reviews

Rubber (2011)

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threehalfstar

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“This is the first time in my life I’ve identified with a tire.”

In the late 90s & early 00s Quentin Dupieux was making electronica records & puppet-starring music videos under the moniker Mr. Oizo. He’s since developed the visual end (the much more interesting dynamic to me) of that project into a career as a full-blown filmmaker. I’ve yet to see any of Dupieux’s other works, but it’s very easy to see Mr Oizo’s (and his puppet surrogate Flat Eric’s felt-covered) fingerprints all over his most widely known film to date, Rubber. Rubber is, in essence, a work of puppetry. A horror comedy about a sentient, killer car tire with psychokinetic abilities, Rubber is puppetry in its most basic sense: it brings an inanimate object to life & supplies it with a personality. Rubber‘s car tire protagonist/antagonist might not be easily recognizable as a traditional puppet, but it’s easy to see an A-B connection between the irreverent puppetry of the film & Dupieux’s past work as Mr. Oizo/Flat Eric. Local mainstay Miss Pussycat might be a more logical path of lineage for Mr. Oizo, but Dupieux has certainly not left those puppet-centric music video roots in his past.

A full-length feature film about a killer car tire might sound a little narratively thin to wholly succeed, but Rubber sidesteps that concern by adding a second plot line concerning meta audience participation to its formula. Rubber is not only an unnecessarily gritty/gory version of the classic short film The Red Balloon; its also a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the audience who would want to see such a gratuitous triviality in the first place. A car tire comes to life & immediately learns to kill after it figures out how to roll on its own treads. After crushing bugs & trash under its light weight, the tire moves onto telekinetically exploding human heads like that one .gif from Cronenberg’s Scanners continuously playing on loop. The only thing that could stop this depraved nonsense is if the meta audience surrogate, a mysterious group of binoculars-equipped onlookers, would just simply stop paying attention. Rubber’s central message seems to be very much in line with that of the Treehouse of Horror segment “Attack of the Fifty Foot Eyesores“. If we don’t want to see any more films this inane, cruel, and unnecessary, we need to stop paying them attention.

Of course, I do enjoy watching things this inane & gratuitous, which is largely what Dupieux is depending on. My favorite parts of the film are the moments when the tire is doing things even more unnecessary than rolling on its own volition or exploding heads with its “mind”: it sleeps, it drinks, it watches television, it peeps in on girls in the shower, it stares in abject horror at a mass grave/tire fire, etc. It takes a certain appreciation of for-its-own-sake-absurdity and/or impossibly dumb horror schlock to enjoy the film for what it is, but Rubber does come off as eager to amuse once you get on its wavelength. The smartest thing Dupieux does with Rubber is to open the film with a fourth wall-breaking mission statement that ponders “In Steven Spielberg’s E.T. why is the alien brown? No reason […] In Oliver Stone’s JFK, why is the president suddenly assassinated by some stranger? No reason,” and goes on to declare “All great films, without exception, contain an important element of ‘no reason’. And you know what? It’s because life is filled with ‘no reason’. The film you are about to see today is an homage to ‘no reason’, the most powerful element of style.” If you’re amused & not violently rolling your eyes at the sentiment of that quote, chances are you’ll have a similar to reaction to Rubber as a whole. All else abandon ship.

Even with all of Rubber‘s stray meta-philosophical tendencies (which are never taken too seriously), Dupieux sticks to a strict doctrine of ‘no reason’. There’s no entertainment value or general purpose to this film about a killer car tire other than the perverse pleasure of watching a film about a killer car tire. It’s the kind of the same joy you could pull from watching a yellow felt puppet file paper work, drive a car, or shill for Levi’s jeans to a groovy beat. It doesn’t need a reason beyond its own very existence.

-Brandon Ledet

The Brothers Grimsby (2016)

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three star

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“When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people — that kind of iconoclasm.” –Steve Martin

By all means, I should’ve hated The Brothers Grimsby with a fiery passion. It’s a cruel, crass, derivative work that turns the phrase “sophomoric humor” into a badge of honor & a mission statement. Still, I found myself quietly rooting for Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest work of depraved triviality. The film managed to pull a few hearty laughs out of me in some of its isolated gags and when a joke fell horrifically, sometimes offensively flat I felt sorta bad for the movie instead of turning against it. Since The Dictator was released upon a nonplussed world in 2012, the looming question has been if Cohen’s politically pointed shock humor shtick has become stale or if his audience has merely outgrown him as he has stubbornly refused to grow with them. I’m not sure what the correct answer is in that dichotomy (or if those two explanations are even mutually exclusive), but as a fan of Cohen’s Ali G/Borat/Brüno glory days I’m not yet willing to let him vanish into the ether. I sincerely want Cohen to return to relevant, pointed work that can carry his particular brand of cynical silliness into 2010s longevity. The Brothers Grimsby is by no means that return to form, but my desperate desire to see Cohen do well again might explain why I was soft on its many, many flaws.

Of all the various characters Cohen has played over the years, The Brothers Grimsby‘s Nobby Butcher might be the least defined. A drunk soccer hooligan from the working class community of Grimsby, England, Nobby is essentially a poverty-bound buffoon with little to no character nuance. Picture a version of Idiocracy set in the UK & you pretty much get the full picture. Nobby has “too many” children. He’s eternally intoxicated. He’s prone to anally inserting lit fireworks to impress his pub buddies, yet is an unrepentant homophobe. In his own words, Nobby is “working class scum.” There’s nothing remotely real or human about his character that could make you fall for him in any empathetic sense the same way you could for Melissa McCarthy’s somewhat similar titular character in Tammy. Nobby exists purely to prove a point, which may have worked if he were employed in the same candid camera prank mockumentary format as the Borat & Brüno movies. In a fictionalized setting, however, his paper thin, archetypal qualities fall flat the same way they did in The Dictator & The Ali G Movie.

