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Mickey One (1965)

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three star

“I couldn’t be funny if my life depended on it . . . And it did.”

Two years before his landmark film Bonnie & Clyde effectively kicked off what’s since been dubbed the New Hollywood movement, Arthur Penn delivered something much stranger & more deliberately obscure with that film’s same star, Warren Beatty. New Hollywood’s loosely defined aesthetic has several distinguishing features: anti-hero protagonists, avoidance of tidily happy endings, counter culture rebelliousness, etc. A large part of the movement’s appeal, however, derived directly from young American directors borrowing stylistic technique from the films of the French New Wave, particularly in their approach to unconventional cinematography. The film Beatty & Penn made before Bonnie & Clyde didn’t exactly pull influence from the French New Wave the way their breakthrough hit would. Mickey One was more of a French New Wave pastiche than a direct descendant. It wholesale borrowed everything it could grab from directors like Godard & Truffaut right down to their stark black & white cinematography. Just about the only things Mickey One kept distinctly American were the accents & Warren Beatty’s face. The results were messy & less iconic than Bonnie & Clyde and far too pretentious to strike a chord with American audiences in the same way, but they are fascinating as an artifact. It’s like watching New Hollywood’s unevolved ancestor crawling out of the primordial cinematic ooze. It ain’t pretty, but you can’t look away.

In a dizzying opening credits sequence we’re introduced to Beatty’s troubled charmer protagonist as a hopeless lush. He drinks, gambles, and philanders his way through his minor celebrity as a stand-up at nightclubs owned almost exclusively by mafia types. In what feels like the credits to the world’s weirdest sitcom, we learn everything we need to know about this doofus: his world, his ego, his thirsts, his enemies. It’s chaotic surrealism, drunken delirium, abrasive jazz, kaleidoscopic noir. Much like with the opening minutes of the proto-blacksploitation piece Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, it’s easy to be convinced in Mickey One‘s intro that you’re about to watch one of the single greatest cinematic achievements of all time, only to have that same exciting energy turned around to beat your enthusiasm into mush. A young, handsome Warren Beatty lives the high life in those credits and immediately crashes once they conclude. Instead of serving as a makeshift court jester for the club-owning mobsters he amuses with corny punchlines he becomes a persecuted target for an offense no one can name. We’re never sure if Beatty’s tortured stand-up faulted on an outrageous gambling debt, slept with a mobster’s wife, or, quite possibly, never committed any crime at all. Mickey One stubbornly clouds its central conflict in an oppressive air of mystery. It’s a choice that might have worked if the film’s abrasive, jazz-driven pace & tone ever slowed down long enough to allow the audience to properly sink into its sense of existential dread, but it’s just a little too frustrating as is.

Penniless & on the run from faceless, mysterious mobsters, our broken hero finds himself greasy, homeless, as handsome as ever, and hiding under a false pseudonym. After a short period of bottom-of-the-barrel blue collar labor, the spotlight calls to him. He starts gravitating towards the types of nightclubs he used to headline, first as a heckler and then as a performer, despite the danger of breaking his anonymity. A Marcel Marceau-type billed simply as “The Artist” pops up every now & then to mime encouragement and to draw him out of laying low. As his love interest puts it, he’s hiding from he doesn’t know what for a crime he’s not sure he’s committed, but he can’t help delivering corny jokes to mildly amused audiences in the meantime. This all whips by in a blur, only ever settling down for two distinct scenes: one where his mime-muse constructs an intricate Rube Goldberg-style art instillation that reflects his greatest fear (the mob disposing of his body in an automotive junkyard) and one where he “auditions” for faceless mobster club owners, the only visible presence in the room being the menacingly divine shine of the spotlight. Mickey One’s jokes aren’t any funnier than Rupert Pupkin’s in The King of Comedy. Its tone is in a continuous, chaotic shift that never allows its audience to get lost in its world. It’s undeniably messy, embarrassingly pretentious, and has essentially zero potential for commercial value. And yet, you can never shake the feeling that it’s just a half step away from being breathtakingly brilliant.

Distribution companies weren’t sure what to do with Arthur Penn’s French New Wave pastiche in 1965 and silently dumped it in drive-ins instead of giving it a prestigious theatrical release. Fifty years later, I’m still not sure what to do with the badly damaged, mostly forgotten art film mishmash. In an abstract sense I greatly admire the way the source of its Kafkaesque paranoia is never made literal and Beatty’s pre-Clyde anti-hero is made to live out his own stand-up comedy-themed version of The Trial. I was just never given much more than that vague paranoia & some terrible one-liners to associate with the character. It was difficult to care about his anxiety & the beautiful, energetic imagery that borders it in any way outside of distant, detached fascination. There’s never any question why Mickey One isn’t the Beatty-Penn collaboration that broke through instead of Bonnie & Clyde. Its limited appeal is immediately apparent. I do find it weirdly compelling as proto-New Hollywood weirdness, though, and I could easily see my cautious fondness for it growing with a few repeat viewings. The problem is that I can also see my nitpicking annoyances with it growing as well.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

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???????

