reviews

Boy (2012)

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fivestar

Taika Waititi very nearly made my favorite movie released in the US last year. The vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows was just barely edged out of my Best of the Year spot by Peter Strickland’s immaculate art piece The Duke of Burgundy, but that might merely be due to a larger, cultural tendency to devalue comedies as high art. Waititi’s horror comedy is one of the more quotable,endlessly watchable films I’ve seen in a long while and suggests a glimpse of a comedic master at the top of his form. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that What We Do in the Shadows wasn’t even the best title in the director’s catalog to date, not by a long shot.

Before the release of Waititi’s cult hit television show Flight of the Conchords & his ultra-quirky romantic comedy Eagle vs Shark, he began working on his most personal work, his most obvious passion project: Boy. Boy wouldn’t reach theaters until Conchords & Eagle had already seen the light of day, however, as Waititi had the good sense to let the film fully incubate before hatching. A film centered on the Maori people (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand & Waititi’s own heritage), Boy eventually stood as the highest-grossing film in New Zealand’s history, obviously striking a chord with a lot of the country’s citizenry. Still, it took two years for the film to earn US distribution despite this success and it barely made a splash once it crossed over. No matter. Waititi made a deeply personal, insular film that exquisitely captures the fantasy-prone imagination of young children’s minds in a way that feels wholly authentic and endearing. Boy is by every measurement a triumph. It’s at times hilarious, devastating, life-affirming, brutally cold, etc. Waititi risked taking his time to deliver a fully-realized, personal work on his own terms and the final product moves you in the way only the best cinema can.

Set in 1984 New Zealand, Boy follows an impoverished community of Maori people, particularly children, through a seasonal slice of life change/growth. The film’s protagonist, the titular Boy, dreams of escaping his community’s limited freedoms when his father returns home from prison/life on the road. Despite the divine reverence Boy holds his father in, the reality of the man is more akin to any petty thief/wannabe biker shithead who treats cheap thrills & even cheaper marijuana in higher regard than his own family. Boy thinks is father is so cool, but the truth is he’s a selfish man-baby just waiting for the next opportunity to break his son’s heart. Waititi himself does a great job performing as Boy’s deadbeat dad, mixing just enough Kenny Powers/Hope Anne Gregory selfishness into his personality to make it obvious why he’s an unfit parent, but leaving enough likeability floating to the surface so that it’s still believable that his son would want to follow in his buffoonish footsteps. The child actors in Boy are similarly phenomenal & nuanced, which is all the more impressive considering Waititi made some last minute casting changes before filming.

Boy pulls off the next trick of starting as a hilarious knee-slapper of a childhood-centered comedy, but then gradually laying on an emotional engine that could choke you up if you allow it to hit home by the third act. It’s difficult to tell exactly how much of the film is somewhat biographical to Waititi’s personal life, but the film does display an intimate, heartfelt familiarity with its plot & characters that wholly sells their potency & nuance. Temporal references like Michael Jackson & E.T. mix with crayon sketches & magazine collage fantasies that perfectly capture a very specific mind in a very specific space & time. With his last two films, Boy & Shadows, Waititi seems to be on a bonafide roll, firing on all cylinders & fully realizing the worlds he set to illustrate. I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am to see this streak continue in his upcoming Thor & Hunt for the Wilderpeople movies. He’s one of the few directors working right now whose mere name makes me giddy.

-Brandon Ledet

Mirror Mirror (2012)

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onehalfstar

How many times do you allow a filmmaker to burn you before you stop coming back for more? Usually I’d allow a fairly long leash in these situations, but I have a feeling Tarsem Singh is about to really test my patience. Singh’s first feature, The Cell, is a fairly decent thriller that’s stuck with me over the years due to its intense, dream-logic visuals (a knack the director undoubtedly picked up from his music video/advertisement days). It was The Cell‘s follow-up, The Fall, that affords him so much patience form me as an audience. Easily one of the most gorgeous films I’ve ever seen in a theater, The Fall is a fantastic, visually overwhelming movie about the very nature of storytelling as an artform, a work that nearly outdoes the great Terry Gilliam at his own game. I can’t say enough hyperbolically great thing about The Fall, which makes it all the more confusing why not any one of the three Tarsem Singh features that have followed have piqued my interest. Somehow, each follow-up looked even blander than the last and I didn’t want to ruin the high note The Fall left me soaring on.

I recently ruined all that goodwill by checking in on Tarsem Singh’s most high profile work to date. When considered in the abstract, a big budget retelling of a classic Grimms’ tale would be a perfect follow-up to the grandiose fantasy dreamscape of The Fall, but Singh does so little to justify that optimism here. I’m honestly not convinced that he hasn’t been murdered & replaced by an imposter, possibly some kind of artificial intelligence from the future or an ancient human-impersonating monster. Mirror Mirror is Tarsem operating in the world of fairy tales (Snow White, for those somehow unaware), but it’s a dull, passionless work that could’ve been handled by any number of journeymen with a Hollywood-sized checkbook. Indeed, there are echoes of the film’s contemporaries like Maleficent and Snow White & The Huntsmen at work in Mirror Mirror, but I’d argue that even those far-from-prestigious comparison points far outshine this lifeless exercise. They’re at least occasionally fun. Even this film’s out-of-nowhere Bollywood song & dance ending was somehow more painful than delightful.