The aspect that almost saves The Brothers Grimsby from total vapidity is Nobby’s relationship with the other Butcher brother, Sebastian. Sebastian is a Jason Statham-type superspy baldy with a chip on his shoulder & a license to kill. Nobby is hell-bent on reuniting with his much more posh brother & reminding him of his humble Grimsby roots. Sebastian’s half of The Brothers Grimsby functions well enough as a cheap-end action thriller, even giving a fairly decent preview of the dizzying-looking 1st person shooter flick Hardcore Henry that’s barreling towards us in the coming months. When Nobby starts to get involved, the film takes a turn for superspy spoofery that pales in comparison to countless comedies that have done it better in the past, most notably last year’s Spy (another McCarthy vehicle; perhaps these two should collaborate; Cohen might learn a thing or two). It’s not the superspy spoofery that threatens to elevate The Brothers Grimsby, though. It’s the familial bond between the Butcher boys. There’s real pain in their separation-anxious childhood flashbacks. Watching them reconnect is even more touching (sometimes graphically so). I never would’ve expected that a film featuring untold gallons of elephant semen would center on a message as sweet as “Family is the greatest gift in life”, but it’s that very aspect of The Brothers Grimsby that provides a window into a better world where Cohen could possibly become lovable again.

Speaking of elephant semen, The Brothers Grimsby seems intentionally dead-set on outdoing Freddy Got Fingered on sheer volume of the stuff. That’s not the only way Freddy Got Fingered functions as a telling reference point for The Brothers Grimsby either. In the hellish version of reality where every movie is a sophomoric, depraved work of delirious slapstick comedy, Freddy Got Fingered is Citizen Kane & The Brothers Grimsby is Forrest Gump. It’s almost good, far from great, and sure to send plenty of discerning, right-minded folks into a huff at the mere mention of its name. In the slightly less horrific world we actually live in, The Brothers Grimsby is more in line with scatologically-obsessed, entirely forgettable flicks like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star.  Dumb-comedy apologists (myself included) might find a surprising amount of entertainment value in there somewhere, but no one’s seriously going to bat to defend it against the flood of negative criticism it assuredly deserves.

Roger Ebert once wrote “The day may come when ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.” There is no such doubt about the future of The Brothers Grimsby, which is never quite irreverent enough to touch on formal surrealism & also wholly dedicated to punching-down humor. Jokes about AIDS, Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, poop, child molestation, crack addiction, non-consensual genital contact, small town poverty and, yes, elephant semen are disappointingly cheap & forgettable, greatly distracting from the very few things the film actually, improbably gets right. If Cohen wants to stick around any longer in any semblance of relevance, he’d be smart to keep The Brothers Grimsby‘s emotional core & knack for deliriously silly diversion, leaving his misanthropic cruelty & scatological fascination in the rear-view. Otherwise, he’ll become as stale & regrettable as titles like South Park & “Two Girls, One Cup”, which are both all-too-appropriately referenced in the film. A small glimmer of hope is still out there for Cohen to grow as an artist & join us in the 2010s, but it’s fading fast.

-Brandon Ledet

Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell (1987)

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threehalfstar

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Way, way back in the magical time of the 1980s, VHS cassettes opened up a new, exciting world where films could suddenly be copied & distributed among nerdy weridos looking to sidestep the interference (and profits) of the movie studios that owned them. That role has, obviously, been filled by the Internet in recent years, so it’s hard to imagine just how exciting this development was at the time. It was suddenly dirt cheap for independent producers to churn out schlock & put it directly in the hands of fans. Special interest markets like skateboarders & pro wrestling nerds all of a sudden had a way to record & distribute their favorite content among like-minded geeks. Not only was a new market of nerdom opened for media junkies that allowed them to trade & curate content once impossible to own at home, but there was an element of danger & piracy involved in the process, which afforded the underground video market the same inherently dorky cool as phrases like “the dark web”.

Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell could have only existed in this sleazily magical time when underground VHS trading was a dangerous-feeling form of nerdy fun. Less of a documentary & more of a straight-forward compilation, Prevues from Hell assembles a montage of movie trailers from horror’s drive-in, grindhouse era. It’s an endless assault of in-bad-taste horror advertising from the 1970s loosely stapled together by stale comedy bits that should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever caught a television broadcast hosted by an Elvira or Morgus-type. The film seemingly assembles every Fangoria & Rick Baker fan in Pennsylvania in an ancient cinema to serve as the audience for this cavalcade of schlock trailers & evil ventriloquist-MC’d wraparound segments. The monster make-up is fairly top notch for a straight-to-VHS horror compilation, but this connective tissue is ultimately a painfully corny diversion from the film’s main attraction: advertisements for long-gone coming attractions. That is, unless someone really, really wanted to see gags like a dummy handing his ventriloquist operator a severed finger & quipping, “Get it? I’m giving you the finger! I’m giving you the finger!”

As for the film trailers included in Prevues from Hell, there’s an interesting variety on display: cult classics with wide appeal (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Night of the Living Dead, Argento’s Deep Red, De Palma’s Sisters); grotesque films I wish I could erase from my memory (The Wizard of Gore, 2000 Maniacs, The Last House on the Left); forgotten gems I’d love to track down (The Corpse Grinders, Cannibal Girls, Flesh Feast); and nasty-looking works of depravity you’d have to pay me to watch (Africa: Blood & Guts, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, etc.). The most interesting thing the film’s endless montage of grindhouse trailers does is set up Prevues from Hell as a cultural relic from two separate eras of cult cinema. It’s not only an artifact of the underground VHS trading era of the 80s & 90s; it’s also a comprehensive tour of the carnie huckster style of advertising that defined the drive-in era of horror trailers. A lot of schlock producers at the time threw all of their weight into the advertising end of their product, promising the world in the trailers & having very little pressure to actually deliver a quality product once tickets were purchased. The claims in these ads are outrageous: “The most blood-chilling motion picture you’ve ever seen!” “The most shocking ordeal ever permitted onscreen!” “The world’s first horror movie made in hallucinogenic hypno-vision!” The spirit of larger than life hucksters like William Castle & David Friedman are alive in every ad. Any one of these producers could’ve enjoyed a second life as a self-hyped politician. And, sadly, because these trailers are primarily from horror’s nastiest era, the 1970s, they do a pretty good job representing the gleeful depictions of sexual assault that make a lot of these works much more enjoyable to digest in 90 second clips that they’d be as full-length films.