twostar

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And so it goes that Paul WS Anderson’s Resident Evil franchise dies with a pathetic whimper . . . if, in fact, it dies at all. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter makes a hefty promise in its title to decisively conclude what has been a wildly uneven series of futuristic zombie shoot-em-ups. Yet, this sixth installment fails to deliver on that promise of finality, leaving the door wide open for a sequel the way each of its predecessors have in the past. Worse yet, The Final Chapter eases up on the mutated giants, virtual reality scenarios, and cloning-run-wild shenanigans that have made past Resident Evil films such an odd, unexpected delight. Instead of going for broke in its over-the-top CG fantasy violence and convoluted high-concept sci-fi plots, this series “finale” makes the mistake of aiming for genuine dread (a mark it falls far short of) & providing a legitimate backstory for its barely sketched-out characters. If the exact, clearly-defined origins of its heroes & villains were a necessity for Resident Evil‘s entertainment value, the series would not have gotten six films deep without them. These films’ mild popularity (in America at least; they’re wildly popular in foreign markets) depends on the ridiculousness of their zombie-themed action spectacle, something The Final Chapter brings no passion, attention, or inventiveness for. There’s nothing new here that hasn’t been done better in previous films in the series, except for that precious backstory for its protagonist, which, who cares? If this truly is the last Resident Evil film, the franchise has concluded with its worst, least exciting entry, a lazy shrug before its final bow, followed by a winking tease for an encore.

The end of Retribution, the fifth and possibly best entry to the franchise, leaves Project Alice (Milla Jovovich) stranded at the White House with the Agent Smith motherfucker that’s been the Bugs Bunny to her Elmer Fudd for the back half of the series. Surrounded by zombie hordes & some mutated dragon beasts, Not Agent Smith stabs Alice in the neck with a serum that supposedly restores her powers. The beginning of The Final Chapter throws all of the potential entertainment value of that setup in the trash. JK, everyone. Alice doesn’t really have her telekinetic supersoldier powers back. Also, there will be no showdown at the White House, since Not Agent Smith and his zombie buddies have cleared DC by the time Alice wakes up. Instead, we get another retelling of the franchise’s entire story arc, this time with a revisionist history that explains the backstory for the Umbrella Corporation’s evil intent for instigating a zombie outbreak in the first place. Game of Thrones actor Iain Glenn returns as the wicked corporate stooge behind all of the evildoing. Nevermind the fact that in the third film in the series, Extinction, his character was frustrated with his lack of power, having to answer to higher-ups in holographic boardroom meetings. He’s apparently been the head honcho for the Umbrella Corporation all along and the versions of him Alice has destroyed in the past have all been insignificant clones of the real thing. Okay. Now Alice must race back to the place where it all began, the underground Hive facility beneath Raccoon City, to retrieve an antidote to the zombie virus “before it’s too late,” in effect saving the world (or at least the few thousand uninfected humans who still inhabit it). It’s there that she learns who she truly is and where she comes from, a revelation I would have traded for any number of CG creatures, motorcycle stunts, or virtual reality freak-outs.

The Final Chapter completely misinterprets Resident Evil‘s inherent style over substance appeal and bends over backwards to retroactively inject gravitas into a flimsy premise that can’t support it. As a newly-converted fan to the series (Extinction & Retribution are both fun at least), I can’t speak for the majority of Resident Evil‘s dedicated audience, but I can say say that no amount of reformist backstory & clearly defined character motives could raise my own esteem for the long-running video game adaptation. I’ve made it five films into the franchise, somewhat happily, without that kind of clear-headed storytelling, so why start now? Ideally, a Resident Evil franchise-ender would get even more convoluted in its ill-considered sci-fi premise and go for broke in a nonsensical spectacle that would attempt to top the ridiculous places it went in the previous entry instead of crashing the whole thing down to the grounded, generic familiarity of the series’ origins. The closest we get to that here is some weird dragon hybrids teased at the end of the last film & a couple shots of a waterfall made of fire that melts a few zombies in a brief moment of victory. That should’ve been the starting point, not the conclusion. The rest of The Final Chapter is cheap jump scares, confusingly rapid action photography, a grounding backstory the series never needed, and the threat of a sequel despite the finality blatantly promised upfront in the title. The movie even misreads the room by aiming for action cinema legitimacy in a John Carpenter-inspired synth score instead of sticking with its usual nu metal tunage. I don’t look to Resident Evil films for legitimacy. I want them to be over-the-top & tacky. By failing to embrace its own tackiness the way past entries have and in eagerly searching for a more standardized mode of action cinema competency & logical storytelling, The Final Chapter had ended the Resident Evil franchise on its least worthwhile picture to date. It doesn’t exactly sour the memory of the series’ heights in Extinction & Retribution, but it does leave you walking away with a much blander taste in your mouth, which is the ultimate bummer.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

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fourstar

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I had more or less given up on the entertainment potential of the Resident Evil franchise after its fourth installment, Afterlife, wasted its entire runtime treading water & showing off its The Matrix Zombified aesthetic for a 3D lens. In a way, I had also given up on Paul WS Anderson as an auteur, since that entry tore down a lot of the good will established by Russell Mulcahy’s contribution to the franchise, the Mad Max-riffing Extinction. I was wrong to lose faith. The fifth Resident Evil film, Retribution, matches (if not surpasses) Extinction‘s entertainment value as a standalone feature, but does so without having to step outside the franchise’s usual formula. Retribution fully embraces its zombie-themed shoot-em-up video game roots as well as its nature as a late-in-the-game sequel by conducting a simulated, virtual reality retrospective of the series where each film is a level that must be cleared on the way to the final boss. Here, Anderson establishes his particular brand of nu metal technophobia as its own distinct artform, turning what should feel like an exercise in generic action film tedium into high-concept, reality-bending sci-fi with a kick-ass female protagonist in the lead. It’s an amazing act of genre alchemy, one that completely turned me around on the merit of the series as a cohesive whole.

