reviews

The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

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hobbit

three star

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In the most basic sense The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a sequel that no one was clamoring for. Even the star of Snow White & The Huntsman, my beloved Kristen Stewart, declined to return for this second installment of a franchise practically no one loves. This film’s lack of critical hype or a vocal fandom was a little isolating for me, since I was actually a fairly solid fan of the much forgotten original film. As a low-key fantasy epic that called back to mid-80s productions like Legend, Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke, I found Snow White & The Huntsman to be a mostly satisfying experience. What really stood out, though, was the film’s visual flourishes, which bathed a wicked queen played by Charlize Theron in a milky white porcelain & transformed the evil mirror of Snow White folklore into a menacing humanoid made of dripping gold. In this way The Huntsman: Winter’s War could be understood as being simply more of the same. Anyone who brushed off Snow White & The Huntsman as a dull trifle (most people, I’m assuming) isn’t going to be won over or blown away by what they find in Winter’s War. However, fans of the original’s familiar fantasy realm setting & surprising knack for striking visuals in its villainy are likely to be pleased by the franchise’s years-late return. I was, anyway.

A ludicrously belabored, heavy-handed prologue narrated by Liam Neeson asks the question “What does a mirror show you? What do you see?” The answer is clips from Snow White & The Huntsman, apparently. It’s probably not a good sign that this late in the game follow-up feels the need to remind its audience that it’s not an original property, but I found myself entertained by the film’s strained way of setting up its own Kristen Stewart-free narrative. The prologue is so long & unwieldy that it feels as if Neeson is reading a decades-spanning bedtime story, which is far from the worst effect for a fairy tale, all things considered. By the time the setup is over with, Winter’s War simultaneously functions as a prequel and a sequel, retroactively introducing new characters into its already-established mythology so that it has a place to go in Snow White’s absence. I’m not sure knowing the exact plot of this film’s silly middle ground between Lord of the Rings & Game of Thrones is all that necessary for you to understand what you’re getting into. Winter’s War more or less boils down to a CG action adventure about opposing kingdoms’ quest to obtain & command the evil mirror of the first film, which looks like some kind of all-powerful golden gong. It just so happens that the monarchs of those kingdoms are both badass women.

Besides its undeniable knack for visual effects, Winter’s War mostly finds entertainment value in the strength of its casting. Charlize Theron returns as the golden evil queen of the first film, but this time she’s joined by a (somehow previously unmentioned) sister, played by Emily Blunt (hot off the heels of her roles in Sicario & Edge of Tomorrow). Here, Blunt plays a CG-aided Ice Queen who staffs her tundra-set fortress of solitude with a ferocious army of children she raises to be loveless killers. She trains these tiny tyke murderers to believe that “Love is a lie. It is a trick,” establishing her sole governing rule to be “Do not love. It’s a sin. I will not forgive it.” And, wouldn’t you know it, two of her miniature killing machines grow up to fall in love. One of them is America’s hunky but dim foreigner boyfriend Chris Hemsworth, returning from the first film, and he’s romantically paired with Fellow Beautiful Person Jessica Chastain. The two leads essentially live out a feature-length version of the ridiculous fight-flirting scene from Daredevil, interspersed with their attempts to thwart two evil queens from gaining the ultimate power represented in the mirror by destroying a litany of faceless foot soldiers with their gorgeous weaponry of golden liquids & CG ice shards. Edgar Wright’s pet doofus Nick Frost returns as a CG dwarf to offer some comic relief, but the less I say about that the better.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War boasts three badass women as its leads along with stunningly gorgeous costumes & visual effects, but is hopelessly saddled with goofy everything else. For every brilliant idea in its visual play (like a white porcelain version of the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans), there’s something equally silly waiting to drag down its artistic clout (like an early scene that depicts the most blatantly overwrought “You thought this was just a game?” chess match metaphor I’ve ever seen in my life). I might be the only person in the world who regrets not seeing this ridiculous display play out on the big screen, but I do believe with a little push in a more extreme direction, either towards more over-the-top camp in the performances or some R-rated gore in its fantasy violence, this film & its predecessor could have serious cult following potential. As is, you have to appreciate them for their low-key fantasy realm charm, the absurdity of their surprisingly game cast, and the perfume commercial menace of their imagery to buy what they’re selling. Personally, I’m a sucker for all three.

-Brandon Ledet

Krisha (2016)

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fourstar

As I mentioned in my less-than-thrilled review of Knight of Cups, I just don’t have the capacity within me to fall in love with a Terrence Malick flick. Yet, I keep returning to the director’s work because there’s so much promise in his raw material. Turns out the answer to this self-conflict might actually be to follow the career of Malick’s collaborators rather than to keep returning to a director that continually burns me. Tree of Life was one of my all-time most disappointing trips to the theater, but it did introduce me to the wonderful talents of actor Jessica Chastain & cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, both of whom I have been keeping a close eye on ever since. What’s even more surprising, though, is the out of nowhere talent of young writer/director Trey Edward Shults, who had worked on the sets of Malick productions Tree of Life, Weightless, Voyage of Time, To the Wonder, and *shudder* Knight of Cups, but just made his own debut film Krisha. In his very first feature film effort the young talent has, in my my mind, beaten Malick at his own game. Malick has an undeniable talent at constructing an image & a hypnotic tone, but his intensifying disinterest in narrative has left his films dull & meaningless experiences for me. Trey Edward Shults obviously paid close attention to how to evoke the potency of Malick’s raw material, but repurposes it for a clear, deeply personal narrative that makes its impact count for something. Krisha doesn’t always resembles the tone poem hypnosis of a Malick work, but when it chooses to use that cinematic mode as a storytelling tool it makes the impact count for more than any 30 seconds of a Malick film ever has in the past.