Of course, everything about Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell is obsolete in 2016. You could most likely find each & every one of these trailers (if not the films in their entirety) uploaded to YouTube in some form and a very helpful Letterboxd user has assembled the full list of titles the film compiled so you don’t even have to bother with the corny wraparound segments to track down what made the cut. Modern documentaries like Corman’s World & Electric Boogaloo that function like similarly-minded schlock clip compilations provide enough talking head interviews & historical context to make their trips down horror advertising memory lane worthwhile in an informational sense, but Prevues from Hell provides no such context. For instance, who is Mad Ron? Although he’s shown twice in the film I honestly have no idea who he is or what he contributed to the production. Does he own the theater where this was filmed? Is that how he obtained the trailer reels on display? Does that even matter? Prevues from Hell is only an educational experience in that it’s a glimpse into two long-gone eras of horror’s past: the grindhouse drive-in 70s & the underground video swap 80s. Otherwise, you’re probably better off skimming YouTube & assembling your own Prevues from Hell off the cuff.

-Brandon Ledet

Love (2015)

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three star

Browsing through John Waters’s Top Films of 2015 list (which included personal favorites Tangerine & The Diary of a Teenage Girl! whoo!), I was reminded of a film I was once mildly interested in, but had since completely forgotten: Gaspar Noé‘s Love. I’m not typically a fan of Noé‘s work. His provocateur tendency for shock value & Max Landis-levels of insufferable public persona usually keep me away from rushing to check out his work. Waters has a way of getting me to scope properties far outside my comfort zone, though (Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip comes to mind). His blurb for Love made the film feel near impossible to resist: “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D, no less. Thank God for Gaspar Noé.” With a byline like that from The Pope of Trash himself, I figured Love was worth a gander no matter how little patience I have for Noé’s personality.

Love is an erotic drama featuring not one, but two overriding gimmicks: 3D & unsimulated sex. Whether the film is a heartfelt indie drama that approaches high art in its fearless depiction of human sexuality or a well-manicured HD porno with a nice soundtrack is mostly up to the audience. Director Gaspar Noé certainly didn’t distance himself from the porno accusation. He was quoted before the film’s release as saying, “With my next film I hope guys will have erections and girls will get wet.” Sounds like porn to me. In modern film naked breasts are plentiful, but erect penises are . . . hard to come by. Whether or not Noé is aiming for pure shock value, you have to admit that there’s something unique about an art house drama that not only starts with an unflinching depiction of mutual masturbation in its very first frame, but also features an erect penis twice ejaculating directly onto the camera lens (“in 3-D no less!”). However, it’s difficult to claim that the film purely exists for titillation. Only 15 or so minutes of the film’s 135 minute runtime are hardcore sex (though those 15 minutes obviously make a massive impact) and the drama that surrounds that pornographic material is far too sad to be sexually stimulating. The truth is, of course, that Love exists somewhere between those two extremes, high art & cheap porn, and that push & pull is partly what makes the film an interesting work.

The trouble with Love, unfortunately, is that its central drama isn’t nearly as engaging as its hardcore 3D sex gimmick. Noé positions himself as something of an indie circuit carnie huckster here: he promises the greatest show on Earth with a cavalcade of fleshy delights, but once you’re in the tent he has already separated you from your dollars & has very little pressure to deliver the goods. Our fearless protagonist in this particular 3D sex circus is a selfish asshole of a film student emotionally stuck between two women he doesn’t deserve: the mother of his child & an ex-girlfriend he cheated on to produce that child. When he discovers that his ex (who has a history of self harm & substance abuse) has been missing for months, he takes a drug-addled trip down memory lane, ignoring his current family unit so that he can mentally relive his glory days of vicious break-ups, drug-fueled arguments, and, of course, rampant forays into sexual bliss & discord that he experienced with the one who got away. He imagines that his life would’ve been better if he never split with his now-missing ex, but never takes personal responsibility for how shitty things turned out, when it was most certainly his fault. Worse, his disregard & negativity towards his current relationship shows the pattern repeating itself and when the mother of his child spits “Take care of your past while I take care of your future” it’s all too apparent where their own romantic bond is heading. The sad thing is that he’ll probably regret that break as well & find anyone but he person responsible, himself, to blame for it. His negativity & selfishness are purely toxic. God help anyone who loves him.

It’s just as difficult to pinpoint exactly how you’re supposed to feel about Love‘s protagonist as it is to decide where the film falls on the art/pornography divide. He’s a selfish ass, prone to sexist remarks like “Living with a woman’s like sharing bed with the CIA” or calling the supposed love of his life variations of “whore”, “cunt”, “bitch”, etc. He also uses transphobic language in a scene that felt like it would’ve been uncomfortable as far back as the 90s, but even Noé himself has referred to the actress in that scene as a “tranny” in his interviews. Gaspar Noé aligns himself so closely with the protagonist that it’s impossible to separate them. Murphy is an idealist film student who wants “to make movies out of blood, sperm, and tears” & “make a movie that depicts sentimental sensuality.” I’m not sure Love accomplishes either of those goals (except maybe the part about the semen), but those sentiments really do feel like a mission statement directly from the horse’s mouth. The question is if Noé is living out his own romantic bitterness on screen here or skewering himself for indulging in that bitterness & self-absorption in the first place. I don’t have an answer,but I will say that this aspect of the film isn’t nearly as interesting as its salacious carnie gimmickry. Its story is pitifully thin, drawn out, and overlong. No matter what Noé was trying to say with his romantic navel-gazing, what he ended up proving was that the least interesting thing about Gaspar Noé films is Gaspar Noé himself.