It takes a few minutes of housekeeping exposition before Anderson feels comfortable with mashing the reset button in this way. The ending of Resident Evil: Afterlife teases an Umbrella Corporation attack on a ship of uninfected zombie virus survivors and this follow-up delivers that action set piece upfront . . . twice. The attack is first shown in reverse motion, starting with Milla Jovovich’s lead badass floating in an underwater void before being sucked onto the ship & downing a helicopter. She then explains the plot of each Resident Evil film to date in a detailed recap before the same Umbrella Corporation attack is shown in a more linear, traditional fashion. That’s when Anderson mashes the reset button. Project Alice (Jovovich) awakes from her underwater grave to a reality-shift, apparently living an alternate life as a housewife in the Raccoon City suburbs at the start of the zombie outbreak. This traditional George A. Romero scenario is revealed to be a simulated experience, in essence a video game, staged within an underwater facility where The Umbrella Corporation is holding Alice captive. The brilliance of this premise is that it allows Retribution to incorporate all of Resident Evil‘s past lives & themes of cloning, virtual reality simulation, and supernatural beasts in a single, interconnected location Alice must escape as if she were clearing levels on a video game. Where the movie really gets interesting is when pieces of these simulations, including the clones, begin to overlap and the narrative bleed-through finds the series finally reaching its own sense of distinct purpose that doesn’t feel like a riff on a pre-existing property.

Figuring out exactly what makes a franchise special and how to retread old ground without merely going through the motions five films in is no small feat and it actually reminds me of the way Fast & Furious movies similarly took their sweet time figuring their own shit out. Curiously enough, in both cases actress Michelle Rodriguez plays a badass toughie retroactively raised from the dead after a long absence (this time through cloning), which is just about as small of a genre niche as you’ll ever find. Other old characters like the rogue cop Valentine from Apocalypse & the axe-swinging giant from Afterlife also return, giving the film a distinct The Gang’s All Here vibe that’s been absent in its search for consistency. All that’s missing now is Vin Diesel raising a Corona to toast the makeshift family as they fire endless bullets into the zombie hoards that threaten to wipe out what little is left of humanity. Retribution ends in the same frustrating way all Resident Evil films insist on ending: shamelessly setting up a sequel (this time concluding at a zombie & dragon-surrounded White House) and fading out to tacky nu metal era tunage (this time supplied by Deftones singer Chino Moreno teamed up with some dubstep dweeb). Even that aspect feels like a tried & true feature of a series that’s finally come into its own, though, one final adherence to its already-established genre tropes before you leave the cinema. I’m not exactly sure how he did it, but Paul WS Anderson slowly turned me into a fan of his own bullshit just when I was on the edge of giving up on him as recently as one film ago. Even if he doesn’t stick the landing with the franchise’s sixth entry, The Final Chapter, he had already cohesively pulled it all together in the fifth, so the mission was already, in effect, accomplished. Retribution was Resident Evil‘s de facto resurrection, its sorely needed saving grace.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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twohalfstar

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My biggest fear when I learned that Paul WS Anderson had returned to the director’s chair for the fourth Resident Evil film is that he would completely undo what that entry’s predecessor had accomplished. Russell Mulcahy’s Resident Evil: Extinction elevated the franchise’s production value & traded in its overgrown nu mental tone for a goofy Mad Max vibe, making for the best entry in the series to date. My fears were confirmed; Anderson did indeed slide the franchise back into its The Matrix But With Zombies creative rut, even daring to include gratuitous shots of “bullet time” effects to drive the point home. Luckily for Afterlife, I liked the goofy nu metal technofuturism of the first two Resident Evil films, so it’s not like the territory it returned to was all boredom & despair. I’d just be lying if I didn’t find the Original Recipe Resident Evil flavor a little bland after Extinction had spiced it up.

The film opens with a slow pan up a Japanese punk’s leather costume as she solemnly contemplates something mysterious before turning full zombie & igniting a breakout that consumes Tokyo. MIlla Jovovich, the franchise’s anchor, then narrates a plot summary of the first three films in the series, the first time Anderson found that kind of housekeeping necessary for his convoluted, yet video game-thin cyberpunk zombie yarn. We then join Alice (Jovovich) as she raids one of the Umbrella Corporation’s seemingly endless supply of underground bunkers, sporting her latest film-defining costume change: a sleek black ninja outfit complete with swords & throwing stars. A couple decapitations & some telepathic nonsense later and she’s immediately killed, revealing that she was a clone the whole time and that there are plenty more Alices where that came from (a repeat of Extinction’s opening, in a way). Some Agent Smith-looking motherfucker stabs her in the neck with a serum that takes away her ass-kicking superpowers and she spends the rest of the plot hunting him down while collecting any of the world’s straggling uninfected she can on the way.

