweeping fairy tale of a life that never ends.

Sally Potter makes this pure cinema aesthetic feel not only casual & effortless, but also frequently humorous. Orlando’s knowing glances to the audience are a prototype version of a mockumentary style later popularized by shows like The Office and the magical realism of their gender fluidity is often treated like a kind of joke, especially when they declare things like, “The treachery of men!” or “The treachery of women!” The final scene of the film perfectly nails home this half fantastic/half humorous tone as well, playing something like a divine prank. I feel like I can count on one hand the movies I’ve seen that achieve this balance of dry wit and visual opulence: The Fall, Ravenous, The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover, Marie Antoinette, and maybe Tale of Tales. I’d consider each of those works among the greatest films I’ve seen in my lifetime and after a single  viewing I’m more than willing to list Orlando among them. My only disappointment in watching Sally Potter’s masterful achievement is that I’m not likely to ever see it projected big & loud in a proper movie theater setting. Watching it at home on the same television where I’d steam a Netflix series or a pro wrestling PPV felt like an insult to a movie that deserves a much more grandiose environment. It is, after all, pure cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Personal Shopper (2017)

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Kristen Stewart is finally starting to collect the recognition she deserves as one of the most rawly talented actors working today, at least in major critical circles. While polling my sister or my coworkers for their thoughts on KStew still only trudges up old Twilight residue, Stewart’s earned herself a nice little pocket of mainstream critical recognition, whether it be an entire Filmspotting episode dedicated to her work or a world class impersonation of her physical tics & quirks from Kate McKinnon in an otherwise middling SNL sketch. The problem is that the level of obvious, powerful talent in her screen presence (which I’ve described as a mix of Lauren Bacall smokiness & James Dean cool) isn’t being matched by the quality of the films they serve. I might personally go to bat for titles like Equals or American Ultra every time they come up, but they’re not films most people hold in high regard. Director Olivier Assayas’s two collaborations with Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria & Personal Shopper, seem to be a corrective for that career trajectory disappointment. Assayas is almost single-handedly (along with Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women) providing Stewart the arthouse context that allows her consistently fascinating work to earn real attention & prestige. In Clouds of Sils Maria, Stewart is afforded the opportunity to hold her own against dramatic heavyweight Juliette Binoche and does so with casual finesse. In Personal Shopper, she has no such indie world giant to contend with and carries an entire arthouse film on her back as the constant center of attention. I’m grateful that Assayas has been able to promote & boost Stewart’s notoriety as a significant talent in this way. I just wish either of these collaborations could match the potency of the performances she lends them.

In a lot of ways Personal Shopper seems specifically crafted to be the perfect ideal of a Kristen Stewart vehicle. Stewart’s physical displays of nervousness, a concrete set of tics that allowed McKinnon to land such a dead-on impersonation in the first place, make perfect sense within the context of the film. A personal shopper for a high-strung socialite in Paris, Stewart’s skittish protagonist is alone in a major city, attempting to communicate with her brother’s ghost through one-woman séances, and blindly stumbling into the center of a murder mystery & ensuing police investigation. Given the circumstances, Stewart’s usual mode of darting her eyes back & forth, nervously running her hands through her hair, and just generally giving off the vibe that’s she’s gone her entire life without a full night’s sleep make total sense. Her character is a scared, emotional wreck. She can’t make a big show of these emotions, however, due to a medical condition that prevents her from becoming too physically excited or stressed, doctor’s orders. Personal Shopper is the exact ideal of a Kristen Stewart vehicle, not only teeing up a screentime-demanding performance she’s more than qualified to fulfill, but also pairing that presence with recognizable genre thrills audiences can easily latch onto. There’s almost no genre older than the ghost story, a tradition Assayas acknowledges in-film by referencing old movies that have already covered the territory. That’s why it’s such a shame that the film itself finds ways to underwhelm, avoiding any fresh or significant payoff to the nervous energy Stewart expertly builds in the first two acts.