A lot of what drives home the impact of Krisha is the heart aching sincerity. The film’s central story is based on a real life tragedy in Shults’s family, stars his family, and is filmed in his parent’s home. This is an undeniably cheap-looking production, but the pain & anguish it reveals transcends its means. A woman returns to the cautiously open arms of her anxious family after a ten year separation & estrangement. There’s a mystery to the past trauma that has kept the estranged family member, Krisha, as an arm’s length black sheep, an ambiguous separation represented by the image of a deformed finger & the occasional tense accusation of her “selfishness” & “abandonment.” Although the exact circumstances of Krisha’s departure are never made explicitly clear, she does carry the faux-spiritual air of a recovering addict, calling her GPS “a lying bitch” in one breath & then claiming that she’s “working on becoming a more spiritual person” in the next. As the mounting tension of her tentative return to the fold escalates along with the stress inherent to orchestrating even the most congenial Thanksgiving meal, Krisha seems to be slowly barreling towards a relapse into abuse (both substance & familial), like a turkey slowly reaching the right temperature on an oven rack. The layering of tension in Krisha is methodical & deceptively casual. Once the pressure is released, however, it’s difficult to think back to a moment when the film felt at all civil or tightly contained. The Malickian looseness of the film’s final act is lightly suggested throughout, but once the Shults goes for broke with the tactic it almost feels as if the film had always been that way, just as its titular antagonist had never truly been “spiritual” or reformed.

Besides Shults’s strong command of image & tone, a lot of what makes Krisha stand out is the titular performance from his real-life aunt, Krisha Fairchild. Her stressed-out addict’s faux hippie costume of serenity & acceptance is a bravely difficult balance to toe, especially considering the metatextual factoid that she’s portraying a real-life member of her family. Krisha’s pathetic attempts to make herself useful in the kitchen or to personally connect with individual members of a family she does not know would be absolutely devastating if it weren’t coming from such a phony, selfish place. Other non-actors in the film give memorably great, effective performances, most notably a grandmother figure who makes the horrors of dementia feel way too real, but this is undeniably Krisha Fairchild’s show. The film opens with her starkly framed & vulnerably staring down the audience, somewhat similar to Thomasin in The Witch, and the performance gets no more vain or glamorous from there. It’s a truly unique mode of self-effacement for grim, unblinking, deeply personal art.

I may have been overselling the Malick vibes of Krisha a little too hard in my opening screed here, mostly based on the fact that I watched it so soon after Knight of Cups, a film it surpasses in intensity & impact with so few brushstrokes, not to mention that Shults had worked on both films. Without that connection you could surely find other works for easy comparison points. The arrhythmic score & cacophonous soundtrack of dogs barking & familial chattering recalls the insufferable sonic tension Paul Thomas Anderson punishes his audience with in Punch Drunk Love. The mood-evoking images of a turkey grotesquely getting prepared for the oven & general search for an open-ended, eerie tone brought me back to the terror in the ordinary established in this year’s surprise knockout punch The Fits. If you go into Krisha expecting a Malick derivative you’re going to be severely underwhelmed & agitated. Instead of copying the director’s feature length search of tone poem submersion in pure, disjointed imagery, Krisha uses that narrative approach as one of many tools in its back pocket, only to be wielded when it’s most useful.

For a first time filmmaker with an obvious eye for powerful imagery, Trey Edward Shults shows a surprising amount of restraint, saving his showier moments of technical prowess for when they best serve the story he’s telling. That story is a familial drama turned into a psychological horror of ambiguous, tension, one Shults & his family apparently had already lived through once off-camera. It’s a fascinating debut that far exceeds its obvious financial limitations and I’d much rather watch whatever the young talent has lined up next then another navel gazer of a slog like Knight of Cups, a film that’s only proven its value by inspiring better art in other works.

-Brandon Ledet

Drag Becomes Him (2015)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

One of my favorite aspects of the drag queen reality show competition RuPaul’s Drag Race is that the system works. A lot of viewers believe a (completely believable) conspiracy that the show’s winners are predetermined & cherry picked for success (yet another theory that supports my contention that drag & pro wrestling are essentially the same thing), but I don’t really care if that’s true. My favorite contestants on the show are generally the queens crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar (except maybe in the recent case of Kim Chi), which is good enough for me, no matter what mechanism produces that result. I was curious, then, when I discovered a documentary on Jinkx Monsoon, the winner of season 4, lurking on Amazon Prime, as they were my favorite contestant on their season of the show. Truth be told, Drag Becomes Him is an interesting doc whether or not you watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with any regularity. It’s essentially a portrait of an artist who happens to make it big in a crowded field of similar talents. Although ostensibly a vanity project, the film has very little vanity as it mostly shows drag performer Jinkx Monsoon in various stages of undress & overwhelming stress. It’s a low-key document of a significant time in the unglamorous life of a performer embedded in one of America’s most glamorous & most underappreciated art forms. And even as a standalone film divorced from Monsoon’s celebrity, Drag Becomes Him still commands an interesting, unique vision & narrative, a surprising feat for a film obviously crowdfunded & cheaply made.