I’m not sure how closely Mirror Mirror follows the original Grimms’ tale, but I am sure that I don’t care to investigate. In this version (subversion?) Snow White carries a sword and saves her own ass from peril, which is presented as a big whoop, but instead bores to the point of cruelty. If I’m remembering correctly, I’ve seen a swordfighting, swashbuckling Snow White onscreen before on the impossibly cheesy ABC show Once Upon a Time and even they did a better a job of keeping my eyes open than this drag. I guess the film gets certain brownie points for at least attempting to subvert the damsel in distress dynamic of many (bastardized) fairy tales, but it does so with such a half-hearted non-effort that it’s hard to drum up any genuine enthusiasm for the content.

The true story of this film is the long list of suffering actors practically checking their watches as the running time slowly bleeds out. Nathan Lane looks especially pained in his boredom and, despite thanklessly giving the same endless charm he brought to his roles in The Social Network & The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,  Armie Hammer does little to lighten the mood. The most embarrassing turn of all comes from Julia Roberts, however, who fully commits to her role as the evil queen/witch, but fails miserably. Roberts toothlessly gums the scenery when the movie demands that she devour it. An over the top villain might’ve saved Mirror Mirror from total devastation but Roberts simply isn’t up for it & watching her try is admittedly a little pathetic.

I guess if I were to say one nice thing about Mirror Mirror I could point to its lavish costumes, which likely deserved the Academy Award they took home in 2013. As the costuming in The Fall was similarly striking, this one detail could maybe serve as a glimmer of hope that Tarsem Singh has at least one more decent movie buried deep within him somewhere, depending on how closely you want to look. Costume design is only one small piece in the larger, complex filmmaking puzzle, though, and I doubt the other Singh films I’m going to catch up with despite myself are going to fare much better, brilliant costume design or no. There honestly isn’t much hope left out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Fresh Dressed (2015)

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fourstar

I can’t say with full honesty that I know enough about fashion to truly weigh in on a documentary on the subject, but I have enjoyed a few films like Iris & Paris is Burning that touch on the genre. Fresh Dressed was a little more of an easy entry point for me than those examples (although not nearly as spellbinding as the beyond-reproach Paris is Burning) because it approaches fashion from a pop music perspective. Chronicling the evolution of where fashion fits in as an integral element of hip hop culture, Fresh Dressed is simultaneously a fun nostalgia trip through bygone eras of oldschool rap (not unlike Ed Piskor’s brilliant Hip Hop Family Tree comic book series) and a necessary history lesson in the evolution of modern black identity as expressed artistically through clothing. The documentary has the distinct feeling of giving credit where it’s due, finally exalting a subject that would’ve casually been brushed off as frivolity in the past & spotlighting some of the underserved artists who have been long forgotten as cultural pioneers.

Fresh Dressed establishes a solid foundational layer by beginning its story long before hip hop was even a concept. Mapping out how the pristinely immaculate church clothes of even the poorest of America’s black communities would later be reflected in the flashy garb of jazz & blues singers, Fresh Dressed logically explains the history of fashion as a prime component of modern black identity. Hip hop is explained as a starting point where black fashion took on a D.I.Y. punk context, openly rebelling against the cops & whites that conspired against black people, especially the youth, through institutionalized oppression. Biker fashion, gang insignia, black pride militarization, and external displays of pride in personal wealth all complicated & varied the boundaries of what hip hop fashion could mean as well as what it could look like. At a certain point in time you could tell what neighborhood a person was from (in NYC, obv) based on what they were wearing, but things got much more disparate & more interesting from there and watching a culture develop through the hallmarks of its clothing is a lot of what makes Fresh Dressed a delight.

Documentaries like this often live or die by the strength of their talking head interviewees and Fresh Dressed indeed has a stacked deck of willing participants: Kanye West, Big Daddy Kane, Nas, Pharell, etc. There’s also a wealth of great photographs, video clips and (duh) music to back up its fashion retrospective narrative, making the film a fun ride while still an informative one. Fresh Dressed doesn’t have the same temporal advantage of films like the similarly-minded graffiti doc Style Wars, as it’s documenting a movement & a subset of oral history interview subjects long after their heyday, requiring it to rely on archival footage & word of mouth to construct its narrative. As the story develops, the film also loses a little steam as hip hop fashion loses its credibility as a D.I.Y. punk aesthetic and becomes a marketable big business commodity. It’s worth noting, too, that its narrow focus on heterosexual male fashion in the hip hop community often treats female & queer perspectives as an afterthought, which is a shame given those groups’ contributions to fashion innovation over the decades. All that considered, Fresh Dressed is still a wonderful history lesson in a topic that’s rarely treated with the level of respect it deserves. At the very least the film is a museum in motion, with nearly every document of hip hop fashion’s past just aching to be screengrabbed & converted into Tumblr posts. There are certainly less worthy modes of fashion documentation than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Green Room (2016)