As a ghost story, Personal Shopper is satisfyingly eerie in its mix of old world technique & modern urban ennui. In an early scene Stewart is alone in her brother’s old residence calling out to the spirit world for a definite, unmistakable sign that his ghost is attempting to contact her from beyond the grave. The loud noises and physical disturbances she’s met with when she makes these demands are familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a haunted house feature before. Even more familiar are the physical manifestations of ghosts, who do eventually appear, but look like the same rudimentary CG smoke that has defined ghostly cinematic representation going at least as far back as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. References to séances, ectoplasm, Spiritualism, mediums, and portals into the spirit world all feel just as rooted in ancient movie magic tradition. Assayas does find a way to at least slightly modernize this old world ghost story by questioning whether it’s even ghosts or spirits that are being communicated with instead of some sort of non-human presence or, as Stewart puts it, just “a vibe.” He also makes modern technology a kind of medium in itself. Empty elevator cars, automatic sliding doors opening for no one, text messages seemingly broadcasting from beyond the grave: Personal Shopper is peppered with images of a spooky modernity. In a way, Stewart’s protagonist is a ghost herself, haunting the streets of Paris. Her brother, a large part of her, has died before the movie even begins. She mostly communicates with her boss through passed notes instead of direct interaction. Her boyfriend can only reach her through the digital grain of long-distance Skype sessions. This thankfully doesn’t lead to a Shyamalan-type twist about her vitality, though, just questions about who or what she’s communicating with, what life alone in a major city can do to one’s sense of isolation & grief, and how the world beyond our grasp can be felt & understood as, well, a vibe.

It does seem a little silly to fault Personal Shopper for being merely pretty good when I wanted (if not needed) it to be truly great. If nothing else, I found it to be a huge step up from Assayas’s work in Clouds of Sils Maria, an acknowledgement for the necessity of satisfying audiences with emotional payoff from a film’s central themes. The basic genre thrills of a classic ghost story narrative don’t hurt the film’s muted, but pleasant charms either. It’s just frustrating to feel Assayas reach for something more ambitious & intangible beyond those modest rewards without ever getting close. It’s interesting to see him frame this ambition in the context of Abstract Art as a tradition, specifically referencing the work of painter Hilma af Klimpt as a comparison point. His work never fulfills that kind of transcendental analysis, though. If it did, he’d have found new, unfamiliar ways to represent ghosts onscreen or completely shift the film’s visual representation of its narrative into something more vibe-conscious and less straightforward. Personal Shopper is a film that’s confident in its sense of mood, a haunted reflection of modern melancholy, but does little to excite in terms of breaking form & offering something that’s never been seen before. The film’s biggest accomplishment is in providing KStew enough room to once again prove herself to be an effortlessly powerful screen presence. She would have been better served, however, if the film were able to achieve more than that. She’s already had enough stepping stones on her way to a career-defining barn burner of a starring role. It’s likely unfair to judge Personal Shopper harshly for not being that knockout of a KStew film that’s sure to come (and soon), but it was close enough to being that ideal that it left me disappointed for not getting there.

-Brandon Ledet

Everybody Says I’m Fine! (2003)

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Was I wrong to look at the cover of Everybody Says I’m Fine!, with its pictures of a handsome man and a pair of scissors near blood splatter and the quote “When private thoughts turn deadly,” and assume that this was going to be a horror film? I don’t think that I was, although that genre confusion is the least of the film’s problems.

This directorial debut by Rahul Bose tells the story of Xen (Rehaan Engineer), a young hairstylist who owns and lives above a candy-colored salon. As a result of being trapped in a soundproof recording booth as a child and forced to watch helplessly when his musician parents were killed by a short-circuiting sound studio board, Xen has the ability to read thoughts, although he has honed this ability so that it only comes into play when he is cutting his client’s hair. As a result, he is privy to their desires, hopes, fears, and dreams. Based on the cover, this is about the time when you would expect that he reads the thoughts of one of his clients who turns out to be a murderer, and then the mystery/horror takes off, right? Not really.

Engineer is certainly charming and charismatic in the role of Xen, and Xen’s attempts to make the lives of his customers better is cute, although when The Butcher’s Wife did the same thing a decade earlier its posters and covers didn’t misrepresent the film’s content the way that Everybody Says I’m Fine!’s marketing does. Xen sets up two college-aged lovebirds (Juneli Aguiar and Sharokh Bharucha) in a minor side story that goes on for far too long. Another subplot, involving a woman named Tanya (Pooja Bhatt), who has been deserted by her husband but is attempting to keep up appearances that all is well, and a second woman named Misha (Anahita Oberoi), who nosily probes into Tanya’s life, is fascinating in the way that it showcases the way that the upper class women of Mumbai interact across class (Tanya is specifically mentioned to have come from a small community with no wealth, in comparison to her husband and to Misha). This section is by far the most interesting of the film; I could have watched an entire film about Tanya. Yet another subplot revolves around an obnoxiously hyperactive would-be actor named Rage (director Bose) who has Xen give him a series of bizarre cuts that are supposedly for roles, when in actuality no one will hire him. There’s also a rich man named Mr. Mittal (Boman Irani), who has recently won an award and uses Xen’s services to prepare for public appearances.