This is easily the most low-energy, self-serious entry of the Resident Evil franchise so far. There are so many shots of Jovovich flying a small airplane, searching out the window for a purpose to be onscreen, when Afterlife could’ve just as easily held onto the army of Jovovich clones it blew up in the first scene instead and made a much more interesting picture. Besides a few zombies with some octopus mouths and a mutated giant swinging a CG axe, there just isn’t much Afterlife has to offer that you couldn’t get from the three franchise entries that precede it. The film seemingly has three directives: to openly riff on The Matrix, to make gratuitous use of the then-recent Avatar 3D technology, and to promote the A Perfect Circle single that plays multiple times throughout. Afterlife indulges in frequent enough goofy action sequences to feel occasionally worthwhile, but after the series heights of Extinction I had come to expect more than that. As a director, Anderson feels a little limp here, stuck in an outdated mode of nu metal cinema like a slightly more endearing (and significantly less funded) Zack Snyder. I’m still willing to afford the final two entries into the franchise an open mind, but the bland diminished returns of Afterlife has significantly dampened my expectations.

-Brandon Ledet

I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

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fourstar

“The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”

It would be an easy feat to find a better-realized or more academically thorough documentary than I Am Not Your Negro among recent releases, given the medium’s current creativity boom, but it’d be unlikely to find one more philosophically resonant in today’s political climate. In its better moments, this critical essay by late author & political thinker James Baldwin (directed by Raoul Peck & narrated by an unusually restrained Samuel L. Jackson) feels downright necessary. It seems inevitable that I Am Not Your Negro will be employed as a classroom tool to convey the political climate of the radicalized, Civil Rights-minded 1960s, but the form-defiant documentary is something much stranger than that future purpose would imply. Through Baldwin’s intimate, loosely structured essay, the film attempts to pinpoint the exact nature of the US’s inherent racism, particularly its roots in xenophobic Fear of the Other and in the ways it unintentionally expresses itself through pop culture media. These are not easily defined topics with clear, linear narratives and your appreciation of I Am Not Your Negro might largely depend upon how much you enjoy watching the film reach, not upon what it can firmly grasp. As the film contextualizes its questions & arguments in a 2010s setting by incorporating Ferguson protest footage & surveillance videos of recent police abuses in contemporary black communities, it makes this line of philosophical probing feel essential for modern survival, even if the individual results can be frustratingly incomplete.

The incomplete, scattered nature of I Am Not Your Negro is, in many ways, unavoidable. Peck constructs this documentary around an unfinished manuscript Baldwin did not see to completion before his death in the 1980s. The initial concept of the manuscript sounds fairly straightforward: a portrait of the Civil Rights 60s told through a triptych of profiles on Baldwin’s personal and professional acquaintances Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Medgar Evers. I’ll admit up front that I’m barely, if at all familiar with Evers as a public figure and the movie does little to profile him in any significant way other than to point out that he was the first of the three men to be assassinated by angered white segregationists. Baldwin himself largely becomes the third corner of this triptych as he reflects on his own political positions of the time, mostly in how he was a perpetual outsider. Trying to find a personal balance between the indignant radicalization of Malcolm X and the measured reason of Dr. King, Baldwin would ultimately feel little more than isolation & deep resentment for the world at large. He felt alienated both by the NAACP and the Black Panthers; he recalls Malcolm X calling Dr. King an Uncle Tom on national television long before the two found their own ideological middle ground; he explores conflicted urges to both move far away from America and to maintain a connection with his community. In many ways I Am Not Your Negro stops being about King, X, and Evers at all, instead focusing entirely on Baldwin’s inner psyche (like the way Heart of a Dog is more about Laurie Anderson than it is about dogs). He recounts his lifelong troubled relationship with America by reflecting on the way its racism bubbles to the surface in its advertising, its cinema, its televised broadcasts. Baldwin himself frequently appears on television and in filmed college lectures, reaching to express something intangible, but deeply grotesque about modern race relations. He draws a line between active racism & uncaring ignorance, making a case that both are cancerous to the nation’s spiritual health. None of this is allowed to play out onscreen in a strictly historical context, despite the manuscript’s original intent. The issue is explained to be as relevant & distressing now as it’s ever been, a problem without a solution.

If I Am Not Your Negro has an Achilles heel, it’s that its subject is often more fascinating than its form. A couple cheesy Chicago blues soundtrack choices, some cheap-looking typewriter text, and Jackson’s overly gritty narration can occasionally distract from the film’s main attraction: Baldwin’s personal philosophies & political ideology. Baldwin expresses disgust & exhaustion with American racism in a deeply personal mode of cultural criticism that somehow cuts to the heart of the problem in a way that an academic history lesson on Civil Rights protest & educational desegregation never could. Peck has some interesting ideas of his own that support these explorations through post-modern montage. Images of the Space Race, Black Lives Matter protests, 1930s cinema, reality television, and Martin Luther King Jr bobbleheads all mix together in a disorienting gestalt that matches the uncertain, incomplete nature of Baldwin’s central text. Not every gamble pays off, but the documentary is often fascinating in its looseness and its attempts to reach beyond its means. If no other good came from I Am Not Your Negro than raising the public profile of someone who was obviously an immensely talented writer & profound political thinker, then the film would still be a worthwhile effort. It’s in reaching beyond that basic, biographic artist profile formula to apply James Baldwin’s theories & anxieties to a modern context where the documentary becomes something more, something truly special. It’s a work that tries to make sense of the modern world by looking back to the criticism of the past, only to take disgust in the realization that not much has changed in the decades since. It’s not a pretty story or even a complete one, but it’s one that needs to be told.