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threehalfstar

With his last two features writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has carved out a nice, little niche for himself in constructing intimate, terrifying thrillers about folks who are in way over their heads (in blood & viscera). His last film, Blue Ruin, was a tightly-wound revenge thriller in which a doomed, ordinary man took on an organized criminal syndicate despite his ineptitude for violence in a private war he instigates (or avenges, depending on your perspective). His attempts at violence are ugly & disastrous, as he fucks up constantly, but the inertia of the plot doesn’t allow him any viable options but to continue on anyway. There isn’t much of a difference in Saulnier’s follow-up, The Green Room, except a change in scenery and a shift in perspective from revenge to survival in its central plot concerns. The Green Room somehow feels less special & more pared down than Blue Ruin, but it’s still an effective thriller that never loosens its chokehold on the audience’s throat throughout its runtime thanks to an increasingly limited set of options for a positive outcome for any one of its characters, protagonist or otherwise.

Fictional hardcore punk band The Ain’t Rights (featuring Burying the Ex‘s Anton Yelchin & The Final Girls‘s Alia Shawkat among its members) are struggling to make it home from a disastrous road tour, resorting to siphoning gas & camping roadside to ease their financial desperation. Keeping their punk band ethics D.I.Y. & internet presence free, the band finds themselves in the fragile situation of playing one last gig for an isolated skinhead (ne0-Nazi) community (run by a no-nonsense, ice-cold Patrick Stewart). As soon as The Ain’t Rights open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’s classic diddy “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” the vulnerability of their situation becomes terrifyingly apparent & only gets worse as the plot thickens & the chokehold tightens. After their set The Ain’t Rights accidentally uncover a couple nasty secrets their racist/militaristic punk show hosts are hiding at their concert venue/compound and the situation snowballs into a total nightmare where they’re locked in a small, windowless dressing room with no hope for escape except an all-out bloodbath where the ill-prepared youngsters aren’t likely to survive. Spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with this kind of genre fare: most of them don’t.

If there’s a prevailing concern that drives every scene of The Green Room it’s authenticity. Scenes of D.I.Y. punk kids drinking beers, listening to records, getting dead serious about their biggest artistic influences during college radio interviews, and having out-of-body religious experiences while thrashing around in a mosh pit all feel true to the punk scene as I know/remember it, albeit without the stench of body odor that would seal the deal. Apparently The Thermals frontman Hutch Harris was brought in as a coach for this aspect of the film, which is about the cutest thing I’ve heard of since Deb Harry handed out “punk rock merit badges” to the Frog Scouts on The Muppet Show. I only have to assume that the skinhead scene is represented with the same level of authenticity, as I’ve thankfully had very few experiences with their presence at New Orleans D.I.Y. shows. I’d like to see a version of this kind of punk scene thriller without these white power monsters’ involvement, but the movie seems well-researched in their representation. At the very least it gives the same fetishistic attention to the various designations of their bootlace colors as Friedkin gave to the gay S&M scene’s handkerchief coding in Cruising.

The Green Room‘s authenticity doesn’t stop at its depictions of D.I.Y. punk culture, either. The violence is some of the most horrifically brutal, gruesome gore I’ve seen in a long while, not least of all because it’s treated with the real life severity that’s often missing in the cheap horror films that misuse it. Each disgusting kill hits with full force, never feeling like a frivolous indulgence, and the resulting tone is an oppressive cloud of unending dread. From the Dead Kennedys cover to the end credits my veins were pulsing so hard they felt as if they might explode. That’s a sign of a highly effective thriller, but it wasn’t necessarily a feeling I’d wish to return to at any point.

The Green Room amplifies the hopeless situation of Blue Ruin by confining its action to an extremely limited space & uping the potential number of lives at stake, but I couldn’t help but find the plight of Saulnier’s in-over-their-heads protagonists a little repetitive here. There are some truly great, small moments in the film (the religious experience in the mosh pit especially stands out), but in a larger context I felt it was mostly delivering a heart-racing sensation of fear & apprehension. It was intense in the moment, but felt like somewhat of a cheap thrill once I reached the relief of the end credits. As a genre picture I think The Green Room checks off all the right boxes & delivers everything you could ask for as an audience looking to cower & sweat. However, I’d love to see Saulnier switch gears in the future & push where else he can take that intensity/authenticity with an entirely different set of genre expectations.