Jinkx Monsoon states nakedly, both in a figurative & a literal sense, that they desire “to be known as an artist, not just a female impersonator”. A Seattle queen from a very artsy, performance-based scene (as opposed to the appearance-obsessed world of “pageant queens”), Monsoon has a kind of put-on, Old Hollywood demeanor that makes it difficult to differentiate between performer & character. A theater kid type who’s always “on”, Monsoon might be a bit much to have around as close friend, but they’re a joy to watch onscreen & seem to be very sweetly sincere in an art scene that seems prone to very jaded personalities. The film is structured around Jinkx explaining the basics of drag as an art form as they slowly apply makeup & accessories, making that awkward transition from looking like a Buffalo Bill-type psychopath while in half drag to becoming a larger than life persona. Simultaneously, a narrative emerges of both Monsoon’s personal life in a broken home & their professional career from performing at the age of 15 to cutting their teeth at local clubs to becoming an enterprise with several dedicated employees. Drag Becomes Him has the benefit of a wealth of footage from every stage of Monsoon’s career, but the way it juggles all of those narratives without seeming overburdened or reading like an A-B linear Wikipedia article points to a surprisingly adept team in terms of directing & editing. This is a small scale, low stakes documentary, but it’s one done exceedingly well.

One thing I did not expect form Drag Becomes Him was how wild Jinkx Monsoon would come across in their personal life. On RuPaul’s Drag Race they were kind of pigeonholed as a relatively tame personality in contrast with their competitors. Here, Jinkx does sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll as convincingly as any queen, getting stoned & partying in celebration in a newfound high point of their career (and deservedly so). The film has a completely different tone from Drag Race, skewing kinder & more gently sincere, but it does traffic in the same unapologetically gay headspace. The way it openly leers at masculine bodies is refreshing, since this kind of content can often be phonily de-sexed in order to put a wider audience at ease. Still, Monsoon’s life is far from one continuous, glamorous party and the film finds humor & fascination with the inconveniences of the logistics of drag: the indignity & discomfort of tucking, the machinations of taking a piss while buried under layers of clothing, typing while wearing cartoonishly long nails, etc. The only aspect of Monsoon’s life the film skips over is the narcolepsy revealed during their reign on television, which seems like a curious detail to avoid. Everything else is laid bare.

I don’t think you have to be a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race to enjoy Drag Becomes Him. The film carves out its own space entirely separate from the show’s very particular camp aesthetic. I was especially surprised by how it establishes a sort of digital pastel look all of its own that both serves its subject’s personality & helps distinguish the film as a work of art. I do think, however, that you’d be hard pressed to finish the doc without being at least somewhat a fan of Monsoon. They bare so much of their vulnerabilities as a real-life personality & their artistic sensibilities as a drag performer that it’s difficult to leave the film without feeling intimately connected. I entered Drag Becomes Him as a previous convert to all things Monsoon & I left as an even bigger, more dedicated fan. Jinkx is a talented artist & Drag Becomes Him makes a convincing, intimate case for how significant their art form can be.

-Brandon Ledet

A Town Called Panic (2009)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

I have a bad track record with modern CG animation as filtered through companies like Disney & Pixar and a traditional 2D, hand-drawn animation feature is increasingly difficult to come by, so stop motion might very well be my final refuge in animation as a cinematic medium. This might help explain why (besides them being lovingly crafted & emotionally devastating) titles like Mary and Max & Kubo and the Two Strings have stood out to me as some of the more memorable animated features of the last decade. The 2009 stop motion madcap comedy A Town Called Panic, adapted from a cult Belgian TV show of the same name, doesn’t aim for the same awe-inspiring depth & beauty of titles like Kubo. All things considered, it’s probably a lot more in line with the slapstick antics of something like Shaun the Sheep. However, its tactile visuals, which go out of their way to call attention to its stop motion format, and its manic comedy style make for a much more memorable, enjoyable experience than most of your standard talking CG animal features could. I’m not saying that A Town Called Panic is automatically “better” than all CG animation features because of its virtue as a stop motion work (at the very least, it’s highly likely that Zootopia will make my Top Films of 2016 list at the end of the year and it easily falls under that umbrella). I just find it remarkably easy to tap into the film’s headspace because I am in love with its methods, however crudely executed.

Stop motion studios like Laika pride themselves in pushing their medium to a technical extreme, smoothing out the movement of their figurines through CGI doctoring and striving to achieve grander, larger scale accomplishments in their films’ action sequences. A Town Called Panic is refreshing in the way it casually approaches the medium, intentionally drawing attention to the crudeness of its visual style. Its characters are simple figurines anyone could pick up out of a dollar store toy bag: a cowboy, an Indian, a horse. Their character names are just as simplistic: Cowboy, Indian, Horse. When they run from danger they have to hobble violently because of the limited movement of the plastic bases attached to their feet. There’s a world built around their overly simplistic shapes; pianos, cars, houses, and computers are designed so that they can be operated by horses. It’s not the intricately mapped out, multiscale world of Zootopia, however. It’s more like a children’s playset. I haven’t seen stop motion employed so casually & so conspicuously since KaBlam! in the 90s. The approach doesn’t necessarily read as lazy, though. It merely works as a reminder of how effective stop motion can be as a visual medium even when stripped down to its bare parts. The animation in A Town Called Panic is just complicated enough to deliver the physical comedy & whimsical absurdity of its story. It’s function over fashion, but in its kids’ playset simplicity the film does achieve its own aesthetic.