-Brandon Ledet

Mark of the Witch (1970)

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fourhalfstar

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Many moons ago when I was at boarding school, there was a patio restaurant across the main drag from campus that had a detached building containing the restrooms. In the short hallway between latrines, there was a poster for a horror flick I had never heard of, entitled Screams of a Winter Night. After some research using 2004-era internet access (no small feat, to be honest), I found that the movie had been filmed in and around Natchitoches, Louisiana (where my boarding school was located) by college students in the late seventies. They made three prints of the film and took them to drive-ins in the nearest cities, where Screams was discovered and picked up for nationwide distribution. Although it’s my understanding that the film has since found a home on DVD, it took some time to locate a pirated VHS copy of the movie at that time; although it has a certain nostalgic appeal for me, it’s not a very good movie, being largely amateurish in its narrative cohesion and poorly filmed in general, with lighting that renders much of the film impossible to see at points. Maybe I’ll get around to reviewing it for the site one day, but this is really just a preamble to discuss today’s selection, another cheap regional production, 1970’s Mark of the Witch, which, unlike Screams of a Winter Night, is actually a lot of fun and definitely worth seeking out.

In the late sixties, two Dallas women named Martha Peters and Mary Davis noticed that, although the horror genre was exploding, very few films were being made by or for women. Since both women had an academic interest in the occult, they composed a draft of Mark of the Witch, in which a young co-ed is possessed by the spirit of a centuries-dead witch. The film was shot with a cast and crew comprised mostly of local Texan amateurs: Peters seems to have never written anything else, while Mary Davis’s sole other screenwriting credit was for 1974’s Scum of the Earth. This was the first directing credit for Tom Moore as well, although he would direct Return to Boggy Creek (sequel to The Legend of Boggy Creek) seven years later before going on to have a largely unremarkable career as a TV director for episodes of various programs, including Cheers, Picket Fences, The Wonder Years, Mad About You, and L.A. Law.

The film opens with the hanging of the titular witch (Marie Santell), overseen by the betrayer MacIntyre Stuart (Robert Elston); he and two other members of their coven turned on the other ten members, leading to their execution. With her final words, the witch curses Stuart: he and all of his descendants shall bear her mark, until she returns to exact her vengeance. Some three centuries and change later, Leonard Nimoy lookalike Alan (Darryl Wells) is buying some books on witchcraft at the local university bookstore, where his girlfriend Jill (Anitra Walsh) is assisting with a book drive. They briefly discuss the psychology course that they are taking from Professor “Mac” Stuart (Elston again) and make plans to attend one of his parties/seminars that evening. After Alan leaves, Jill discovers a real spell book, later identified as the Red Book of Appin. That evening, she brings the book to the meeting and encourages her friends and classmates, including horndog Harry (Jack Gardner) and ditzy Sharon (Barbara Brownell), to participate in a ceremony outlined in the book: summon a witch.

When nothing seems to happen, the group disbands for the evening and Alan, unaware that Jill has been possessed by the witch, gives her a ride back to her dorm, shrugging off her strange behavior as a kind of joke. Jill returns to Stuart’s home and tells him the truth. Stuart had donated the Red Book, a family heirloom, to the book drive in the hope that it would be found and a ritual performed as a psychological experiment; after a few demonstrations of her power, Stuart and Alan realize that they have unleashed an old evil in modern times. While the possessed Jill seeks out and kills Harry and Sharon to complete a rite that will make her ruler of the world, Alan and Stuart work together to try to find a way to exorcise her possessor before it’s too late.

This is a fun little movie, and surprisingly impressive for a film made on such a small budget and with only local talent. The fun is mitigated in a few places by special effects failures (the fire that the possessed Jill uses in her rites at the wooded grove is no larger than a dinner plate, for instance) and some repetitiveness (the witch uses the same overlong invocation in a few separate scenes), but it’s obvious that all of the players involved are having fun, and that sense of bonhomie and good humor is infectious enough that it’s no trouble to get swept up in the moment.

I saw the film at the Alamo Drafthouse’s weekly Terror Tuesday event in Austin, and the reels themselves were provided by the American Genre Film Archive, which is committed to preserving little oddities like this. Host Joe Ziemba noted that the film had never been checked out from the archive since its induction, and that only a few dozen people had seen the film in its original release. Although the quality of the 35mm print was imperfect (some parts of the film itself had actually turned to dust, resulting in a few skips in the narrative and a blank screen), it was still a great viewing. The entirety of Mark of the Witch appears to be available on YouTube, so viewing it in your own home is not only easy, but highly recommended.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

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fourstar

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Although I found the first two titles in the Resident Evil  series fascinating in a cultural context & entertainingly goofy in select scenes of CG fantasy violence, I failed to fall head over heels for either work as an individual, stand-alone feature film. Watching Milla Jovovich weaponize a motorcycle by launching it through a stained glass church window makes for a fun, dumb action movie moment, but I’ve had a difficult time maintaining that kind of enthusiasm for the entire length of one of these zombie-themed shoot-em-ups. The third film in the franchise changed that for me. Within the first five minutes of Resident Evil: Extinction I felt a huge leap in quality, as if the series had emerged from a direct-to-DVD production value to a legitimate action cinema aesthetic. This is likely a result of hiring Razorback/Highlander director Russell Mulcahy, who cut his teeth directing music videos for 80s acts like The Buggles, The Vapors, and The Human League, to take the reins. Series mastermind Paul WS Anderson still remains a steady hand in the writer’s seat, but Mulcahy brings a slick sense of professionalism to the film’s staging that saves it from the series’ usual idiotic The Matrix But With Zombies formula.