-Brandon Ledet

Madhouse (1974)

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three star

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One of the most depressing questions I encounter in everyday conversation is “Who is Vincent Price?” It comes up more often than you’d expect. I got it when I dressed as Price’s version of The Red Death last Mardi Gras. I got it when I was working at a movie theater with a bunch of skateboarding goofballs over the past year. It’s far from cool of me to have Kids These Days moments like this when I’m still just shy of 30, but what is the deal with kids these days anyways?  What are they teaching these whippersnappers in school? Surely there’s room in the curriculum for a little Vincent Price 101. Also, I remember the days when Vincent Price movies cost half a nickel and get off my lawn.

Madhouse would be far from my first choice for titles to show the young & curious who Vincent Price was, but it is an interesting addition to the horror giant’s resume because it’s explicitly about his own celebrity. Basically playing a fictionalized version of himself, Price appears here as the aging star of a horror series centered on the wicked Dr. Death. Relying on old clips mostly pulled from Price’s collaborations with Roger Corman in the B-movie legend‘s infamous Poe Cycle (which shared a producer in Madhouse‘s Sam Arkoff, naturally) the meta horror of this film is a little weak in that it constantly reminds you of the superior work Price made in his heyday. There’s a lot of interesting details in the film’s set-up, including Hollywood satire & the idea of a masked killer framing the “real” Dr. Death by recreating kills from his various films, but that novelty eventually wears off (in favor of a Brannigan-esque trip to London) and large stretches of the movie ultimately feel punishingly dull. Anyone with a vested interest in Vincent Price’s career (or meta horror in general) might get a kick out of Madhouse, but that appeal is unlikely to be universal.

That’s not to say that the film is stylistically lacking. Madhouse seems to intentionally ape the style over substance mentality of the giallo genre, even daring to lift images directly from the works of folks like Dario Argento & Mario Bava. A gloved hand enters from off screen wielding a shiny knife intended to slash a young woman down. The faceless mannequins of Blood & Black Lace appear for an odd jump scare. A trench coat, fedora, and mask combo shroud the identity of the killer to make for a sort of murder mystery where the murder is obviously more important that the mystery. Like the giallo it mimics, Madhouse exists as a sort of proto-slasher that would predict many horror trends of the late 70s & 80s to follow. It’s just unfortunate that the space between the kills feels so dull, especially once the Hollywood satire & meta horror fade to the background.

As much as I feel deeply dispirited when one of These Damn Millenials™ doesn’t know who Vincent Price is by name, here’s where I have to admit that I don’t know much of anything about the actor outside his onscreen roles. For instance, I always assumed that he was exclusively homosexual, based mostly on his campy, fey way of performing. Although a public ally to the gay community, Price apparently was married to several women & fathered multiple children. As a fan not previously in the know about this aspect of his personal life, my favorite parts of Madhouse were the ones showing Price’s fictional surrogate interacting with women, who are driven absolutely mad with lust for him. At the beginning of the film he’s depicted as an aging, wealthy actor engaged to marry a young porn star. Late in the proceedings he develops a weird sort of domesticity with an insane woman who raises hordes of spiders as her “babies”. In between these connections there’s several young groupies fighting for the chance to be near him. What’s odd about this is aspect is the way the film criticizes the film industry’s misogyny problem while also participating in it (as most slashers do by nature). In one breath Madhouse will criticize the way young women are left by the wayside at the wrong end of slut-shaming or mere aging. In the next the film will follow that sentiment up with wonderfully bitchy exchanges like “You scared the pants off me.” “Who hasn’t?” It’s an uncomfortably compromised balance, but it does reveal aspects of Price’s personality/sexuality that I was previously unaware of, a detail I appreciated greatly.

I enjoyed Madhouse well enough as a silly little meta horror with taglines like “Lights, Camera, Murder” & as a reflection of who Vincent Price was as an oddball celebrity, but I don’t think the film would hold the same level of interest for those not already predisposed to enjoy the actor’s work/aesthetic. For folks seeking a better introduction I’d recommend checking out pretty much any one of the Roger Corman classics this film tries to pass off as Dr. Death flicks (except for maybe the incomprehensibly inept The Raven; yikes!). The man had a massively impressive career with dozens of titles that help define the best classic horror has to offer as a genre. Unfortunately, Madhouse is more of a distant echo of those works than an active participant, interesting context or not.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

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jack reacher

fourhalfstar

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“There’s something in the water that eats flesh! I said ‘eats flesh’! People!”

The 1980s were undeniably the glory days of gore in horror cinema, but they weren’t necessarily the root of extreme on-camera violence. George Romero is often credited as being the godfather of gore, ushering in the era of special effects that paid great detail to exposing the insides of horror’s actors/victims. Romero’s seminal work, The Night of The Living Dead, was released as early as 1968, well before onscreen gore reached its Reagan-era fever pitch. Before The Night of the Living Dead hit the theaters, however, it was originally titled The Night of the Flesh Eaters and subsequently changed its moniker to avoid confusion with a film simply titled The Flesh Eaters released just four years prior. The Flesh Eaters shares no resemblance with the zombie-centric plots of Romero’s Living Dead series in even the vaguest sense, but it does beat the director to the punch somewhat in terms of onscreen gore, so it’s somewhat appropriate that they almost shared a name.