The plot is similarly bare bones. As with a lot of television series, especially comedies, A Town Called Panic plays like several TV episodes strung together instead of a traditional feature-length movie plot. Cowboy, Horse, and Indian are three roommates who’ve formed a strange, symbiotic domesticity within their household. Horse is the responsible adult of the house, while Cowboy & Indian are his goofball foils. They kick the plot into action when they forget Horse’s birthday & build him a barbecue as a last minute present. Through a mistake anyone could make, really, Cowboy & Indian order 50 million bricks instead of the mere 50 required to build the barbecue and decide to hide the bricks from the much put-upon birthday boy. For all of its manic energy & physics-bending absurdity, the best attribute of A Town Called Panic is its comedic patience. There’s a great payoff to the absurd visual gag of “hiding” 50 million bricks, but it’s a very slow, methodical reveal that relies on the strength of comedic timing even more than it does on situational humor. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a stop motion feature more confident with showing absolutely nothing happening onscreen in lingering shots so the impact of its long-game gags can pay off with greater comedic confidence. The setup of the bricks leads to many ingenious punchlines and episodic adventures, including an Atlantis-esque underwater colony, scientist kidnappers, and farm animal ammo in a territorial war. The absurdity is gradually, incrementally escalated, though. It’s a payoff that doesn’t arrive immediately, which is both surprising for a feature with such manic energy and impressive in terms of comedic confidence.

Overall, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint the exact tone of A Town Called Panic from the outside looking in. Is the franchise intended for children or stoned-out-of-their-mind college students? Both? It commands neither the cutesiness of Wallace & Gromit nor the dramatic ennui of Anomalisa, leaving it in some kind of stop-motion libido. Outside of a few details like alcohol consumption, marital infidelity, and the occasional potty language of words like “bastard” & “dumbass” it’s hard to say for sure that kids wouldn’t be able to watch it over parental concerns, but the humor isn’t exactly “adult” either. Its irreverence & whimsy recalls the stop motion comedy of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo or Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it traffics in the crude simplicity of something like KaBlam!. Maybe if I were Belgian I’d have better context for A Town Called Panic’s target audience, but as an American Doofus & a stop motion fanatic all I can say is it’s very funny and I’m glad it exists. It’s rare to see a comedy in an medium brimming with so much minute-to-minute energy, yet patient enough to let longterm gags reach their full potential before payoff. This is a confident work of a very particular, unique mode of stop motion comedy & entirely deserves the traction it’s gaining as a cult curiosity on an international scale.

-Brandon Ledet

Holy Hell (2016)

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three star

What is it about Californians’ disposition/DNA that makes them so susceptible to cults? Whether it’s a documentary like Going Clear or a far-fetched thriller like The Invitation, I always get the sense that a California setting is downright essential for a fertile cult breeding ground. The recent CNN documentary Holy Hell only strengthens that argument. When its cult subject The Buddhafield begins in California it flourishes, offering a spiritual utopia for college educated depressives in the midst of Reagan-era yuppiedom. It isn’t until the cult moves from California to Austin, TX that its promise of inner peace starts to fall apart in favor of the cult culture cliché of serving an enigmatic leader as a Master. Not far from the atrocity of Waco, The Buddhafield miserably & deservedly crumbled. In West Hollywood it looked like The Garden of Eden, except with the unusual uniform of Raybans & Speedos.

One of the stranger aspects of Holy Hell as a cult life expose is its ungodly wealth of access. Documentation Will Allen was a film school student nursing childhood obsessions with Death & “The Truth” when he entered The Buddhafield cult on the ground floor, so he poured his filmmaking passion into documenting the “truth” that he found with his new “family” for the decades he was hypnotized under his Master’s spell. It’s rare (I hope) that a cult as contemporary as The Buddhafield would be this unknown & this under the radar, but Holy Hell’s hook is how intimately associated & submerged its documentarian was in the menacing organization’s trenches. Allen knows exactly how to make a cult look inviting & attractive to an outsider because he lived through it himself. He initially portrays The Buddhafield as an oasis of young, attractive, talented people losing touch with reality in the wilderness as they begin to feel “Alive” for the first time & revel in “freedom from self.” He then slowly introduces the more disconcerting aspects of life at The Buddhafield, like a ritual where members are hypnotized into “knowing,” “seeing,” and “tasting” God & the gradual realization that their “spiritual leader” is a selfish, life-destroying monster that permanently damages the very victims he dares call family. At the beginning of Holy Hell, members of The Buddhafield rationalize “If this is a cult, at least it’s a really good cult.” By the end they’re left empty & permanently scarred by a human monster who still abuses young, malleable minds today (back in the holy mecca of California, of course) . . . if they were able to escape his mental grasp in the first place.

It’s tempting to get hung up on the weirder aspects of Holy Hell and treat it like a tale of curiosity like Tickled or Finders Keepers, but the abuse at the center of this documentary runs even deeper than that of those deceptively dark human interest stories. It’d be easy to reduce this story down to its weirder details, like a cult member who’s convinced that he’s making fruit salads “for God” or The Buddhafield’s strange abstinence policy or the fact that although individual members essentially work as the cult leader Michel’s employees they were still charged money for their weekly hypnotherapy sessions. There’s a lot of very specific detail to get distracted by here. However, the film’s main function is as an expose of Michel’s inhumane crimes and abuses. Holy Hell’s real life horrors are way too grave for the film to be treated as an arm’s length curiosity. It’s not a flashy documentary; it doesn’t feel too different from what you’d normally expect form a CNN production. Yet, its intimacy & the ongoing atrocity of its subject makes for a fascinating watch. At the very least I’d recommend it as a double feature to drive home the severity of Karyn Kusama’s recent thriller The Invitation. As a pair the films call into question the dangers & menace of faux spirituality, not to mention make California look like a hellscape below its sunshine & bare skin surface.