The primary plot, however, revolves around Xen’s meet cute with Niki, a spirited young woman whose mind he cannot read, presumably because her darkness is buried too deep, and how she disrupts his isolated and relatively humble existence. Over the course of the film, she appears at random intervals to taunt and tease Xen, before the two of them go to bed together. He eventually discovers that the disobedient “girl” Mr. Mittal is perpetually dwelling upon is actually Niki, who is his daughter and whom he has molested for years. Xen then murders Mittal in a fit of rage and fakes an accident, leading Niki to break down in his arms, all her thoughts bubbling to the surface as she weeps and shrieks. The following morning, when Rage appears for a haircut, Xen realizes that he cannot hear the man’s thoughts, or anyone else’s. He is finally free.

There are laudable elements here to be sure, but not enough to recommend. The backstory and resolution of Niki’s plot are tonally inconsistent with a film that is mostly a magical realism premise stretched too thin and featuring a color palette that is straight out of Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. As stated above, I could watch an entire film about Tanya, her deteriorating marriage, her deceptive in-laws, and her attempts to keep her economic betters find out that she has fallen from grace. Overall, however, don’t let this movie’s cover fool you like it fooled me: if you want a feel good movie with a weird rape/incest subplot that appears without warning in the final 15 minutes, this is the film for you, but you really should see a doctor instead.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Abby (1974)

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In Shock Value, author Jason Zinoman discusses the fact that The Exorcist was surprisingly popular with black audiences in 1973, so it was only natural that a blaxploitation follow up would appear relatively quickly. Appearing on screens for only a month in 1974, Abby, written and directed by William Girdler (who had previously scripted and helmed cult classics like Three on a Meathook and Asylum of Satan, and who would go on to direct Pam Grier in Sheba, Baby), raked in an astonishing four million dollars before attracting the attention of Warner Brothers. WB sued American International Pictures for copyright infringement and won, leading to virtually every extant copy of the film to be destroyed, with only the film negatives thought to still exist. Until a long-forgotten copy of the film was discovered at the bottom of a box of 35 mm trailer reels at the American Genre Film Archive, that is. It’s unclear what will happen with the film now and whether it will see a new home media release (a very low quality 16 mm print was converted for DVD release in 2004, but it’s just awful), but it definitely deserves one.

The narrative opens on Reverend Emmett Williams (Terry Carter), who is going to Nigeria to perform missionary and humanitarian work during a plague. On the other side of the world, his son Garnet (William Marshall) has ascended to the rank of Bishop and taken charge of a church in Louisville, with his faithful wife Abby (Carol Speed) at his side. She, too, is active in the church, having just been certified as a marriage counselor and organizing church activities seven days a week. The two have just moved into a new home near the church, with help from Abby’s mother “Momma” (Juanita Moore) and brother Cass, a police detective. When the elder Williams opens an ebony box in Nigeria and unleashes an evil orisha spirit named Eshu, Abby becomes possessed by it and begins behaving in bizarre and dangerous ways, prompting her loved ones to try and find a way to save her, body and soul, before it’s too late.

For all that Warner Brothers did to bury Abby, they certainly had no issue taking some elements from it when drafting a script for The Exorcist 2, including the connection to ancient African myths and legends. That aside, Abby is marvelous, aside from a little bit of drag in Act III. Speed’s performance as Abby is heart-wrenching, as she struggles to make sense of the actions taken while possessed during her moments of clarity. Of particular note is the scene that follows her first episode, in which Eshu forces her to slice her wrist; Abby awakes to find her wrist bandaged and her baffled cries and moans are enough to stir even the hardest of hearts. Speed, who had recently lost her lover to a random shooting in the street outside of their home, took the role to distract herself from the tragedy, and she pours that emotional vulnerability and intensity into every scene. Also of interest is the fact that Eshu is not solely expelled through the power of Catholic exorcist intervention, but by the elder Williams donning a dashiki and kufi hat over his priestly collar, combining western Catholic tradition and ancient African mythology to solve the crisis at hand. It’s a thoughtful way to handle the film’s denouement, and serves to differentiate it from many of the run-of-the-mill Exorcist clones that followed William Friedkin’s more famous film.