One of the ways Extinction shakes off its stylistic rut is by hitting the reset button, opening with the exact same scenario as the first Resident Evil film. Milla Jovovich’s zombie-slaying protagonist wakes confused & unremembering in the shower, finding her iconic red dress from the franchise’s debut laid out carefully on her bed. As she tries to fight her way out of a military takeover of her home, she’s killed, the scenario is revealed to be a simulation, and her body is dumped on a pile of similarly-dressed clones in a chilling image that recalls the excellent existential horror Triangle. While The Umbrella Corporation’s main stooge (Game of Thrones’s Iian Glen) is literally trying to clone past successes of the franchise with villainous intent, Extinction then blows its derivative, campy treats wide open by shifting from Matrix knockoff to Mad Max knockoff, taking the zombie-infested shit show on the dusty, dusty road. The breakout has spread from Raccoon City to cover the entire globe, making Earth an endless Mad Max hellscape. Just like in the second Resident Evil film, an inconsequential female badass archetype leads a band of anti-Umbrella Corporation rebels until Jovovich arrives to take over. While Glen’s slick-haired corporate jerk is obsessed with cloning her, he also wants to capture & harness the Original Recipe version, which means the small group of desertscape rebels has to fight off the evil corporation in addition to the zombie hordes. Everything that goes down from there is highly stylized, but mostly predictable outside maybe Jovovich’s newfound telepathy abilities, a weaponized murder of crows the rebels fight off with flame throwers, and the casting of R&B singer Ashanti. The movie then doubles back to its origins a second time for another underground showdown with a mutated humanoid beast & some ominous warnings from a creepy child A.I. This is when Jovovich discovers the cloning project, concluding the film on a moment of existential horror.

It’s difficult to convey exactly why Extinction is of a higher quality than its two predecessors. On a writing level, its story is just as scattered & inconsequential as ever and its characters still sport dumb names like Project Alice, White Queen, and (most notably here) K-Mart. There are some new details like a serum that partially domesticates zombies, characters blowing off steam by running over zombie roadkill, and some corporate intrigue nonsense involving hologram boardroom meetings. It’s all very silly, but no more entertaining in and of itself than the silliness of previous franchise entries. I really do think it’s Mulcahy alone who elevates the material by bringing in a strong, stylistic guiding hand that the series desperately needed. He drags Resident Evil out of its nu metal era technophobia into some more timeless (but equally derivative) genre territory. Extinction is a really fun entry in a series so stupidly convoluted in its futuristic zombie mayhem that it doesn’t deserve to be so entertaining this many films in. I’m a little bummed to know that the last three contributions to the franchise all have Anderson returning to the director’s seat, because it seems like the best he can do at this point is knock down what good will Extinction built up in its break from the usual aesthetic. I won’t at all be surprised if this film stands as the best of the bunch and it’s sad to know that the most fun I’ve had with the series is likely already behind me.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

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three star

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When we binged on a small selection of “iconic” video game adaptations for episode #11 of the podcast, I was surprised to see Paul WS Anderson’s name pop up twice in a row as a director of both Mortal Kombat & Resident Evil (2002). Not only is the video game adaptation not a genre you’d typically associate with an auteur’s go-to passion for repeat offerings (outside maybe a stray Uwe Boll-type), but Anderson’s two contributions to our list were actually two of the better films, bested only by 1994’s Super Mario Bros in terms of pure entertainment value. Of his two entries, Resident Evil was the biggest surprise in terms of competency. Mortal Kombat had the narrative upper hand of a ridiculous interdimensional martial arts tournament to boost its camp value (along with a delightfully obnoxious theme song & a scenery-devouring Christopher Lambert). Resident Evil, on the other hand, was a seemingly straightforward zombie picture, so it was downright bizarre that Anderson managed to make it even moderately memorable in the face of a market that’s been overcrowded with similar works for decades. The Milla Jovovich-helmed action vehicle was actually an interesting trifle, however slight, one made novel by a wealth of weird details like A.I. children, genetically mutated beasts, and menacing corporations with dystopian designs on world domination.

What’s even more surprising than Anderson managing to make a watchable film out of the Resident Evil video game franchise is that he did not stop at just one film. The 6th (and supposedly final) entry in the series has just reached theaters over a decade later and both Anderson & Jovovich have shared some level of involvement in the series throughout its entire run, which is a much higher level of consistency than you’d expect for a zombie video game franchise. The second film in the series, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (which obviously didn’t follow through on the finality of its title) wasn’t half bad either. It expands the bunker-confined action of the lower budget first film by bringing its zombie breakout above ground. Its world-building details like the exact nature & temporal location of its Raccoon City setting, its menacing (and hilariously named) villain the Umbrella Corporation, and the exact skills & origins (and even name) of its Ripley stand-in (Jovovich), all remain fuzzy to me after two full-length features. All you need to know to make it through a Resident Evil movie is that zombies & capitalists are bad, while women & guns are good. The rest is all shoot-em-up nonsense and militaristic zombie movie mayhem, a triumph of action horror cinema only in that it should be impossible for Anderson to make something so generic so delightful to watch and, yet, he’s done it at least twice.