–Brandon Ledet

Knight of Cups (2016)

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onehalfstar

Full confession up front: I don’t “get” Terrence Malick. The filmmaker has an admirable eye for breathtaking imagery & in theory I like the idea of the way he deconstructs the very concept of narrative cinema, but I simply get no enjoyment out his work. The much-beloved Tree of Life in particular might be the single most personally disappointing trip to the theater I can remember, based on the critical hype I was riding in and the wave of dejection I rode out. As a collection of isolated images Tree of Life succeeds in provoking awe & reflection. As a two hour theatrical experience, however, it’s an extreme exercise in patience with Sean Penn whispering vague, pretentious nothings about humanity & motherhood.

I mention this here because Knight of Cups is a deliberate doubling down on Tree of Life’s worst impulses. It trades in the former film’s suburban America setting for a similar snapshot of a wealthy man’s vacuous life in Los Angeles & swaps out Sean Penn’s whispered vagueries for those of Christian Bale, but the results are mostly the same. I feel like both Tree of Life & Knight of Cups establish their best selves & all they can offer in their opening few minutes, as if they were a resume for a cinematic skillset instead of an actual product. Both films have the feeling of an art school student trying to prove their worth in an early gig car commercial, except the car never arrives & the credits never roll. What frustrates me the most about Malick is his obvious wealth of raw material. If there weren’t so much technical skill displayed in his films I’d never feel the need to return to his work, but there’s too much promise here for me to simply walk away. He’s the filmmaking Roadrunner to my critical Wile E. Coyote. I just keep returning for more punishment, never learning my lesson.

It would feel disingenuous to tack on a plot synopsis for a review of Knight of Cups. The best I can put it is that Christian Bale is sad from having casual sex with too many beautiful models & attending too many Hollywood soirees. He navigates a world of strippers, luchadores, outer space, pool parties, and nothingness. Malick constructs “fragments, pieces of a man” in a disorienting display that might be intended to mirror the emptiness of his protagonist’s existence, but ultimately feels far too exhausting & reverently celebratory in the process to resonate as meaningful. There are a few interesting moments here or there – like when a promise of stillness is interrupted by an earthquake or when you can spot a seemingly random Famous Beautiful Person, say Joe Manganiello, in the background of an L.A. party – but for the most part the film is a wash. Once it hits its hypnotic rhythm it’s extremely difficult to focus on. The voice over becomes a foreign language and the beauty in the imagery loses its initial poetry. By the end credits there’s nothing left to feel but drained, empty, and at least a little bit cheated.

The wealth, beauty and ennui of Knight of Cups feels very much akin to a music video. Imagine, if you dare, a version of Beyoncé’s Lemonade film where nearly every actor is white and all of the pop music has been replaced with more spoken word poetry. Better yet, imagine Kanye West begging on loop that there please be “No More Parties in L.A.” for two solid hours with no indication that the party will, in fact, ever stop. The opening title card of Knight of Cups suggests that the film would be best enjoyed with the volume cranked, but I felt the exact opposite way. The film is probably best enjoyed with the soundtrack muted & replaced with something more narratively exciting & cohesive, like a rap album or, honestly, dead silence while you take care of some household chores.

I would say that after this film & Inland Empire I’m proving to have a back track record with the glacial, narratively sparse high art meditations end of cinema, but that’s not necessarily true. I fell madly in love with The Neon Demon & Heart of a Dog, which while not on an exactly comparable wavelength as Knight of Cups, at least follow a similar approach to valuing imagery & cinematic hypnosis over linear storytelling. The truth is probably a lot more likely that Knight of Cups wasn’t my thing because Malick himself just doesn’t do it for me. He probably never will, but I’m too fascinated with the glimpses of brilliance lurking in his exhaustive haze of artistic pretension to walk away. Much like Wile E. Coyote, I suspect this won’t be the last time I fall off this particular cliff. I’ll just keep doing it forever.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Blair Witch (2016)

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three star

Director Adam Wingard & writer Simon Barrett have made an exciting reputation for themselves with their last two feature film collaborations: the home invasion subversion You’re Next & (my personal favorite) the action thriller by way of John Carpenter horror The Guest. Unfortunately, their usual knack for subversion & experimentation within genre bounds is mostly checked at the door in their latest feature, the years-late sequel/reboot hybrid Blair Witch. In the years since its 1999 release the original The Blair Witch Project has earned a growing reputation as being one of the greatest American horror films of all time, but has also suffered the misfortune of inspiring an entire subgenre of imitators. In the late 90s a found footage, documentary-style horror played like a game-changing innovation, to the point where some audiences were even convinced that the film was “real.” In 2016 the gimmick can feel a little tired & old hat. For every found footage horror that feels exciting & fresh (Creep, Unfriended) there’s a heap of examples that feel unnecessary & more than a little bit silly (The Visit, They’re Watching, Cloverfield, Exists, Da Hip Hop Witch, etc.). That’s why it’s a shame that Wingard & Barrett delivered such a straightforward found footage horror here. There are some interesting, bizarre ideas & rug pulls that shape their Blair Witch film, but they’re not pushed nearly far enough to distinguish the final product from the billion other The Blair Witch Project devotees we’ve encountered since 1999. Blair Witch finds Barrett & Wingard working in the straightforward genre picture mode they started their careers with in the horror anthology V/H/S when the film desperately needed the prankster spirit they brought to You’re Next & The Guest.