Tracking down a decent copy of Abby may be no small feat, but it is highly recommended.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Corrupt Lieutenant (1984)

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I have a bad habit of occasionally purchasing second-hand DVDs solely for their shoddy cover art. I don’t think I’ve ever topped myself in this trivial pursuit since the day I purchased a bootleg copy of some forgotten cop thriller titled Corrupt Lieutenant. The cover for my obviously unofficial copy of Corrupt Lieutenant is a master work of outsider art & visual anti-comedy. Falling somewhere between rudimentary Photoshop collage & a nightmare swirl of stock photography, it’s the exact kind of utter garbage my terrible raccoon brain can’t help but hoard away at home instead of just letting it rot at Goodwill. Unfortunately, that means these movies sometimes collect dust, unwatched for years until I force myself to follow through on actually giving them a chance. As it turns out, Corrupt Lieutenant not only has some of the best-worst artwork I’ve ever found on one of these ill-advised excursions to the thrift store; it also stands as one of the few select examples I can think of where it turns out the movie itself was actually worth the gamble. As far as cop thrillers go, it’s not exactly mind-blowing, but considering the state of its cover art it’s a miraculously competent picture.

It’s worth noting upfront that my unsanctioned copy of Corrupt Lieutenant isn’t even titled correctly. Although it’s been released under the alternate titles The Order of Death, Corrupt, and Bad Cop Chronicles #2: Corrupt, this Italian crime thriller was originally distributed under the name Copkiller, which is by far its most apt moniker. Since the distributors of the film allowed its copyright designation to slip into public domain status, however, it’s been repackaged several times over in disparate stabs by a wide range of enterprising folks trying to make a buck. This is how Copkiller was retitled Corrupt Lieutenant in the early 90s after its star antihero, Harvey Keitel, was featured in the infamous Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant. The two films don’t really have all that much to do with each other outside of Keitel’s starring role in both. The Ferrara picture plays like an especially deranged version of a Scorsese crisis of faith exploration, while its Italian predecessor is more of a sleazy, giallo-esque knockoff of the crooked cop genre Friedkin ignited with The French Connection. Performances from Harvey Keitel and a typically acting-shy Johnny Rotten combine with a score from omnipresent Italian composer Ennio Morricone to afford the film an air of legitimacy, but its shitty public domain transfers, off-kilter Italian dubbing, and sleaze > substance ethos are all constant reminders of its true place in the world as a forgotten work of mediocre genius.

A killer dressed in a police uniform and ski mask is terrorizing the cops of New York City by murdering them one by one, seemingly at random. A young John Lydon plays a spoiled brat punk who confesses to these crimes to Harvey Keitel’s grizzled lieutenant. Keitel’s either believes the confession or is angered enough by its flippancy to falsely imprison Lydon in his own apartment, since the rest of the force is treating him like a liar and a prankster. After a period of keeping the smirking punk tied up & torturing him for a more detailed confession (he feeds him out of a dog food bowl, shoves his head in an oven & cranks the gas, etc.), Keitel’s forces his prisoner at gunpoint to actually slit a cop’s throat, an ill-considered plan that backfires in a wide variety of ways. While figuring out what to do about that cop’s death, Keitel’s finds himself seducing the widow of the man they killed and Lydon moves into his former captor & newfound accomplice’s apartment on his own free will, nagging him as a kind of spiritually corrupt conscience. The film takes on a tense, slowly ratcheted form of psychological torment from there as the weight of the crime the two committed together and the true identity of the (would-be titular) cop killer eventually driving the whole thing home for an inevitably tragic conclusion.

Corrupt Lieutenant is most notable for the authenticity of its violence & grime. Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten, is reported to have provided his own wardrobe for the picture, which shows in his convincingly ratty, 80s punk appearance. When Keitel’s corrupt lieutenant goes on a bender and starts bonding with the gross little bugger in the most unlikely of unions, the grotesqueness of their collective downfall looks & feels legitimate, an effect that’s only amplified by the VHS-quality imagery of a shitty bootleg DVD transfer. Similarly, Keitel’s physical violence laid upon Rotten’s scrawny shoulders is a convincing kind of rough-housing and it’s occasionally tempting to worry about the little shit’s physical wellbeing. Instead of reading the punk’s rights, Keitel’s more prone to shout, “Shut the fuck up!” and thrash him around the interrogation room. I’m not convinced the film has anything more to say beyond a Cops Can Be Violent Criminals Too cliché, but the way Rotten worms that idea into Keitel’s head in the back half and the way Beetlejuice/Mars Attack actress Silvia Sidney posits that, “The police create disorder, not order. They inspire us to commit crimes so that we can be punished for them,” makes the idea interesting and more than a little bit slimy. There’s even a hint that Rotten’s confessed cop killer gets a sexual satisfaction out of having Keitel’s slap him around, which is then backed up by the S&M collages plastered on his bedroom walls.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected out of Corrupt Lieutenant/Copkiller/The Order of Death/Corrupt when I popped it in the DVD player, but the sleazy Italian cop thriller I got was a surprisingly entertaining watch. That could maybe be chalked up to the low expectations set by its laughably bad cover art, but I think anyone with a little appreciation for giallo or the post-Friedkin crooked cop thrillers of the 70s & 80s would be able to get on board with it as a minor entertainment. Funnily enough, just about the only scenario in which I wouldn’t recommend the film is if someone were specifically looking for a work similar to Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. Corrupt Lieutenant has even less to do with that work than Herzog’s “spiritual sequel,” which was mostly about, I don’t know, iguanas & Nic Cage freakouts. Much like the cover art for my DVD copy of the film, that little bit of revisionist rebranding was amusingly brash & ill-considered.