The Flesh Eaters is horrifically violent for a mid-60s creature feature, paying great attention to the special effects of its blood & guts make-up. Many credit the film as being the very first example of gore horror & it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The anachronistic-feeling intrusion of extreme violence in what otherwise feels like a standard Corman-esque B-picture is beyond striking. Although I’ve seen far worse gore in films that followed in its wake, the out-of-place quality the violence has in The Flesh Eaters makes the film feel shocking & upsetting in a transgressive way. I don’t know for sure if Romero was at all inspired by The Flesh Eaters or if he even had seen it before making The Night of the Living Dead, but his work certainly wasn’t the first gore-soaked spectacle in town, not by a long shot.

A drunk movie starlet, her overworked assistant, and a cocky airplane pilot are temporarily marooned on a small, mysterious island. It’s there that they encounter a creepy scientist fella experimenting with a microscopic, weaponized life form that greedily eats human flesh clean off the bone. At first the only evidence of these tiny mutant bastards is the washed-up skeletons that arrive picked-clean on the shore. Soon they reveal themselves as tiny spots of nuclear glow that can only be described by their potential victims in the vaguest of terms: “that shiny stuff”, “that little silver stuff”, etc. Without revealing too much, I can promise that these tiny, evil, glimmering somethings eventually snowball into a much bigger, stranger problem that a small crew of shipwrecked amateurs stand very little chance of surviving.

Directed by the guy who voiced Papa Racer on the 60s Speed Racer cartoon (Jack Curtis) & partially funded by his winnings on a long-forgotten television game show, The Flesh Eaters is largely a labor of love. There are some details to what it delivers that relegates it to a camp cinema context: some nonsensical asides about Nazis, a beatnik caricature that would’ve made even the extras in Corman’s Bucket of Blood blush, some bathing suit oggling, a William Castle-style distribution gimmick in which audiences were armed with “instant blood” to feed the flesh eaters in case of attack, etc. As goofy as The Flesh Eaters can be in moments, however, what truly makes it unique is the ahead-of-its-time attention paid to its special effects. Holes are poked into film strips themselves to indicate the flesh eaters at work. Blood & gore ooze out of victims in a horrifically stark black & white. The scale of the third act mayhem far exceeds what you’d reasonably expect based on the budget. The Flesh Eaters suffered many setbacks, including years-delayed distribution & a hurricane disrupting production, but it was well worth the effort. It eventually stood as a must-see landmark of horror cinema that would in its own way predict where the genre was headed in the decades to come and it still plays remarkably fresh today because of that grotesque innovation.

-Brandon Ledet

Don Verdean (2015)

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threehalfstar

I can’t blame everyone else for not caring, but I personally want the best for Jared & Jerusha Hess. The married couple/filmmaking partners started their career as something of a novelty act with the titles Napoleon Dynamite & Nacho Libre, but their third film, Gentlemen Broncos, is a personal pet favorite of me. It’s a nerdy, delightfully misshapen work that found the Hesses embracing their inner strange in a seemingly authentic way and I’ve made it something of a personal mission of mine to shepherd the too-easily discarded film into cult classic territory. The Hesses recently seemed poised to top that success with a pair of talent-stacked comedies going into wide release the same year. Unfortunately, their Zack Galifianakis/Kristen Wiig bank heist comedy Masterminds suffered a blow when its distribution company financially collapsed & its release was shelved indefinitely. The other movie, Don Verdean, made not even the smallest splash at the theaters and quietly slipped onto streaming on Netflix with no apparent fanfare. It seems the Hess heyday is still somewhere ahead of us (unless it began & ended with the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt craze, which seems just as likely).

Again, I can’t exactly blame critics & audiences for not falling head over heel for Don Verdean. For a comedy this deeply strange & off-kilter it’s also oddly subdued, as if the Hesses were aiming to make a lowbrow version of a Coen Brothers film. Don Verdean is a screwball comedy about four snake oil-selling religious hucksters trying to make a dishonest buck in the faith industry: Sam Rockwell as the titular “archeologist” (read: artifact thief); Danny McBride as the living “miracle” Tony Lazarus (whom The Good Lord decided brought back to life so that he could marry the hooker he overdosed with & start a ministry); Will Forte as a competing minister/former High Priest of the Church of Satan; and Jemaine Clement as a con artist producer of religious artifacts both real & forged (in an unfortunate bit of Middle Eastern Jew racial caricature). All four of these dark souls are condemnable in their exploitation of religion as a racket, which may be an indication of the Mormon filmmakers Hesses’ disgust with certain, cynical factions of Evangelicals within the Christian community. The film never aims to be a satire about gigantic institutional shortcomings within organized religion’s opportunistic hucksters, however. It’s more of a character study of a small, oddly specific group of barely human weirdos who sometimes allow their thirst for financial gains & notoriety outstrip their faith in God.