I think Resident Evil‘s key to surviving as a notable action horror franchise is its dedication to excess. The film couldn’t logically bring in Jovovich’s hero immediately to deal with the above-ground breakout so it created a second badass with a gun cliché (a cop named Valentine, hilariously) to shoot some undead baddies in her initial absence. There’s some first person POV shooting in a police station and found footage shenanigans with a rogue news broadcaster that helpfully treads plot water until Jovovich can burst onto the scene by flying a motorcycle through a church’s stained glass windows and then turning said motorcycle into a makeshift bomb. Once our two badass ladies join teams everything else is an action-packed blur of knives, grenades, rocket launchers, and the undead bursting out of graves like a cover version of the “Thriller” video. New locations play like video game levels. The film’s Final Boss characer is a new genetic mutant called Genesis (who vaguely resembles the version of Bane in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin). Everything is all very loud and violent and impossibly dumb, to the point where the monotone excess becomes its own artform and your options are either to play along with the film’s buffoonery or to feel like your better senses are constantly being assaulted.

I don’t care to learn any more about this series’ mythology than the little I can catch between explosions and bullets. Jared Harris (Lane from Mad Men) pops up here as some kind of smart programmer type who’s constantly hacking into the mainframe or some such nonsense and Iian Glen (Jorah from Game of Thrones) swoops in at the last minute for some Wolverine-type experiments & mumblings about clone technology, but outside of those actors’ before they were C-list stars pedigree, their presence signifies nothing. No one really matters here outside Jovovich & Anderson. Even the newly introduced & oddly omnipresent character of Valentine is mostly just a place holder until Jovovich can arrive above-ground, guns & motorcycle blazing (and the less I say about the film’s wisecracking pimp comic relief, the better). I’m sincerely amazed that a single filmmaker & a single performer have stuck with such an explosively inane series for as long as Jovovich & Anderson have. I also wonder if there are wholeheartedly dedicated fans of the series out there who care deeply about its AI, genetic monsters, and walking dead mythology enough to have been counting the days until the series wrapped up in its final installment. I can’t imagine being at all invested in Resident Evil’s narrative throughline & overarching themes, but I will admit that these films are much louder, dumber, and more entertainingly chaotic than I expected them to be and I’m curious about how they can keep up that stamina for four more installments.

-Brandon Ledet

xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)

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three star

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Grab your cargo shorts and flash art tattoos, folks. Nu metal cinema is back in a big, dumb way. Vin Diesel has briefly stepped away from his long-time role as a Corona-swilling patriarch in the Fast & Furious franchise to resurrect his other embarrassingly dated late 90s action vehicle, xXx. Diesel selflessly returns to his role as Xander Cage, “the rebel the world doesn’t know it needs,” to save the human race with such heroic acts as collecting high-fives while skateboarding downhill, gliding across jungle dirt on snow skis, and bravely bedding entire rooms full of Nameless Babes so that he can turn to the camera and mumble, “The things I do for my country,” like a pilled-out Bugs Bunny. xXx: Return of Xander Cage may not feature a Rammstein concert like its first installment or Family Values Tour ’98 vet Ice Cube like its second, but it is comfortably seated in that same X-treme Attitude nu metal cradle. It’s as if the film acknowledges its status as a far-too-late action sequel by dialing the culture clock all the way back to the early 2000s to accommodate its own wallet chain macho inanity. The results are oddly endearing, even if persistently ugly. Its soundtrack may have been swapped out for dubstep, but Return of Xander Cage still shines as a small scale nu metal miracle, an abrasive rap rock nightmare preserved in the foulest amber.

Does it matter exactly why Xander Cage returned to the international spy game? Actual-talent Toni Collette chews scenery as a menacing G-man/humanoid IKEA monkey who drags Cage back into action by informing him that his former mentor (played by Samuel L. Jackson, naturally) has been murdered via espionage technology that can strategically down orbiting satellites. Cage reluctantly agrees to retrieve this nefarious device, but refuses to do so with the team of untrustworthy supersoldiers Collette’s Evil Bitch government stooge assembles for him. When Cage grills the G.I. Joes about their experiences with X-Treme sports like base-jumping & snowboarding, they retort “We’re soldiers, not slackers.” Wrong response. He nukes the team in what plays like a sincere version of a MacGruber spoof, but decides to forego his past life as a lone wolf, instead borrowing some of his Daddy Dom character’s obsession with “family” in the Fast & Furious franchise to build his own X-treme, rag tag crew of crazed stunt men, EDM DJs, computer geek Millennials, and lesbian snipers. Everything that follows is a loud, dumb blur of shoot-em-up action cinema inanity, with occasional touches like dirt bike/jet ski hybrids and Godsmack-reminiscent nipple tats distinguishing it from any other borderline competent example of its genre. They get the device. They save the day. They put the government in its place and walk away with their collective rebel status intact. There’s even a ludicrous last minute cameo that makes the whole thing feel like a real movie instead of a hazy, bullet-ridden nu metal daydream. It’s all in good fun.