By all means, Love shouldn’t be a likeable film. Its director is something of a self-indulgent ass. Its acting isn’t anything special, which is a major problem for a romantic drama built on emotional performance. Its dialogue can be laughably awful, especially in Murphy’s internal monologues that include statements like “I’m a loser. Yeah, just a dick. A Dick only has one purpose: to fuck. And I fucked it all up.” Ugh. Its electric guitar solo soundtrack often spoils the mood of its erotic moments with unbearable cheese. Themes are drilled home in obvious, self-congratulatory ways, such as when a title card explains the definition of Murphy’s Law (because the protagonist’s name is Murphy! get it?!). Still, Noé sets this paper thin, self-indulgent narrative to an interesting enough visual language that it’s impossible to brush it off entirely as an empty exercise. Beds are colorful voids playfully shot form above as the hardcore sex sessions they host play out in a frank, striking manner. The film’s drug use isn’t particularly interesting by its mere existence, but they do lead to interesting psychedelic images made of flashing lights & 3D ejaculate that afford the film a unique look. The same dream logic of haunting memories that elevated the relatively week narrative of the VHS slasher Sorority House Massacre work their wonders here in an interesting way as well. A tour through a European swinger’s club is treated with the same sex  church reverence as the gorgeous Atlanta strip club sequence of Magic Mike XXL. The stark, alternating lights of dance clubs & bedrooms can be downright hypnotic. Love might be riding on the novelty of its hedonistic 3D sex gimmick, but it does it well enough not to lose your attention before the credits roll.

If Gaspar Noé was trying to break any special sort of ground here, I don’t believe he accomplished his goal. Much like history’s first 3D feature film, Bwana Devil, Love talks a big game about delivering a one of a kind spectacle, but ultimately ends up feeling like so, so many works that came before it . . . just in 3D. I’m not sure, for instance, that the world needed another indie drama about how monogamous jealousy & fear of polygamy can ruin long-term relationships. That story’s been told before with much more interesting nuance in its character & narrative beats. As far as the hardcore, unsimulated sex goes, 2014’s French sex thriller Stranger by the Lake indulged in the same pornographic impulses, but had a lot more to say about the push & pull between lust & companionship. I honestly believe that John Waters has made the best case for Love’s position as a groundbreaking work of cinema. It truly is “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D.” That much is true (although it’s possible Mr. Waters mistook some of the film’s cunnilingus for rimming). Even if that’s all the film accomplished I still enjoyed moments where it desperately reached for more, Gaspar Noé‘s obnoxious personality notwithstanding.

-Brandon Ledet

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

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disaster

fourstar

One thing that’s always disturbed me about “doomsday preppers” & “survival” enthusiasts is that they always seem to be perversely looking forward to the post-apocalyptic scenarios they’re supposedly preparing against. When preppers warn of possible end-of-the-world scenarios that will tear society to shreds, the first thing that always comes to mind is the question “Who would want to survive that?” Whether the world as I know it ends by zombie outbreak, alien attack, or (most likely) nuclear fallout, I’d honestly rather die that pick through the wreckage with the paranoid, power-hungry bullies who had been anticipating that downfall. Apparently I’m not alone in that opinion.

10 Cloverfield Lane is less of a “sister film” sequel to the (shrill, annoying, insufferable) 2008 found-footage sci-fi horror Cloverfield & more of a tense, horror-minded thriller about the monstrous spirit lurking within doomsday prepper culture. I’m not sure that it’s the first film to depict the selfish nastiness & misanthropy at the heart of “survival” types in the context of the horror genre, but it’s the first I’ve seen and it’s damn effective. After a brutal car accident, a young New Orleans woman (played by Faults‘s un-deprogrammable cult fanatic & Scott Pilgrim’s mall punk girlfriend Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself chained to the wall of a mysterious basement wearing only her underwear. Her captor (played by a beyond terrifying John Goodman in what might be a career-high performance) attempts to convince her that she’s “lucky” to be contained in his bunker because “there’s been an attack” & “everyone outside [the shelter] is dead.” Skeptical of her captor’s “generosity” & the idea that “getting out of [there] is the last thing [they] want to do”, our hero carefully attempts to piece together exactly what the strange man wants her for, what’s waiting for her in the outside world, and what’s her safest, most expedient form of escape. 10 Cloverfield Lane keeps the answers to these questions shrouded for as long as possible, but one thing is certain throughout: whatever monstrous threat is waiting outside the shelter could not be has as awful as the one running the show within.

Part of the reason 10 Cloverfield Lane is such a great film is that it’s the exact opposite of its predecessor. Ditching the shaky cam blur that made Cloverfield such a nauseous mess, the film adopts a very grounded, straight-forward visual style that recalls William Friedkin’s masterful stage play adaptations Bug, The Birthday Party, and The Boys in the Band. More importantly, the first Cloverfield film never developed its characters beyond shrill archetypes fleeing danger. When someone’s endlessly shrieking “Rob’s got Beth on the phone! Rob’s got Beth on the phone!” and you don’t know or care who Rob & Beth are, it’s difficult to be anything but annoyed. 10 Cloverfield Lane, by contrast, locks its audience in a basement with a small cast of fearful doomsday survivors suffering under the power dynamics of the cycles of abuse. It’s much easier to be engaged by a film on an emotional level in that kind of scenario.

There is something very essential that both Cloverfield films share, however: the overwhelming power of their central mysteries. If these two films are to be understood as a loose anthology, it’s the basic trick of keeping the audience in the dark that binds them. 10 Cloverfield Lane ups the ante by not only clouding the truth about what exact outside force is looming as a threat over its proceedings (zombies, Russians, Martians, nuclear war, and mutant space worms are all suggested at some point), but also introducing a complexly monstrous threat from within the characters’ ranks that is simultaneously abusive, protective, and difficult to understand. The film’s woman-in-captivity terror is far from unique (actually, it seems to be somewhat of a full-blown trend recently) but the way its Stockholm syndrome familial bonds & doomsday prepper cultural context complicates that narrative allows the film to crawl under your skin in a way that its predecessor never even approached, whether or not its threat was just as mysterious. All of this, a go-for-broke third act that throws all caution to the wind, an expert use of the Shondells classic “I Think We’re Alone Now” to boot. 10 Cloverfield Lane shook me, surprised me, and confirmed my deepest fears about “survival” nuts’ ugly thirst for post-apocalyptic power grabs. That’s far more than I could’ve expected from a “spiritual sequel” to a found footage horror I failed to enjoy all three times I gave it a shot.