I don’t think going small & narrowly focused is necessarily a problem for Don Verdean, but it’s definitely not a comedic style that’s going to grab much attention. Sam Rockwell’s quiet, oddly undignified portrayal of a past-his-prime archeologist seemingly plucked from a Chuck Norris promo VHS scrounged up by Everything Is Terrible isn’t flashy or over-the-top in any particular way. His quiet convictions, both religious & self-serving, are hilarious in their absurdity, however. His company Holy Land Investigations is in the business of searching for artifacts like the scissors that cut Samson’s hair, Lot’s wife’s salty remains, and Goliath’s rock-cracked skull and bringing them to the “USA where they belong” in order to prove that The Bible is “true”. He may not go full living cartoon at any particular moment in his performance, but there’s plenty of unreal amusement is his statements like “Finding treasure in the Earth is meaningless unless it helps someone get to Heaven who wouldn’t get there otherwise” & “What makes you think you can carbon date the wrath of the Almighty?”

Don Verdean may not be a far-reaching satire of Evangelical opportunism or an over-the-top riot of wild caricature, but I do think Jared & Jerusha Hess have a lot to say about outsized hubris and the divisions that arise between faith & financial gain in the more theatrical wings of Christianity. Their point is just quietly grounded in a muted character whose soul is just as grey-brown as the earth tone colors of his Chuck Norris cosplay. The movie only falters when it loses focus on this troubled antihero & instead follows the larger-than-life characters that color his outdated, insular world. They did a much better job of sticking to a grounded, focused POV in Gentlemen Broncos, which may help explain why that film was more artistically successful (to me anyway; neither movie was received especially well), but I still enjoyed most of what goes down here. My uncontrollable urge is to again recommend that you give Gentlemen Broncos a fighting chance, but if you already have & enjoyed what you saw, Don Verdean‘s not too shabby of a follow up. I wouldn’t be surprised if Masterminds plays out much the same way (if it ever sees the light of day in the first place). Here’s to hoping.

-Brandon Ledet

Finders Keepers (2015)

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fourstar

Roger Ebert once called cinema “a machine that generates empathy.” He explained, “It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with people who are sharing this journey with us.” It’s a quote I (and many others) return to often because it is so remarkably insightful & concise, but I don’t think it’s ever more true than it is with documentaries. Documentaries have a way of taking a subject that seems so odd or quaint from the outside & establishing the all-too-relatable, often devastatingly depressing humanity within. While a memeified YouTube clip or local news segment can reduce someone to a modern day freak show (think “Hide your kids, hide your wife” or “Ain’t nobody got time for that”), documentaries have the luxury of digging deeper beyond that detached amusement & fascination. Suddenly someone you might mock for dedicating their life to worshiping the minor pop star Tiffany or donating their penis to a museum while still alive & breathing is revealed to be a real, living person you can’t help with empathize with on some level after being confronted with their humanity.

Finders Keepers is smart in the way it consciously pulls off this trick. The film documents a bizarre case in which a small town “entrepreneur” purchases a barbecue grill from a storage unit auction only to find a human foot inside. Instead of returning the foot to its original “owner” (John Wood), the foot’s new warden (Shannon Whisnat) decides to make a media circus out of the ordeal & initiates a years-long public legal battle over the foot in order to capitalize on the minor fame it affords him. He brands himself as “The Foot Man” & charges admission to see the grill he discovered it in as a kind of morbid roadside attraction. Local news affiliates eat up Whisnat’s snake oil greedily & openly, unashamedly refer to the fiasco as a “freak show”. The film portrays the early goings on with a lighthearted “Get a load of this!” attitude that lures the audience into joining in with the gawking, lest they cast the first stone. However, the empathy machine eventually revs up & things take a very sour turn.

What at first seems like a thin story for a feature length documentary is later revealed to be something fairly nuanced & sinister. Whisnat was not only making a mockery out of a lost limb (which would honestly be bad enough in itself), but also a familial tragedy. Wood lost his foot in the same airplane crash that killed his father. The recovery from this unexpected devastation sent the deceased man’s surviving family into a spiral of abuse, addiction, stagnation, and estrangement. Where Whisnat saw an opportunity for fame & financial exploitation in an accidentally discovered foot, Wood saw a physical manifestation of grief he couldn’t process in a healthy, productive way. Even more fascinating yet, the two men had a history together as children that raises issues like petty jealousy & class politics in a documentary that initially purports to be about something much smaller & more unassuming: a foot. Finders Keepers is eager to surprise at every turn with just how complex & uncomfortable this story can get when it’s initially treated as nothing ore than a joke by the public & the media.