There’s not much of a plot to spoil in Blair Witch if you’re already experienced the original film. In this version of the story the younger brother of one of The Blair Witch Project’s documentarians/victims ventures back into the woods to investigate his sister’s mysterious disappearance. The original film was a search for the truth about an old world mystery. This followup is, by contrast, a search for closure. As the missing woman’s disappearance is well over a decade in the past, her brother is presumably less hopeful about actually finding her than he is about finding what happened to her. Over the course of the film, in a way, he finds a little of both, but the answers come in the form of violence and more questions (duh). The narrative setups to these films don’t really matter all too much, though. They’re basically excuses to a) get young potential victims to the woods and b) commit to a classic horror film dynamic where out of towners are punished for scoffing at locals’ superstitions. Blair Witch mirrors the basic structure of its source material to the point where it occupies the same sequel/reboot gray area of titles like Ghostbusters (2016) & The Force Awakens. The only noticeable update in the film’s basic structure is in the quality of technology available to the film student documentarians capturing the strange, spooky happenings of the woods. There’s as much focus on gear here as there is in Russ Meyer’s love letter to pinup photography, Heavenly Bodies!, with a wealth of shots devolving into people filming each other filming with various gadgets: old camcorders, state of the art Cannons, drones, earpiece cameras (which affords the film a few scenes of a Hardcore Henry style of 1st person POV), etc. It’s a detail that points to both the passage of time between the two films (especially in moments where the HQ digital photography of today clashes with the standard definition DV tapes of old) & the sequel’s reverence for found footage aesthetic (while also poking a little fun at it as a contrivance). However, it can also feel like wasted time in a film that mostly plays by the rules of its genre, never pushing that aspect to the point of self-aware parody.

That’s not to say that Blair Witch is a strict retread of its predecessor, however. Wingard & Barrett do seek out a few opportunities to pull the rug from under the audience, especially in the film’s final act. If there’s an essential difference between Blair Witch & The Blair Witch Project in terms of narrative approach, it’s that the original film was dedicated to the process of telling while the modern version lives by the virtues of showing. The 1999 feature sidesteps depicting onscreen violence by coding its witchcraft folklore into simplistic visual cues like stick figures & characters staring into the corner. The 2016 version somewhat blasphemously trades in that atmospheric terror with real, physical manifestations of its witchcraft: objects moving on their own, body horror in a pulsating, infected wound, visual confirmation that the titular witch is indeed a physical entity, etc. What’s much more interesting, though, is the way the film carves out new, original forms of terror in its play with the otherworldly logic of the woods. Time & space shift in unexpected, unsettling ways that help mark the film’s shift within its franchise from authenticity to entertainment. In its better moments Blair Witch deals in go-for-broke abstraction that somehow makes the expansiveness of Nature feel like a tightly confined space. There’s enough weirdness in the film’s final stretch that suggests that Blair Witch could’ve stood as a much stranger outlier in the found footage oeuvre were it pushed further into the directions teased by the perception-shifting instincts of its black magic spookiness. Instead, it plays like a competent, but obedient genre exercise.

In a lot of ways the mistake Blair Witch makes mirrors the folly of its protagonist: you can’t return to the past. The shaky-cam addled slowburn of the film’s opening pays plenty tribute to what made its source material so striking in 1999, but that territory has been explored a few dozen too many times in the years since to remain fresh or exciting. There’s a value to a steady camera & a cinematic eye, as evidenced by this year’s other found footage update, 10 Cloverfield Lane, but Blair Witch does manage to find other modes of blasphemy in its rug pull of a third act without ditching the found footage gimmick. It just isn’t nearly blasphemous enough. A lot of the leadup to what makes Blair Witch distinct could’ve been condensed to shorthand, given how familiar the film’s story & character beats are to anyone who’s seen a found footage horror before, and that change would’ve left a lot more room for the reality-shifting finale to run wild & free. Blair Witch is a perfectly solid genre exercise in found footage’s now-familiar thrills & chills, falling just on the right side of the divide between entertainment & tedium. If Wingard & Barrett weren’t involved this review wouldn’t likely have such a vague air of disappointment, but rather a tone of acceptance & routine. Then again, I likely wouldn’t have rushed to watch the film in the first place without their involvement, given the dime-a-dozen nature of post-The Blair Witch Project found footage fare.

For Wingard & Barrett Blair Witch stands as a step back to their humble beginnings in the serviceable horror anthology V/H/S. For a no-name, workman filmmaker that humble beginnings aspect wouldn’t be much of a detriment, but I’ve come to expect more from these two. Blair Witch boasts a few moments of flashy weirdness & reality-bending excitement that made the exercise feel at least worthwhile. Yet, on the whole the film feels a little regressive considering the immense talents who delivered it & how much it’s rooted in tradition.

-Brandon Ledet

Baskin (2016)

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twostar

The Turkish horror film Baskin knows how to craft a disturbing image & a depraved scenario, but is that enough of a foundation for an entire feature film? Without much of a story to tell the production winds up feeling like an HD home video of a trip to a haunted house, not at all like a narrative feature. This problem is further compounded when you’re forced to carpool to said haunted house with a gang of overgrown dude bro bully cops. The five interchangeable police officers who are tortured & destroyed by Baskin’s haunted house creations aren’t necessarily portrayed as sympathetic. In fact, they’re quite despicably abusive. However, after long enough exposure to their shitty macho jokes about bestiality & trans sex workers the film starts to take on the same one-of-the-guys locker room vibes that sunk the similarly visually-promising Witchin’ & Bitchin’. The characters are just as repugnant as they are uninteresting, but the film seems to think hanging out with them is enough of a narrative lead-up for a trip to a haunted house full of Hellish freaks when the truth is it makes the whole enterprise feel like a waste of time. There’s nothing accomplished in Baskin that couldn’t be conveyed in a still image, which is a huge problem.

The cocktail napkin plot sends the cops on a call to a remote, out of the city area, where they encounter some demonic, Event Horizon type shit, essentially entering the gates of Hell by careless mistake. The vile imagery of their Hell on Earth experience can range from beautiful (including a heavenly shot of God-sized hands plunging into water to save a drowning man, recalling the German Expressionist horror The Hands of Orlac) to despicable (eye-gouging & rape). The film tries to tack on a meaning in the depravity with some kind of Martyrs-esque philosophy about the spiritual transcendence of extreme pain, but it’s all very vague & never registers as anything more than aimlessly grotesque. Baskin is obviously proud of the demons & demonic lairs it built for the production by hand & those details indeed look great, but I get the feeling they’d be better experienced at a GWAR concert or an off-the-highway, Halloween season attraction in a warehouse. There’s not enough narrative or tonal effort here to justify a feature length film experience.

That’s not to say that the film can’t be scary. Baskin finds terror in simple, straightforward imagery. Its stark lighting & disembodied hands call back to the best of the giallo genre. Its flashlight-driven haunted house aesthetic reminds me of long gone teenage years of “urban exploring” in locations like abandoned pools & hospitals. There’s some interesting dialogue in the last act about how “you can carry Hell with you at all times; you can carry it inside you” and the film’s overall conceit about literally entering Hell opens it up to some sublimely surreal moments. There’s just not enough going on here to make its overall nastiness & cruelty worthwhile. After watching this year’s horror anthology Southbound achieve the same pull-the-rug-from-under-you terror of an unexpected trip to Hell, Baskin fails while reaching for (and without matching its grotesque cruelty for easy discomfort), this film feels more than a little useless.

There’s enough imagery in Baskin to promise that first time director Can Evernol might make some truly memorable horror pictures down the line, but that imagery is much better enjoyed as a scroll through Google image search results than as a painful 100 minute struggle through toxic bully personalities, dead still pacing, and demonic sexual assault. And if he never masters the craft of cinema, he at least has a future in the seasonal work of constructing haunted houses. Baskin isn’t successful as a feature film, but it’d make for a killer resume for that line of work.

-Brandon Ledet

Weiner (2016)

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three star

I imagine one of the most difficult decisions to make as a documentarian is when to start & when to stop collecting footage. Unlike with fictional narratives, there’s no clear beginning & end to most real-life stories and I imagine trying to establish those boundaries on an ongoing story has got to be a stressful process for a filmmaker. The documentary Weiner, on the other hand, seemed to be one of those right place/right time scenarios where a story very clearly has a beginning & an end and all the right narrative pieces just simply fall into place for its story beats. If I didn’t know any better from personal exposure to national news media I’d believe Weiner was too cut & dry to be unscripted. Following infamous politician Anthony Weiner has he attempts to run for mayor of NYC despite a past sexting/dick pic scandal, the documentary had a fairly decent opening premise for a narrative subject. It would’ve probably been a very middling film had its co-directors Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg not “lucked” out & been present while a second dick pic scandal broke during the mayoral campaign while they were filming. Without this second scandal, Weiner wouldn’t be much of a recommendable experience. Without Anthony Weiner’s stubborn narcissism in continuing his campaign & allowing the film to proceed despite the scandal, it wouldn’t have much significance either. Weiner succeeds by happenstance, but it’s still a fascinating glimpse at a slow-moving political train wreck, no matter how the film happened to capture its carnage.

With an excess of footage & access, Weiner initially looks back to the former congressman’s early days when he was known as a “scrappy” & “combative” politician of the people and not an Internet age sex addict. His Achilles heel seems to be synonymous with his greatest strength: tireless passion. The same relentless dedication that made him a popular New York State congressman is also what ruins his career as he refuses to shy away from his disastrous mayoral campaign & instead addresses his scandal head on in the public eye. Weiner wants to talk economic policy and stop & frisk; reporters, somewhat understandably, want to talk dick pics. It’s a destructively stubborn decision to continue his campaign despite these circumstances, one that threatens to end both his career & his marriage in one crushing blow. One of the more interesting aspects of the documentary is how it finds its emotional core in Weiner’s marriage to Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin. The couple deals with the film’s central crisis as a political enterprise rather than a romantic unit, but Abedin’s stress & disappointment seeps through that façade. Without Abedin lurking in the background of this documentary, Weiner would still have interesting things to say about how the media handles sex scandals & how the private lives of politicians sometimes outweigh the merits of their careers, but she’s what provides the film an emotional core that drives that point home. Weiner himself is too much of a tireless cartoon of a blowhard to command that kind of pathos.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter that Weiner succeeds by happenstance. The story is just too good & too strange for the audience to to look away, becoming increasingly bizarre as Weiner becomes more passionate about not backing down in the face of a scandal. At times he threatens to become physically combative, even confronting one of his documentarians for not being a true fly on the wall when they dare to ask a question. The film is interesting in the way it won’t let its subject off the hook for his brazen egotism, the media off for its fascination with sensationalism, or the audience off for participating in those two combatants’ cat & mouse shenanigans as enraptured witnesses. Still, the strangeness of its narrative details (like the revelation that Weiner’s online pseudonym was the even sillier name “Carlos Danger”) and the continued relevance of its story after the end credits (a third, worst-yet Weiner scandal just broke in the last few weeks) were all stumbled upon discoveries. Don’t look to Weiner for anything more than what you’d formally find in the technical style of a CNN documentary or a television special. As far as having an interesting story to tell, however, the film happened to strike pure gold.

-Brandon Ledet

Love & Friendship (2016)

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threehalfstar

2016 very well might be The Year of the Anachronistic Jane Austen Adaptation (if it’s not already being billed as The Year of the Confined Space Thriller or The Year That Superhero Spectacles Shat the Bed). Besides the Comedy Central reality show spoof Another Period, which recontextualizes Austen-era social machinations in a petty Keeping Up with the Kardashians mindframe, we’ve also been treated to the just-as-silly-as-its-title-suggests Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That latter, zombified Austen bastardization didn’t make much of a splash when it was released this last spring, but I got a kick out of the way the horror comedy accentuated the verbal sparring of its source material by making it literal sparring in some ludicrous knockout fights between high society women. The most recent entry in The Year of Austen Anachronisms is Wilt Stillman’s Love & Friendship, adapted from the lessor known, minor Austen title Lady Susan. While the far less subtle Pride and Prejudice and Zombies felt the need to punch up Austen’s verbal aggressions by turning them into physical altercations, Love & Friendship recognizes just how biting & playfully transgressive they already are on the page. Stillman’s film finds its own anachronism by playing the material straight, but fitting it into the format of a modern, 90min comedy, with all of the playful energy that genre implies. In a way it’s similar to Sofia Coppola’s (criminally underrated) Marie Antoinette picture, just without the Converse sneakers & unavoidably depressive third act.

It’s probably best to consider Love & Friendship as a period comedy instead of a period drama if you want to quickly get on its very particular wavelength. The film’s rapidfire, breathy dialogue & playbill-style character introductions (accompanied by phrases like “a divinely attractive man” & “a bit of a rattle”) are a relentless assault throughout the film. As a subversion of its genre the film presents the same polite-on-the-surface setting & intricately beautiful costumes, but with a new, cheeky attitude. Speaking of the usual hallmarks of the costume drama, the familiar-to-the-genre Kate Beckinsale stars as the Lady Susan of the source materials’ namesake, a character at the edge of high society fringe who’s just as self-important as she is calculated & prepared to destroy. A recent “widow without fortune”, Lady Susan is a scenery-chewing Austen archetype who wields love & friendship as deadly weapons in her designs for wealth & discomfort. The movie’s tightly paced, pleasantly efficient plot mostly centers on her machinations to find well-off husbands for both herself and her young daughter. As their financial situation is direly dependent on the kindness of acquaintances at the beginning of the film, the stakes aren’t exactly low, but it’s not easy to sympathize with our “agreeable flirt” antihero as she tries to entrap a husband of the right social stature & age range (he can’t be “too old to be governable” or “two young to die”) & sleeps with other people’s husbands for fun in the meantime. Like all traditional comedies, Love & Friendship ends with everyone finding a suitable mate, but the fun in this film is in watching Beckinsale’s lead shrewdly manipulate each piece of the puzzle so that they fall into place without her barely lifting a finger. Most of the targets of her designs don’t even know they’re being played as pawns and even the ones who do, including her poor daughter, are helpless to do anything but watch her designs play out in stunned silence. They’re all ridiculously outmatched.

All of Lady Susan’s designs wouldn’t mean a thing without her supporting players, however. Chloë Sevigny (who after this & #horror is hopefully staging an indie scene comeback) stars as a friend & conspirator who’s mostly kept around so that Lady Susan has an audience to appreciate her manipulative brilliance. Then there’s the case of the wealthy, potential beaus for Lady Susan & her daughter. The younger, more desirable candidate is a handsome gent with whom she ignites “the most peculiar friendship” and whose family is scandalized that he would associate with a flirtatious widow prone to  such “sauciness & familiarity”. The movie’s real secret weapon, however, is the delightful Sir James. A “very silly” man with “a charm of a kind”, Sir James distinctly recalls the posi stupidity of characters like Murray from Flight of the Conchords. He calls peas “tiny green balls” & “novelty vegetables”, finds difficulty remembering how many Commandments there are in the Bible, and dances like a delighted fool. There are varying degrees to which Love & Friendship’s male characters don’t measure up while going toe to toe with Lady Susan, but no one is as delightfully or entertainingly incompetent as Sir James, who has a way of stealing scenes he’s not even in as characters discuss the various charms & annoyances of his spectacular idiocy.

As amusing as the supporting players can be, however, falling for Love & Friendship depends largely on finding amusement in the cold calculations of Lady Susan, a delicately aggressive performance Beckinsale nails with ease. Although she’s a cunning manipulator who believes that “facts are horrid things” & leaves a few opposing women weeping in her wake, Lady Susan is a formidable social warmonger, a great encapsulation of the social combativeness that distinguishes a lot of Austen’s quietly powerful characters. Love & Friendship may include a lovable dolt performance from a character that belongs in a modern mockumentary-style sitcom & other 90min comedy conventions like a continuous stream of alternate take jokes included with its end credits, but it intimately understand the appeal of Jane Austen’s powerful (& humorous) archetypes in a way that’s not always captured in the more self-serious adaptations of her work. Much like the character of one Sir James Martin, the film is an all-around delight that never outwears its initial charm.

-Brandon Ledet