-Brandon Ledet

Circle (2015)

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threehalfstar

If there’s an Achilles heel for hard sci-fi it’s that the ideas are often bigger than the narrative. Cheaper-end sci-fi writers often sink a lot of their attention into what’s happening to their characters without ever addressing why anyone should care that it’s happening. Last year’s sound stage sci-fi feature Circle is the height of big-ideas-over-character-development genre work. Essentially a Twilight Zone premise stretched to feature length, Circle is a glorified table read featuring fifty archetypal characters standing in a . . . circle & talking each other through a philosophical/supernatural crisis. Each character functions to serve the story, not the other way around, so if you’re going to enjoy the film it has to be on an intellectual level, not an emotional one. Good thing for Circle that its ideas are interesting enough to carry its breezy 87 minute runtime on their back without any real support from its faceless chess piece personalities.

Fifty strangers wake to find themselves standing on a circular board game-esque platform with no real explanation of how or why they arrived there. It quickly becomes apparent that they’ve been assembled to play a sadistic kind of game, a philosophical social experiment. At one or two minute intervals the circle removes a piece from the board, i.e. zaps someone to death. The characters soon discover that they are anonymously voting as a group on who will die next. A lot of finger-pointing, lying, begging, manipulation, and hateful prejudice (racism, classism, homophobia, the whole gamut) turns this already dire situation even uglier as their ranks become increasingly thin. Philosophical questions about whose life should be valued over others’ (whether it be for age, sexuality, criminal past, what they “contribute to society”, etc.) are asked until they reach their logical end- or until the more desperately conniving players decide to gang up & save their own skin.

I won’t ruin the details of who survives Circle‘s deadly sci-fi board game, since the process of elimination is where most of the film’s entertainment value lies. I will say, though, that the film ultimately reaches a satisfying conclusion worthy of the shocking reveals of its Twilight Zone roots. It’s generally obvious who will die next in the moment when it’s happening. For instance, if someone says something overtly racist or homophobic it’s typically a given that they’ll be the next player zapped to death (which is entertaining in its own way). However, as the film gets uglier in its interpersonal conflict the kills get increasingly unpredictable and the looming question of who or what is behind the mysterious circle’s origin becomes increasingly fascinating.

Beyond what the film does or doesn’t accomplish narratively, Circle does a good job of distinguishing its own sense of style despite its obviously limited budget. Filmed in a black sound stage void, the movie somewhat resembles the music video for Battles’s 2007 indie hit “Atlas“. Its soundtrack of atmospheric drone & 360° camera spinning can be downright eerie in their own right and the emptiness of its set ultimately serves the abstract philosophy of its narrative by highlighting the dialogue as a focal point. Again, this is a film that survives on the strength of its ideas, which are plotted out in an interesting enough structure to keep your mind active & engaged throughout. Calling to mind both the similarly-minded supernatural horror Devil & real-life social experiments like The Stanford Prison Study, Circle is a perfectly entertaining exercise in ideas-over-characterization sci-fi writing.

-Brandon Ledet

The Forbidden Room (2015)

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threehalfstar

Ever since I saw director Guy Maddin’s dark absurdist comedy The Saddest Music in the World in the mid-2000s I’ve been trying to make sense of his visual aesthetic, which is a strange form of collage that uses intentionally-degraded film & analog effects to create an ancient world of “lost”, “forgotten” cinema that probably never existed. Last week, the simple act of Netflix browsing helped me break the code. After watching animator Don Hertzfeldt’s Oscar-nominated short World of Tomorrow in close proximity with Maddin’s latest work, The Forbidden Room, I feel like I’ve finally found a point of reference for where Maddin’s coming from as an auteur. Both Maddin & Hertzfeldt seem to be operating in similar realms of visual collage, just ones separated by the live-action/animation divide. Both directors also have a propensity for mixing highbrow technical achievements with surprisingly childish (or at the very least absurdist) humor that undercuts any potential pretension. Thinking of Maddin as the live-action Hertzfeldt opened a lot of doors for me in understanding his work, as Hertzfeldt’s early works Rejected & Billy’s Balloon made a huge impact on me in my high school years & have stuck with me ever since.

Understanding a basic context or comparison point for Maddin is one thing, but trying to get a full grasp on his work in any particular sense is a much more futile exercise. The Forbidden Room is, in a lot of ways, pure Maddin aesthetic with little to no consideration given to purpose or accessibility. The film is funny, strange, visually astonishing, but purely there to amuse itself with its very existence. The Forbidden Room is High Art with a prankster’s spirit, a feast for the eyes much more interested in juvenile humor than any specific narrative. Its a story within a story within a story within a story story structure is a pure down-the-rabbit-hole adventure, a dizzying mess of dueling timelines that individually hold less & less significance as they multiply. The film opens with the instructional short “How to Take a Bath”, a how-to guide hosted by “Marv”, who might be the least mysterious man in the world. From there the camera is flushed down the bathtub drain where it finds a submarine full of men who’re sustaining their oxygen supply by consuming the air pockets in flapjacks. It gets more convoluted & silly from there. By the time you’re in a cave inside a forest inside a submarine inside a bathtub, making sense of the film’s setting or Inception-esque narrative becomes entirely superfluous, especially since the walls dividing their individual parts become increasingly thin in the film’s second hour.

The best way to enjoy The Forbidden Room is to look for solace in its visual treats & remarkably silly humor. It’s probably wise not to worry, for instance, about why the bathtub submarine men are “protecting the blasting jelly”, but rather to have a good laugh at the purple prose of the title card that introduces them as “Four frightened men forty fathoms deep, embedded in silence, hidden from God behind the face of the sea, behind the waves that sing and flirt of the face of the sea.” And that’s one of the more highbrow gags. Another title card exclaims, after the suggestion of cunnilingus, “Within the deep pink of a cave – boggling puzzlements!” Because of its frantic visuals & silent era horror weirdness, The Forbidden Room is the kind of film destined to be projected behind some anonymous stoner metal band at a dive bar or a house party, but treating the film that way would severely undercut its weirder strains of humor. It’d be a shame, for instance, to miss the treat of hearing new wave pranksters Sparks perform an ode to the wonder of derrieres (or at least a fetishist’s love of them). The film demands to be seen with full attention at least once through. There’s nothing else quite like it.

As fascinating & as funny as The Forbidden Room can be, it’s also a grand test of patience at a whopping 130 min. I feel like Hertzfeldt’s main advantage over Maddin’s in terms of accessibility is that he works almost exclusively in short films. Even Hertzfeldt’s wonderfully twisted mental illness comedy feature film It’s Such a Beautiful Day was pieced together from a series of shorter works. Maddin’s feature-length work films might be less daunting, or at least a little easier to digest, if they came in ten minute tangents, and the director indeed mostly works within a short film format, much like Hertzfeldt. Any of The Forbidden Room‘s story within a story vignettes could’ve thrived as a standalone short film & might’ve stood as tighter, more vivid pieces with that kind of runtime limitation. Still, it’s wonderful that we have a craftsman experimenting in this kind of entirely unique (to live-action cinema, anyway) dream logic & absurdist humor visual collage. Maddin is a treasure even if his feature-length films require a great deal of work on the audience’s end. He’s worth it.

-Brandon Ledet

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2015)

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fourstar

“I do believe motion pictures are the significant art form of our time. And I think the main reason is, they’re an art form of movement, as opposed to static art forms of previous times. But another reason that they’re the preeminent art form is they’re part art and part business. They are a compromised art form, and we live in a somewhat compromised time. And I believe to be successful over the long run, unless you’re a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a true genius in filmmaking, you have to understand that you’re working in both an art and a business.” – Roger Corman

There are a few documentaries that might get me as excited about movies as an artform as Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films does (Life Itself & Corman’s World both immediately come to mind), but few elevate the finance side of the business as an artform in itself in the same way. The Israeli-born cousins/filmmakers Menahem Golan & Yoram Globus, who rose to prominence as a pair of real-life Morty Finemans in the 70s & 80s as the heads of the schlock giant Cannon Films, understood the art of finance on an intrinsic level. On the surface Electric Boogaloo is a celebration of the batshit insane catalog the team of Golan-Globus managed to build in their Cannon Films heyday, but the movie also stands as a priceless testament to the importance of turning a profit vs. the secondary concern of making fine art in the film industry. It’s impressive how many of their productions tapped into a surreal, over-the-top headspace far above the “tits & explosions” formula they aimed for, but what’s even more impressive is how these Hollywood outsiders managed to make hundreds of films for American markets in the first place. For a strange, difficult to understand time in cinema’s past, Golan-Globus & Canon films were on top of the schlock world and that success had a lot more to do with their artistry with the dollar than the artistry of what they were doing behind the camera.

The trajectory of Golan-Globus’s success in the film industry is far outside of the norm. After growing up watching American movies in Tel Aviv they started filming cheapies for the Israeli market, lucking out with a huge hit in a picture titled Lemonade Popsicle, a sort of wild teen sex romp, a precursor to Porky’s. With Golan operating the artistic end of their partnership & Globus handling the all-important finance, they decided to chase their dream of making Amercian films with this newfound success. Their first major act was to purchase the production company Cannon Films so that they’d have a sizeable back catalog of works they could sell to independent movie circuits & use the profit to produce their own work. Since their work began in the historically nastiest time for schlock, the 1970s, early Golan-Globus films are heavy on the sex & violence formula for commercial success. Even by the time they were able to produce their first Hollywood film, a sequel to the highly paranoid Charles Bronson shoot-em-up Death Wish, their films gleefully participated in the salacious depictions of sexual assault that make so many B-pictures form that era difficult to stomach. Things got better (or at least more fun) from there once Golan-Globus (foolishly) attempted to outshine major studios, striking a distribution deal with major player MGM & reaching the American movie-going public at large instead of the . . . more grizzled grindhouse crowd.

Their success obviously didn’t last forever, but it’s incredible how they found ways to survive financially in an industry that wanted nothing to do with them. In the early days they would sell a picture to distributors based on the poster & title alone and then turn around to use that profit as funding for getting the picture made at breakneck speed. They’d crank out so many movies in such a short amount of time that there was never any real pressure for a single title to be a success. Often, their plan was to sell a surefire hit as “the engine that would pull the train”, making enough money that they could finance pictures they were more excited about. This rapid production rate would ultimately be their demise as Canon Films expanded too big too fast & eventually collapsed. Golan produced too many films. Globus tied up too much money in purchasing theater chains wholesale. They collectively got too big for their britches when they tried competing with major Hollywood studios in increasingly expensive (and increasingly bizarre) film productions instead of continuing their model of making a torrent of small budget films & hoping one strikes gold. However, what’s most remarkable about Golan-Globus is that they were able to survive in their hostile industry as long as they did, not that they weren’t able to survive forever.

Of course, I can prattle all day about how fascinating the financial end of Golan-Globus’s business partnership was, but the truth is that it’s the films themselves that are the main draw for Electric Boogaloo in terms of entertainment value. The documentary gives off the distinct vibe of drunkenly searching YouTube for bizarre movie trailers after a long night of crazed barhopping. Each film feels more improbable than the last. A Blue Lagoon meets Lawrence of Arabia mashup? Sure. A melting pot Frankenstein monster of equal parts The Exorcist, Flashdance, and ninja-themed martial arts cinema? Why not. Of the few Golan-Globus titles I’ve seen I can confirm that the films are as deliciously inane as they seem from the outside looking in. Masters of the Universe, Over the Top, Invasion USA, Breakin’, Invaders from Mars . . . these are the kind of (to borrow a phrase) over-the-top messes schlock junkies hope for when their combing through B-pictures for the so-bad-it’s good variety. And for every title I’ve already seen & fallen in love with, Electric Boogaloo includes a dozen more than I’m excited to watch ASAP. Of course I want to see Hercules hurl a bear into outer space or some topless sword fighting or the wall-to-wall inanity of big budget epics like The Apple or Lifeforce. As one interviewee puts it, “What [Golan-Globus] didn’t have in taste, they made up for in enthusiasm.” Electric Boogaloo does a great job of representing this enthusiasm at every turn, making Cannon Films look like the greatest show on Earth, a runaway circus of schlock.