I missed catching Finders Keepers (among several other promising-looking documentaries) at last year’s True Orleans Film Festival, which is an opportunity I’m sad to have squandered. Watching the film with a live audience seems like it’d be a great venue for appreciating what it delivers, since its M.O. is to make you laugh, then make you feel bad for laughing, then make you laugh through the pain. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this keen of an observation on the exploitative nature of media coverage & the memeification of human beings and although the film holds up really well as afternoon Netflix viewing, I’d love to have experienced this particular empathy machine at work with a room full of strangers. I imagine the delight & discomfort would’ve both been palpable.

-Brandon Ledet

The Phantom (1996)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

campstamp

Common wisdom seems to be that the film market is currently flooded with so many comic book properties that mainstream audiences will soon be experiencing a wicked case of “superhero fatigue” and the whole Marvel/DC empire will crumble. So far I seem to be experiencing the opposite effect. All of these rampant comic book adaptations have sent me on something of a superhero tangent and I’ve been finding myself looking back to comic book cinema of the past for smaller titles I might’ve missed over the years. Sometimes this urge is a blessing, like when it lead me to Sam Raimi’s goofily masterful Darkman. In the case of The Phantom, however, I’m not so sure I’m on the right path.

Based on a comic strip that’s been running continuously to this day since the 1930s, The Phantom is a starring vehicle for 90s pop culture artifact Billy Zane. While dressed as his superhero alter ego The Phantom, Zane is decked out here in skintight purple spandex, black leather mask & boots, and a handgun he rarely touches. He also rides an immaculately white horse & keeps a gigantic wolf for a pet. Raised by Mongolian pirates 400 years in the past or some such nonsense, The Phantom is rumored to be an immortal ghost who protects the sanctity of the jungle from white archehologists & businessmen looking to plunder its resources. In the comics he does this through practical real world means (including some martial arts shamelessly designed to show off Zane’s fanny in purple spandex). The movie adds a supernatural element to the mix in some black magic skulls that can be exploited to bring on world domination. This addition threatens to make The Phantom entertaining as a campy trifle with half-assed old-world mysticism backing up its comic strip charm. Nothing significant comes of it, though, and after the novelty of seeing Billy Zane dressed up as a handsome, but deeply odd superhero wears off the rest of the film is a total bore.

The main problem with The Phantom is that it lacks any strong creative voice or soulful eccentricity required to make a comic book movie really work. Just match up your very favorite scene from this film to an 15 seconds of Darkman & you’ll see what I mean. There was a time when the legendary Joe Dante almost helmed The Phantom as a tongue-in-cheek camp fest and another where the delightfully sleazy Joel Schumacher could’ve dragged it down to the same so-bad-it’s-great depths he brought Batman & Robin (the one with the bat nipples & ice puns). Sadly, neither of those versions of The Phantom were meant to be and the film wound up in the dull, uninspired hands of the director of Free Willy & Operation Dumbo Drop. It’s easy to see how The Phantom could’ve swung in a more interesting direction. If nothing else, the slightly off performances of the spandex-clad Zane, O.G. Buffy Kristy Swanson, and a deliciously evil Catharine Zeta-Jones all feel like they belong in a much better movie (or at least a less boring one).

As with everything in criticism, my boredom with The Phantasm might’ve had a lot to do with personal taste. Once the wackier introductions to the film’s central scenario were out of the way, the movie would up playing like a second-rate version of the Indiana Jones franchise, especially in the way it mimicked the “Tune In Next Time!” structure of old, serialized action programs on the radio. There are Indiana Jones junkies out there who might be aching for more similar content to tide them over until the next inevitable reboot and those might be the only folks I’d recommend The Phantom to. Anyone who’s looking for an eccentric comic book movie here is a lot more likely to feel let down. The aspects of The Phantom that wound up fascinating me the most were more or less all related to its comic strip source material. The Phantom is credited as being the first superhero shown wearing the skintight jumpsuit that has become pretty much the standard for the genre and is often seen as a direct precursor to superhero titans like Batman, Superman, and Captain America. The artwork & narrative of the strip also has a distinct echo of the work of madman outsider Fletcher Hanks to it, especially of his character Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle.

It’s never a good sign when an adaptation is outshined this much by its source material and it seems audiences at the time of The Phantom‘s release shared wholeheartedly in my boredom. The film bombed at the box office and, despite strong VHS & DVD sales, never earned the two sequels in its originally-planned trilogy. I wouldn’t call this effect “superhero fatigue”, however. It’s more of a boring movie fatigue, as the superhero source material was the only interesting thing going for this slog, an effect that fades fast once the novelty of the live action comic strip wears off.