-Brandon Ledet

Mascots (2016)

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threehalfstar

Christopher Guest’s brilliance as a comedy director has always relied on a kind of subtlety & understatement that lends his behind-the-camera work to being overlooked. Guest’s best films, titles like Waiting for Guffman & Best in Show, are densely populated with cartoonishly over-the-top, attention-hogging characters, so the director wisely takes a back seat in a lot of his own works. He fosters an improv-loose environment & sets a distinct narrative stage for his performers in each film, but otherwise isn’t especially flashy in his own directorial style and a lot of the humor in his films is derived from that dynamic. He’s like the improv comedy version of Robert Altman. As time goes on, Guest continues to return to that tried & true formula and his work starts to feel even more understated & undervalued. The mockumentary style Guest established in his early work has since infiltrated every corner of American television. The Office, Parks & Recreation, Modern Family, Arrested Development, the most recent version of The Muppets: Guest’s humor has almost completely replaced the traditional laugh track sitcom, so it has become even more difficult to parse out exactly what makes him special as a hand-off director with a consistently even keel. There’s no better example of what I’m describing here than Guest’s latest work, the Netflix-distributed comedy Mascots.

Mascots has been generally received with an underwhelmed shrug, largely due to the perceived career-long sameness of Christopher Guest’s catalog as a whole. In all of his films a group of hubris-oblivious weirdos in a highly specific field meet for a climactic competition where their personalities clash in both public & private forums. Instead of a dog show or bluegrass concert or an Oscars race this time, Mascots instead stages its climactic showdown at a sports mascot competition. Other than the setting, the Christopher Guest formula remains more or less the same, with the director even reprising his role as Corky St. Clair from Waiting for Guffman (along with Parker Posey’s Cindi Babineaux from the same film) to drive that established tradition home. It’d be reductive to assume that because Guest continually returns to his old grooves & rhythms, though, that Mascots is worthless as a comedy. If the director has proven anything by staging all of his films in a similar fashion, it’s that the formula works. Mascots may not feel as fresh or unique as Guffman did in the early 90s, but it’s still damn funny. Its setting-specific references to “mini tramps” & “Fluffies” combine with dark, perverted tangents about furries, yeast infections, and penis-in-ear sexual intercourse to make for a bizarrely understated comedy that only doesn’t feel strange because its creator’s voice has infiltrated so much American television in the past decade that it’s started to feel normal. By the time Mascots reaches its predetermined climax it can be just as funny as any of Guest’s most well-loved films. It only feels slight due to its modern context.

If anything has shifted in Guest’s insulated world, it’s been the gradual expansion of his usual cast of weirdos. Along with Posey, the director’s regular cast of Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr., Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge, and whoever else fits in that specific set returns to the screen. What’s more important, though, is that Guest has picked up more weirdos along the way. Chris O’Dowd, who had worked with Guest on a short-lived HBO series, steals some spotlight from the director’s veterans as “the badboy of sports mascotery.” He’s joined by familiar character actors from shows like Parks & Recreation and The Office that have sprung up in the wake of Guest’s best-known works. He may not be an especially flashy or experimental filmmaker, but I have great respect for the consistency & the quality of laughs his films deliver, especially since he acknowledges his own influence by recruiting comedians who’ve made a name in the mockumentary television field launched in his shadow. As long as Guest wants to continue to film weirdos in highly specific fields discussing “passion” & “craft” in his tried & true mockumentary formula, I’ll continue to afford him my attention. Nothing made this so clear to me as moment during Mascots‘s climactic competition where the crowd was applauded a literal piece of shit, freshly plunged, and I felt the urge to join them. Christopher Guest has earned my laughter in any context he asks for it.

-Brandon Ledet