If there’s one moment in Electric Boogaloo that captures Golan-Globus in a nutshell, it’s the last minute revelations that the famed producers refused to be interviewed for the film & rushed to complete their own documentary on Canon Films three months prior to this one’s release. Their refusal to work within the system (or to be shut out by it), their enthusiasm for producing relative work in a short amount of time, and their shrewd business sense are all captured perfectly in that factoid. It’s a piece of trivia that’s oddly endearing & more than a little insane, the exact qualities one looks for in a Cannon classic.

-Brandon Ledet

Zootopia (2016)

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fourhalfstar

As I explained when reviewing the much-loved Inside Out last summer, I have a complicated relationship with CG animation. I typically find the medium’s general look to be uninteresting & its tendency for easy pun humor to be a relatively lazy waste of ensemble voice talent. It’s often difficult for me to differentiate between absolutely dire properties like Norm of the North & The Angry Birds Movie and more prestigious pictures like all of Pixar’s non-Cars output. Still, every now & then a film will sneak past my defenses. Despite the film’s flat, Puzzle Bobble-esque visual palette & simplistic modes of characterization, I found Inside Out to be an impressive feat in worldbuilding, a remarkably well mapped-out personification of how the inner mind acts & develops. The buzz for Inside Out was fairly massive, though (mostly due to its reputation as a Pixar release), so liking that movie wasn’t really much of a surprise. What really caught me off-guard was how much I enjoyed the latest Disney-produced CG animation Zootopia. After a horrendous ad campaign that has driven me to near-unbearable frustration with merciless repetition of its sloths-at-the-DMV gag (Get it? Because the DMV is slow! Like sloths! Haha. Ha.) & Disney directly reaching out to furries (seriously), I was prepared to hate Zootopia, or at least to brush it off as a trifle. Instead, it won me over wholesale. This is a really great, truly enjoyable film, one that even manages to feel Important without ever feeling overly didactic. Honestly, despite myself, I enjoyed it far more than I did Inside Out, which is supposedly the “smarter” picture.

The reason I enjoyed Zootopia so much is that it takes Inside Out’s meticulous attention to worldbuilding & applies it to a complicated narrative with themes that extend far beyond its own setting’s structure. Inside Out gets sort of lost in its own headspace. Zootopia maps out a metropolis-sized amusement park of interwoven, animal-themed neighborhoods (Tundra Town, The Rainforest District, etc.), but uses that intricate sense of setting as a launching pad instead of an end goal. Much like with George Miller’s surrealist classic Babe 2: Pig in the City, Zootopia follows a small animal taking on a giant metropolis far beyond her limited resources. As the film’s bunny cop protagonist navigates neighborhoods designed for animals that range in size from elephants to mice, it’s near impossible not to sit in awe of the thought & care that went into the film’s setting (or to get lost in how cute the mouse-sized miniatures can be). However, that setting isn’t the film’s main focus, but merely a platform meant to host an exploration of the film’s true focus: institutionalized racism & other forms of prejudice. Our fearless bunny cop protagonist, Officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Once Upon a Time’s Ginnifer Goodwin), attempts to earn respect in a system that doesn’t want her, repeatedly kicking in shut doors with the boundless enthusiasm of a Leslie Knope. Because of her size & heritage, her dream of being a Brannigan-esque supercop is often shot down just because she’s the wrong species. Even her parents advise her to abandon her goals, trying to sell her “the beauty of complacency” & the idea that “It’s great to have dreams just as long as you don’t believe in them.” Hopps refuses to stay in her predetermined place as a milquetoast carrot farmer, though, and pursues earning respect as an exceptional officer of the law. Her journey takes the shape of a missing person case that recalls noir-style mysteries of yesteryear & eventually dismantles (or at the very least disrupts) the very system mean to break her spirit. Officer Hopps might weave through various animal-themed neighborhoods with impressive attention to detail & constantly-shifting perspectives, but the intricate worldbuilding is meant to serve the purpose of her story, not the other way around.

As for the anti-prejudice allegory at the heart of Zootopia, it’s a metaphor that probably works best without being examined too closely. There are plenty of direct references in the film to recognizable, real-world issues (such as racial-profiling in the modern day police state & workplace politics that devalue contributions from women), but no one systemic underdog group works as a direct correlation to the film’s interspecies politics. This isn’t a film solely about racism or sexism or any other specific kind of institutionalized prejudice. It’s a film that addresses all of these issues in a more vaguely-defined dichotomy (kind of the way The X-Men have been metaphorically worked into all kinds of social issue metaphors over the decades). Zootopia structures its anti-prejudice moralizing around the way various species of “vicious” predators & “meek” prey have been conditioned to stereotype & alienate one another. Small animals can’t get giant cops to care about their misfortunes. Coded language (such as calling an animal of a more disadvantaged species “articulate” as a compliment) raise tensions between disparate groups. Well-meaning victims of prejudice are revealed to be just as guilty of wrongly (and constantly) judging a book by its cover. Zootopia is at its smartest when it vilifies a broken institution that has pitted the animals that populate its concrete jungle against one another instead of blaming the individuals influenced by that system for their problematic behavior. A lesser, more simplistic film would’ve introduced an intolerant, speciesist villain for the narrative to shame & punish. Zootopia instead points to various ways prejudice can take form even at the hands of the well-intentioned. It prompts the audience to examine their own thoughts & actions for ways they can uknowingly hurt the feelings or limit the opportunities of their fellow citizens by losing sight of the ideal that “Anyone can be anything.” It’s there that the film finds a beauty in endless diversity & a destructive force in institutionalized prejudice that both extend far beyond a cartoonishly simplified message like “racism = bad, so you shouldn’t be racist”.

It’s hard for me to say for sure if audiences, particularly children, are likely to find Zootopia funny. The gags that worked best for me were stray references to ancient media like The Godfather & REM. I was also amused to hear the always-welcome voices of Jenny Slate, Idris Elba, and Jason Bateman included in the cast (if nothing else, so that people I find entertaining could cash in on some of some of those sweet, sweet Disney dollars). For the most part, though, the film is more poignant than it is humorous. Despite what the film’s never-ending sloth DMV advertising campaign might’ve been trying to sell you, this is not a film that lives or dies by an onslaught of animal puns & exaggerated, species-based attributes. It’s much closer to the heartfelt, earnest end of the Disney spectrum. The production company/financial titan has become so adept at emotional shorthand that Zootopia had me constantly crying throughout its runtime, tearing up at the most saccharine of character beats (such as, say, a hopeful bunny rabbit defiantly ignoring her naysayers because “Anyone can be anything”) as soon as five or ten minutes in. The impressive thing is that Disney is able to wield this tonal power while both undermining the racial & gendered stereotypes of its own past and bitterly teaching the lesson that “Life isn’t a cartoon musical where you sing a song & all of your insipid dreams come true.” There were a few aspects of Zootopia that didn’t land for me: an insufferably shitty pop song performed (twice) by Shakira, a stray foxes-are-like-this-bunnies-are-like-that gag or three, some uncomfortable aspects of the anti-prejudice metaphor played for cutesy humor, etc. For the most part, though, the film is massively impressive (for a CG animation starring cute, talking animals). The attention-to-detail in its setting, the narrative stakes of its central mystery, and the overall theme of the ways institutionalized prejudice can corrupt & destroy our personal relationships all amount to a truly special, seemingly Important film. Pint-sized audiences might not squeal with laughter, but they might actually learn something a little more complex & nuanced than Inside Out’s assertion that “It’s okay to be sad sometimes” (which is a valid lesson for kids to learn, just one with a much easier path to success).

-Brandon Ledet

New City (2015)

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three star

2015 saw the ten year anniversary of the broken levees that flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The decade that’s followed this man-made disaster has brought various anxieties & concerns to the city, not least of all about the flood of transplants that have moved here during our long road to recovery. It’s easy to get bitter about the speed in which the city is changing. People move to New Orleans because they love its culture, but often try to change the city from within once they arrive. The fear is that along with positive changes like economic growth & much needed educational reform the city might be trading in its more unique cultural traditions, transforming into a modern, homogenized city no different than Anywhere Else, America.

The documentary New City bucks local negativity about the rapid changes we’ve seen post-Katrina, positing the last decade as “a renaissance” for New Orleans, playing almost like an advertisement for the direction the city is heading in. The film is relentlessly positive, countering the exhaustion & PTSD New Orleans has been struggling with in the years since the levee breach with unbridled enthusiasm about the hope that young  transplants bring to our economic landscape. There are a few voices of dissent among the film’s interviewees, but they mostly belong to barflies trapping themselves in negative thought loops. Local business owners, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, and other sober voices are selling a purely positive spin, declaring that the city is (in Landrieu’s words) “stronger & better than before”. No one is claiming that the storm’s death, destruction, and diaspora were a good thing for the city (at least I hope not), but when the loudest negative voices about post-Katrina transplants are coming from drunken rants that cover distaste for everything from President Obama to “job stealing” Hondurans, Landrieu & company’s optimism plays like a much more attractive way of thinking.

Form-wise, New City is about what you’d expect from a talking heads documentary about the current state of the city. It feels ready-made to be put in rotation on WYES (which is not at all a bad thing). The film does some interesting things with the format, though. Its aerial shots, most likely drone-operated, are very striking, inviting the audience to pull back & look at the city from a detached, distant angle. I also appreciated the way local cuisine is woven into its narrative. Narrator (and first time documentarian) Max Cusimano often exclaims things like “Let’s take a food break!” or “And now for some food porn” & values interviews from local chefs & food critics like Tom Fitzmorris & Out to Lunch‘s Peter Ricchiuti just as much as he values input from folks like the mayor. In a lot of ways, New City‘s bartstool interviews, drooling food photography, and stray footage of live music & Mardi Gras parades often work like a wordless reassurance that the city’s culture is here to stay indefinitely no matter how much or how quickly the population changes.

I’ll admit that I found certain aspects of New City‘s relentless optimism frustrating. There are entire lines of thought that the film avoids as long as possible in order to keep things posi. It takes almost 40 minutes for the doc to address people being priced out of their neighborhoods in this so-called “renaissance”. Words like “gentrification”, “Airbnb”, and “hipsters” are held off for even longer despite the severe weight they hold for locals. I also bristled at the way some interviewees valued “new, educated, business-oriented people” over undermined & underserved local talent. Even more uncomfortable was watching a Los Angeles couple gush over mix drinks with names like “levee breach” & “flood water” at a restaurant in the 9th Ward. Still, I found the film’s overall positivity to be downright infectious. My own tendencies to get defensive about who’s moving here & how they should behave once they arrive is unproductively negative & ultimately futile. New Orleans is a port city. As protective as we can be about maintaining local traditions, it’s good to keep in mind that our entire history, our very fabric is dependent upon constant influx of new faces & new ideas. This is far from our first “renaissance”.

I found myself agreeing with New City‘s the-future’s-looking-bright attitude most when it was tempered with a little caution for balance. As much as Landrieu lauds all of the new money & young talent coming through town, even he punctuates that opinion with the old adage that once you move to this city you don’t change it; it changes you. I also found myself encouraged by a bar owner’s levelheaded reminder that it’s great to have money flowing through the city that wasn’t here before the storm, but that “Money isn’t everything.” Even though I wish more of New City‘s sentiment was thoughtfully balanced in that way, it was still pleasant to see the city through the film’s hopeful eyes. At the very least, it put a lot of my own personal negativity about where the city might be headed & who’s moving here in check. I genuinely appreciated that. And when it wasn’t working for me, there was always food porn waiting to put my mind at ease.

Side note: When I watched this film on Amazon Prime there were a few sound quality issues in some of the interview footage that occasionally obscured what was being said. So, you know, that might not be the best platform to watch the film on even if it is currently the most convenient.

-Brandon Ledet