-Brandon Ledet

The Jungle Book (2016)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

bear

fourstar

I’ve gone on record as not being a particularly huge fan of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man movies, but it seems the director might’ve learned a thing or two about how to deliver a big budget CG spectacle while helming that franchise. Favreau’s latest effort, The Jungle Book, is a “live action” remake of a Disney animation classic & marks the director’s most impressive work to date. I put “live action” in quotes because there’s really only one live action character here existing in a computer animated world, newcomer Neel Sethi as the protagonist Mowgli, which sort of positions The Jungle Book among nostalgia-inducing titles like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and, less deservedly so, Cool World. The film intentionally cultivates this nostalgic lens through certain subtle details like a decades-old yellow font for the credits that look like they were lifted straight from an ancient VHS cassette. It’s a smart decision that eases the audience into a certain level of comfort & familiarity despite the state-the-art technical prowess on display. Again, Favreau seems to know exactly what he’s doing here, as if he’s seen it all before.

The story of The Jungle Book may be familiar to many audiences by now, but I’ve personally never read its Rudyard Kipling-penned source material & it’s been a good two decades since I’ve seen the Disney original, so I honestly didn’t remember jack shit about it going in. The only detail of The Jungle Book that was clear to me when I entered the theater yesterday was the character Baloo’s personal anthem “Bear Necessities”. Indeed, the modern version of this story doesn’t truly come alive until Baloo’s personal laid back huckster philosophy enters the scene. Early depictions of the lovable scamp Mowgli interacting with various animals of the jungle (after being raised by a pack of wolves like a little badass) range from cute to terrifying to majestic, but also lack a distinct personality & emotional pallet that Baloo brings to the table. The Jungle Book is a two-fold tale of revenge (one for Mowgli & one for the wicked tiger Shere Khan) as well as a classic coming of age story about a hero finding their place in the world, but those plot machinations are somewhat insignificant in comparison to the emotional core of Baloo’s close friendship with Mowgli (which develops a little quickly here; I’d like to have seen it given a little more room to breathe). So much of that impact rests on the all-too-capable shoulders of one Bill Murray, who delivers his best performance in years here (outside maybe his collaborations with Wes Anderson).

You might think that performance wouldn’t matter so much in a film populated with CG animals, but part of what makes The Jungle Book such a technical marvel is how realistic the animal faces are while still retaining the expressive qualities of the actors who voice them. The film essentially looks like those nature-themed t-shirts you can only seem to buy at national parks & gun shows come to life, but it’s the motion capture technology that adds a whole other layer of awe to the film’s visuals. Lupita Nyong’o is very sweet as the wolf mother Rashka who tells who tells Mowgli things like “No matter where you go or what they call you, you will always be my son.” Christopher Walken is wonderfully bizarre as the mythically gigantic orangutan King Louie (I’m guessing his uncomfortable turn as Captain Hook last year was a kind of dry run?). ScarJo & Idris Elba are both effectively terrifying in their respective roles as a murderous snake & tiger (with Johansson more or less combining her parts in Her & Under the Skin on her end). None impress quite as much as Murray does here as the con artist bear Baloo, however. Just look at his Harry and the Hendersons moment when he has to push Mowgli away despite his deep affection and you’ll find more pathos in those thirty seconds than most of the rest of the film could carry with all the time in the world. Murray has always been exceptional in his interactions with children on camera & his casting here was a brilliant choice that elevated the material greatly in terms of emotional impact.

That being said, I do feel there was somewhat of an emotional deficit at work here that made The Jungle Book more of a technical achievement than an all-around cinematic one. This was the most awe-inspiring depiction of talking animals I can think of since George Miller’s Babe (and one of the best depictions of animal coexistence politics since Babe 2: Pig in the City), but it didn’t quite reach Babe’s emotionally impactful penchant for drama. I could easily recommend The Jungle Book the same way I’d recommend a Hugo or a Dredd. You have to see this movie in the theater. You have to see it in 3D. I just don’t think it commands quite the same emotional weight as some of Disney’s more pointed work, with Zootopia being a great example from earlier this year. I should note that I might’ve been a little distracted by exceptionally poor movie theater etiquette at the particular screening I attended (screaming children, repetitive Facebooking, 4/20 bros acting unruly, the full gamut), but my emotional detachment from the film still remains true. It was beautiful to look at & Baloo made it fun, but I wish it had hit me harder square in the feelings.

It’s also worth mentioning, because it’s such an unfamiliar reaction for me, that the end credits for the film might’ve been my favorite part of the whole ordeal. The obnoxious crowd scuttled out of the theater & left me mostly alone with a beautiful pop-up book animation on a blue velvet background that made excellent use of the 3D technology on hand by playing with depth & scale. Walken’s weirdo performance also returned to serenade the (mostly empty) crowd with more New Orleans-inspired tunage and that oddly nostalgic yellow font returned to make me feel warm & fuzzy for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint. All that was missing was some extra Bill Murray content. It sounds kind of vapid to say, but the end credits in itself seemed to position The Jungle Book as a huge advancement in cinema’s visual tools, with encouraging implications as to how that advancement could be applied in a meticulously manicured art film (once it’s more affordable/accessible). The film was visually fascinating & at times wildly fun, but for the most part it just made me excited about the future of movies in general.

-Brandon Ledet