As much as Return of Xander Cage likes to pretend that its team-building exercise is actually important to the plot, the movie is still largely just a loving prayer at the altar of Xander Cage (and, by extension, Vin Diesel himself). It’s right there in the title. No one else truly matters. Entire villages cheer his presence. Little kids look up to him in awe. He delivers every one-liner with a JCVD-style lethargic drawl, as if he’s so pleasantly relaxed in the role that he’s half asleep. When someone hands him a bomb he mumbles, “Oh boy, here we go again,” rising to twirl in a lazy circle while firing a machine gun, yawning, and literally checking his watch. His entire crew is qualified to save the day, but they’re asked to hang back as his cover. Everyone is visibly horny, but only Xander Cage gets to fuck. It’s super cool and totally worth mentioning that this dumb, spiritually-backwards action film has a mostly POC cast (including an over-qualified Donnie Yen among its ranks) and the only scene dominated by white male faces involves an evil boardroom of business pricks threatening to tear the world down. It’s just also funny that the diversity in the crew is mostly for naught, as they’re ultimately no more significant than any one of Xander Cage’s many Tough Guy clip art tattoos.

It may sound like I’m being a little tough on Return of Xander Cage, but it’s a tough customer; it can take the pressure. This is actually a pretty fun version of what it is: mindless shoot-em-up action cinema with a fetish for X-Games style stunts. It’s just impossible not to poke fun at every leering shot of tight leather mini-skirts, every dumb objective like “Get there fast and take this guy down,” and every stupid one-liner like “It’s like finding a needle in a stack of needles.” At this point in modern taste & decency, X-treme action cinema has no comfortable, legitimate home and the xXx franchise addresses that concern by bullheadedly avoiding giving a shit about taste or decency. It’s a nu metal hangover stuck so far out of time that it had to abandon its angst rock roots for an EDM soundtrack that’s also hopelessly outdated, just by a narrower margin. It’s in this overgrown bro cultural faux pas that Return of Xander Cage emerges as cute & oddly quaint in its ironically mild brand of “X-treme” entertainments.

-Brandon Ledet

Hidden Figures (2016)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

fourhalfstar

Although it’s a fairly paint-by-numbers historical pic, Hidden Figures stands out as a moving and impressive film, and the Academy has taken notice: Figures has picked up multiple Oscar nods this year in both behind-the-scenes and before-the-camera categories. This is important for a number of reasons, not least of all that it demonstrates that the #OscarsSoWhite backlash has put the old guard on notice. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the current political climate is anti-science, anti-progress, anti-women, and anti-minority, and while this film doesn’t exactly stand in that gap and hold the door, it does serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go.

The film follows the story of three real black women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and 1960s as “computers,” numerical analysts who performed and checked the calculations needed to put satellites into orbit, and later to send the first men into the cold vacuum that lies between the stars and bring them down to earth again. Janelle Monáe plays Mary Jackson, a mathematician who becomes an engineer, alongside Octavia Spencer’s Dorothy Vaughn, who leads the “colored women” computing group as a de facto supervisor despite being denied the prestige, title, and remuneration of that position. The cast is largely led by Empire‘s Taraji P. Henson, who plays Katherine Goble (later Johnson), a mathematical and physics genius who is instrumental in the calculations that are used to launch John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit and save him from destruction on re-entry. Rounding out the cast are Kirsten Dunst as Dorothy’s foil, an obstructionist gatekeeper, Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford, the head engineer of the Space Task Group, Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, the director to whom both Stafford and Katherine Goble report, Mahershala Ali as Katherine’s love interest Jim Johnson, and Aldis Hodge (so good to see you, Aldis, I’ve missed you so much since Leverage went off the air) as Mary’s husband Levi.

As with all historical films, it’s not wholly clear how precise Hidden Figures is in its details (I must admit that I haven’t read the book on which the film is based), but that’s largely irrelevant to the film’s message. Does it matter whether or not the real-life Al Harrison took a crowbar to the “Colored Ladies Room” sign and declared that “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,” after learning that his best mathematician had to run a mile to the only such lavatory on the program’s campus every time she needed to relieve herself? Not really. What matters is showing young people (especially young girls) of color that although barriers exist, they can be surmounted. It also reminds the white audience that is, unfortunately, less likely to seek this film out that the barriers that lie in place for minorities to succeed do exist despite their perception of a lack of said barriers. What Harrison initially perceives as a failure in his subordinate’s work ethic is, in reality, a fact of her existence to which he is blind because of his privilege; in fact, his position of power has rendered him so above and outside of this concern that the fact it exists is a shock to him. It’s not exactly subtle, but when the truth has to still be dropped like an anvil from the sky fifty years after the fact, there’s no room for subtlety.

Characters like Stafford and Vivian Mitchell could easily be construed as caricatures, but Hidden Figures reminds us that this same kind of oppression is still ongoing. Post-bathroom-desegregation, Vivian and Dorothy both emerge from bathroom stalls and Vivian (who at this point has blocked Dorothy from a promotion to supervisor and taken no small satisfaction in the way that the goalposts have been moved for Mary’s transition to engineer) tells Dorothy that she has “nothing against [her] kind,” she just does her job. Dorothy gives her the only answer that she can: “I know . . . that you probably believe that.” It’s a stark reminder that “following orders” to maintain an immoral status quo isn’t just used as self-justification for the enablers and perpetrators of genocide in a distant past, it’s something that happens every day, hindering progress at every half-step.

There’s a lot to parse in this film, straightforward though it may seem, certainly far more than can be contained in this review (and, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this discourse is limited by the horizons of my privilege as a white cisman), but Hidden Figures gets a strong recommendation from me. Catch it in theaters if you can; and, if you can’t, make sure to rent it somehow to show to your ignorant friends and family next holiday. Just be prepared to admit that maybe it is hard to buy Glen “Chad Radwell” Powell as American hero John Glenn.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond