reviews

Hitman (2007)

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three star

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I’m not going to claim that Hitman is any better than your typical mindless video game adaptation, but I will admit to liking shoddy video game adaptations in general. The combination of an outlandish concept with well established, highly stylized visuals & general lack of a fully fleshed out backstory have made for some pretty fun ventures into schlock in the past: Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, etc. Well, I enjoyed those titles at least. Visually eccentric, but narratively empty properties are well-suited to the action movie format & the video game Hitman (which I’ve admittedly never played or even seen played) works pretty well as a laughably mindless shoot ’em up, all things considered.

You can’t get much more Generic Action Movie than the details of Hitman. The titular assassin, alternately known as “Agent 47”, was raised on some kind of hitman farm where young children are shaved bald, branded with barcordes, and trained to become efficient killing machines. The evil force behind this diabolical plot is (I’m not kidding) The Organization, a super-secret conglomerate with “ties to every government.” Agent 47 kills cops & criminals alike, depending on his orders, and the plot of this particular movie requires him to publicly assassinate the president of Russia, which leads to some bargain basement political intrigue & an unlikely friendship with a sex worker. Or whatever.

The plot of Hitman obviously doesn’t matter too, too much. It’s mostly a necessary inconvenience that provides a framework for the movie’s ludicrous action film charms: grotesque violence (including severed limbs & CGI blood splatter), synchronized martial arts (including an over-the-top swordfight between four of The Organization’s bald, barcoded graduates), and macho fantasy fulfillment (the sex worker sidekick is often naked for the leering camera, of course). There are a couple odd twists on the format here or there, especially in the Hitman’s asexuality, which would melt in most action movies in the face of his prostitute best friend, but holds strong here. However, the hyper-masculine vibe of the film overpowers any genre-subverting oddities, which leads to some unfortunate moments like an out-of-nowhere transphobic gag & some glaring questions about the main character’s life choices (if he’s trying to get by unnoticed, why doesn’t he wear more hats & wigs to cover up that bald head & exposed barcode?). For the most part, though, it’s as enjoyable as a Generic Action Movie can be & when Agent 47 all but promises a Hitman sequel with a winking “I hope I never see you again,” I found myself surprisingly game.

-Brandon Ledet

Shanghai Noon (2000)

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threehalfstar

(Viewed 8/15/2015, available on Netflix)

Shanghai Noon is an entertaining buddy romp that presents the Wild West through a unique lens. The main character is neither white nor American. I’d say that Shanghai Noon makes for a post-modern Western movie that deconstructs the genre, though I would hesitate to say that this is an intentional subtext, even as the movie delves into the treatment of Chinese laborers on the Intercontinental Railroad. Jackie Chan stars as Chon Wang (say it out loud . . .), trying to rescue the damsel in distress, and Owen Wilson sidekicks as Roy O’Bannon, an outlaw with an image problem.

It’s a funny and energetic movie. I trust Jackie Chan implicitly with action and humor, and he delivers. Owen Wilson brings his regular brand of self-aware goofiness and performs solidly here. The main humorous setup is along the vein of Culture Clash at the OK Corral with a side helping of Buddy Comedy, and I think that it works out well as Chon Wang explores the tropes and narratives of the cinematic Old West and Roy O’Bannon tries his hardest to not learn anything about himself.

Shanghai Noon utilizes Jackie Chan’s kinetic brand of physical humor to great effect, leaving you both impressed and laughing. He and Owen Wilson make a successful odd couple, and their relationship is the most important one in the movie. It’s clear that O’Bannon thinks that he’s the protagonist, and it’s important to his characterization that he keeps this perspective even in the face of massive evidence that he is indeed the sidekick. I wonder if there is subtext here that captures the feelings of non-Americans in a wider sense, that Americans think that everything is about them.

The romantic relationships fall weirdly flat though, as Chon Wang accidentally marries a nameless Native American woman (while blackout drunk, not ok, all right?) who silently follows the boys around and keeps them out of trouble, then eventually takes up with O’Bannon. At the end of the movie, Princess Pei Pei inexplicably falls in love with Chon Wang and presumably gives up her life of royalty to live in a frontier town as a sheriff’s wife. This romantic side is so strange to me because the women are presented as powerful on their own, and then just seem link up with the men because it makes for tidy ending. The Native woman takes on the classical Western roll of the Man with No Name and saves the day time after time as Chon Wang and O’Bannon bumble along. Princess Pei Pei is noble, strong, courageous and self determined as she tries to balance her own desires and her role as a leader. Were the romantic subplots really necessary?

I’d recommend this movie on its own merits as fun and entertaining, perfect for a bowl of popcorn and not having to think about anything. I think that you could also work it into any list of Jackie Chan movies since it’s a good example of an American production that fully utilizes his skills in both action and comedy. It would also be of particular interest to anyone looking at deconstructive or post-modern Westerns, or looking at comic Westerns as a genre.

-Erin Kinchen

4 mosche di veluto grigio (aka Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971)

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see no evil

onestar

No matter how you slice it–no pun intended–4 mosche di veluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) is a weird, sloppy mess, even for a Dario Argento film. The final part of Argento’s so-called animal trilogy, Flies was released just ten months after The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and the movie follows a horribly unlikable protagonist who is being stalked and harassed by a killer in a mask. Oh, also, the protagonist is a killer. Well, not really. I should explain, and I will try. Be warned: this review is chock full of spoilers, but it will save you the trouble of sitting through this stinker.

As the film opens, a drummer in a standard early seventies rock band, Roberto (Michael Brandon), realizes that he is being followed by a cloaked man. After practice, he follows the man to an abandoned opera house, where an altercation ensues and Robert stabs the man with his own knife. Roberto is then photographed standing over the man’s body with the knife. The following day, he receives the stabbed man’s identification in the mail. Then he and his bandmates have a party! Roberto goes to change a record, and finds a photograph taken during the previous night’s incident between two albums. He remains completely unaffected, either by the fact that he killed someone or that he’s getting the I Know What You Did Last NIGHT treatment. He finally tells his wife, Nina (Mimsy Farmer), what happened after he is nearly strangled in their living room in the middle of the night; she is understandably disturbed, but he mansplains her down. Do you like the main character yet?

Roberto’s maid (Maria Fabbri) places a phone call that reveals she knows who the blackmailer is and wants a piece of the action. She waits to rendezvous with them in a park, but gets locked in and killed after dark. It is then revealed that the man Roberto “killed” is still alive, and he and the blackmailer/killer conspired to make Roberto appear to be a murderer, for no initially apparent reason, although there is an eventual explanation. Is it ever explained how he and the killer know each other, or why he would be amenable to such a thing? Nope! After the maid is found dead, Nina tells Roberto she’s leaving town, like a sensible person would after multiple break-ins and a murder, but Roberto is mildly interested in seeing what happens next. I say “mildly interested,” because, compared to the level of intensity and interest displayed by Sam Dalmas in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Carlo Giordani in the aforementioned Cat, he seems to be completely apathetic to the danger to his own life, and only invested in saving his life insofar as hiring a preening, effeminate private eye, who takes the case mostly because he finds Roberto cute.

The private eye, Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is one of the film’s saving graces, and a film that followed him solving the crime would have been a much more interesting endeavor than what does end up on screen. Before he is killed in a subway restroom, Arrosio tracks down information about a former mental patient who was considered by the staff to have been a “maniac” but was “completely cured.” At this point in the film, the killer, or the killer’s sex, becomes pretty obvious; the killer’s whispering voice does little to disguise the fact that she is a woman, and the way that the head psychiatrist at the asylum insistently refers to “the patient” in order to avoid using gendered pronouns is stilted and obvious. I guessed this twist so early in the film that I initially assumed it was the maid, before she ended up dead before the end of Act I. You might guess that the killer is Dalia (Francine Racette), Nina’s cousin, especially after she seems to hear the killer’s madness mantra–a man’s voice saying things like “I wanted a boy, not a weakling!” and “I never want to see you cry!” It’s also worth noting that fewer than sixty seconds pass between Nina’s goodbye and Roberto’s seduction of Dalia. What a class act!

Alas, Dalia is herself killed. The police want to run a ridiculous forensic test: using a laser projected through Dalia’s eye to render an image of the last thing she saw before she died. You may remember such a test from Fringe, or even failed Will Smith vehicle Wild, Wild West. It’s completely absurd, and the science is even more dubious than Cat’s XYY gene nonsense, but it’s also the clue that breaks the case and the explanation of the title: Dalia saw four flies in a line. That night, Roberto waits in the dark with a loaded gun and almost shoots Nina when she comes home. As Roberto begs her to leave, he realizes that her giant ugly necklace has a fly in the medallion, and that Dalia’s last vision was of the necklace rocking back and forth. Nina then gives a rant-filled monologue about how her stepfather wanted a son and tried to raise her as one, but put her in an asylum when his beatings failed to turn her into a boy (shocker); by the time she was released, he was already dead, so she sought out someone like him upon whom she could heap all her vengeance, and Roberto fit the bill. She is scared away, jumps in Roberto’s car, and speeds into the back of a large truck, dying instantaneously. End credits.

This is a bad movie. The most compelling imagery in the film occurs in Roberto’s recurring nightmare about being beheaded in a public square, apparently based upon a story he overhears at a party. So much of the plot is frontloaded with absurdity that by the time an explanation is given, you can hardly bring yourself to care. The tone of the film is inconsistent not only with Argento’s other works but within itself as well. There are times when it seems Argento was going for mild comedy, such as the recurring joke about one of Roberto’s neighbors consistently receiving a different neighbor’s misdelivered pornography, or the pranks and jokes of the two recurring homeless men with whom Roberto is friends (for some reason). Intentionally comedic or not, it doesn’t work. That Nina is the killer is apparent from pretty early on, and her motivation is telegraphed with far too many voiceovers and rotating shots of a padded room. Although the mask Nina wears is delightfully creepy, I wish Argento would have saved it for use in a better film. There are some editing choices that seem to be trying to be avantgarde (notably, people disappear from where they were standing in a park, again “for some reason”), but ultimately have no in-story justification. The only thing really novel about Flies is that a female victim, the maid, dies offscreen for once.

Considered by some to be a hard-to-find gem, I cannot in good conscience suggest that you spend your time trying to track down this movie or view it. The 2009 DVD released by MYA Communications restores the two minutes of Nina’s speech that were cut from previous U.S. releases, but I can’t recommend it, either. Although viewers have the option of viewing the film in English or Italian, there are no subtitles on the disc at all, save for the parts of Nina’s speech which were never dubbed into English due to being cut (the restored footage is in the original Italian). Unlike some of Argento’s other films, in which insert shots of printed text were shot in additional languages for easier international release, all onscreen text is in Italian as well, and there aren’t even translations of these in subtitle form either; as a result, the taunting notes that the killer leaves for Roberto are completely meaningless if you, like me, are unfamiliar with Argento’s native tongue.

Overall, I can only suggest skipping this film. If you are a completist like I am, you’ll probably find yourself watching this as part of the Argento oeuvre at some point. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Little Mermaid (1989)

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fourstar

(Viewed 8/21/2015)

The Little Mermaid is a movie that I’ve carried with me for my whole life. I can’t remember the first time that I watched it . . . it must have been as a two-year-old on the VCR in living room, embraced by the blue-gray arms of the La-Z-Boy. So perhaps writing a review of this movie is unfair in a way. I’m certainly filtering it through the lens of nostalgia.

By way of review, there’s not much to say that hasn’t been said. The Little Mermaid is gorgeously animated, the songs are catchy, and the plot and pacing are sprightly. This movie is good enough to have resurrected Disney’s animation empire after decades of decline. It won two Oscars.

Watching the movie as a kid, The Little Mermaid was a beautiful fantasy. My guess is that you couldn’t get a little girl near a body of water without a reenactment breaking out. I seriously considered becoming a mermaid when I grew up.

It turns out that there are in fact a handful of professional mermaid gigs in the United States.

For adult audiences, The Little Mermaid presents some food for thought and entertainment. Ursula’s vampy, campy brand of evil, performed with oodles of moxie by Pat Carroll, draws from Divine’s drag performances. Ursula oozes through her lair, winking at the audience over her Faustian deals and feminine wiles. King Triton is actually doing his best to protect and discipline his teenage daughter, and is in fact an old softy under all of the yelling. Ariel is scrappy and adventurous, but learns no lesson from her risky choices and gets a fairytale ending handed to her by her pops. Prince Philip, in an interesting inversion of cinematic gender roles, is almost an empty character and more of a plot device to allow for Ariel’s growth as a character.

The Little Mermaid as a whole is entertaining. The music is catchy and fun, the animation is luscious. I can recommend this movie in good faith to anyone looking for a break from Frozen . . . but you might check in with your kids about things like consequences of your actions and expectations about romantic relationships.

-Erin Kinchen

The Backyard (2003)

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wrasslin

fourstar

Pro wrestling is a form of escapism for me (and countless others), a hyperreality in which the eternal battle of Good vs Evil is played out weekly in a something that resembles a combination of a soap opera & a violent ballet. The violent physicality of that equation is of course a large part of wrestling’s appeal, but some promotions push that violence to a level that I can’t stomach as a fan. “Hardcore”, blood-soaked wrestling bouts often delve into some grotesque barbarism that’s difficult to stomach for someone much more interested in the sport as escapist entertainment than as source for macho street cred. Back in the late 90s & early 2000s, however, when pro wrestling was enjoying one of its peak moments of cultural success, there were countless youngsters who were way too into the bloodier aspects of “sports entertainment” to the point where they were risking their bodies & lives to be active participants.

The small-scale documentary The Backyard tries its best to capture the chilling phenomenon of early 00s teens attempting to recreate extreme, hardcore “death matches” in their own backyards. Each participant voices dreams of earning fame in the ECW or the WWF (now the WWE), but what they’re more or less doing instead is senselessly beating the shit out of each other with barbed wire, plywood, lightbulbs, thumbtacks, mouse traps, tables, chairs, and fire for modest Internet fame. It’s genuinely disgusting. These are young, overly confident kids with bedrooms covered in pro wrestling toys, posters, and bedsheets, growing up in a time before a publicly-traded WWE would repeatedly warn them not to try their stunts at home. There is some mimicry of the pro leagues’ catchphrases & over-the-top characters in the kids’ creative gimmicks that include some interesting concoctions like Bongo: The Pot-Smoking Monster & A.D.D. Dave, but mostly the kids are trying to make a name for themselves by trading VHS tapes of their most brutal stunts over the Internet & local cable access television.

To be fair, not all backyard promotions covered in the documentary are entirely grotesque. There’s a pair of brothers who kinda cutely chokeslam their mother onto mattresses & create barbed wire covered plywood gauntlets in the middle of the desert to entertain a small handful of friends. An upstate New York promotion is a world away from the brutal chair & lightbulb smashings and even includes moral support & spectatorship from the youngsters’ parents & teachers. Then there’s (the true star of the show) The Lizard, a charismatic young father with some legitimate athletic talent & screen presence, who’s mildly concerned for his own safety at least for his young daughter’s sake. There’s plenty of darker personalities mucking up any unintended wholesomeness, however, including an especially gruesome crew of young juggalos who liken their violent wrestling habits to the “fun” of “gaybashing” & a heartless 17 year old promoter who takes advantage of his young employees & somewhat ironically calls himself the “Vince McMahon of backyard wrestling”. Most of the kids profiled here are generally likeable & interesting as subjects, though, especially The Lizard & a kid named Scar who uses hardcore wrestling as a form of therapy to help himself emotionally recover from a childhood spent under the knife due to liver complications.

There are very few voices of reason included here; The Backyard mostly allows its hubris-mad interviewees to voice their dreams without consequence or ridicule. Pro wrestling legend Rob Van Dam is the only authority figure with any clout and he downplays what happens in backyard promotions as worlds away from what he does for a living. He encourages the kids to treat wrestling like any other professional trade & that “You have to go to wrestling school” if you truly want to make it. Besides RVD’s entirely sensible pleas for logic, there’s really only one other voice of dissent, a contestant’s apoplectic mother who cries things like “Not the thumbtacks! Not the thumbtacks!”, but her contribution is much more amusing than it is effective.

Moralizing is mostly absent from The Backyard‘s horror show of teens putting themselves in needless danger & the documentary smartly instead lets the disturbing facts speak for themselves. A lot of the film’s brutality is difficult to watch, but there’s no doubt that it’s a fascinating historical document of a very specific DIY pro wrestling culture that may still exist, but is certainly less prevalent than it once was. I may not have enjoyed every minute of the film as entertainment (due to my personal squeamishness for real-life gore), but it made strong enough of an impression overall that I’m considering making room for it on my list of all time favorite pro wrestling documentaries.

-Brandon Ledet

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

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threehalfstar

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On the surface the sci-fi adventure cheapie The Angry Red Planet (aka Invasion of Mars & Journey to Planet Four) is the exact kind picture you’d expect from a 50s creature feature known by three separate titles. There’s plenty of antiquated cheese in the film’s space age bleep bloop machines, its hokey dialogue in lines like “Hey! Two moons! What a place for romance,” and in visual tricks that pull off “movie magic” such as making a rocketship “land” by showing its takeoff in reverse. Beyond its schlocky surface pleasures, though, there’s an oddly prescient & psychedelic film at the heart of the movie aching to bust out of its meager means.

It’s tough to say for sure if The Angry Red Planet was an influence on Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires and, thus, Ridley Scott’s Alien, but it at the very least telegraphs their basic structures, foreboding senses of dread, and literally otherworldly landscapes . . . just on a much cheaper scale. It not only pre-empts their tense, atmospheric stories about desolate alien landscapes; it also attempts to compete with their visual intensity in its own adorable way. The Angry Red Planet achieves the bizarre look of its Martian surface by abusing an absurdly saturated red filter that not only masks some of the shoddiness of its hand-drawn “CineMagic” backgrounds, but also provides the film a disorienting effect that’s almost painful to stare at directly for extended periods of time.

Visual eccentricities & tense atmosphere aside, this is by all means a monster movie that happens to be set in space. Before we even see Mars’ surface the ship’s crew is shown reading pulpy sci-fi serials and pontificating empty thoughts like “Mars . . . Martians. Monsters,” “Mars . . . The god of war,” and of course, “Mars . . . The angry red planet.” When they first arrive on the surface & don’t immediately spot an alien creature (which don’t appear until a half-hour within the film), they even joke about the possibility of invisible Martians, which is especially funny because it had been done before in Invisible Invaders. Once the movie delivers on its creature feature promises, though, it’s immensely satisfying. Carnivorous plants with tentacle arms, hideous space whales with rotating googly eyes, and an especially righteous bat spider complete with giant claws & blood-curdling screams all populate the startlingly red, inverted look of the movies’ version of a Martian surface.

If the film’s practical effects monsters and “CineMagic” visual techniques are a little laughable as campy oddities, it may have something to do with the fact that Danish-born director Ib Melchior was reportedly only afforded ten days & $20,000 to complete the picture. Sometimes the cheapness overpowers the proceedings, like in a dopey scene in which the obviously stationary space explorers are “rowing” a boat on a Martian lake or when the ship is attacked by killer psychedelic soap suds. It’s much more interesting to me, however, when the formula actually works. This is a surprisingly successful & bizarre sci-fi monster picture for something that was slapped together in little more than a week, not only standing out as a visual oddity for its time, but also reaching into the future to leave its mark on more substantial art films like Alien & Planet of the Vampires.

-Brandon Ledet

Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie (1990)

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threehalfstar

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Bridging the gap between the George A. Romero-produced television series of the same name & the start of Tales from the Crypt‘s television run, Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie is a delicious little slice of early 90s horror anthology. Besides the occasional shocks of gruesome practical effects & general Creepshow vibe, Tales from the Dark Side also features great performances from some always-welcome faces in all their 90s glory: Christian Slater in full Heathers mode, a handsomely young Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore in dated aerobics gear & the makeup of the undead (not at the same time, unfortunately), Deborah Harry as a killer housewife preparing to cook & serve a child for a dinner party, etc. Much like the look of its recognizable cast, it’s a very dated film in terms of visual & cultural aesthetics, but it’s enjoyably dated, as horror anthologies typically tend to be.

The aforementioned Deborah-Harry-preparing-to-cook-a-child story is the tie-in or “wraparound” segment that provides the framework for the film’s three short tales of terror. Adopting an Arabian Nights structure, Harry’s would-be victim tyke prolongs his precious little life by telling his captor scary stories while she prepares to cook him. At first he recounts the tale of a revenge plot that involves a mummy rising from the dead to mummify the living. Then he tells the story of a murderous cat squaring off with a mafia hitman. Finally, he concludes his stay of execution with a romantic tale that revolves around an artist & a winged demon that looks like some kind of cross between a gargoyle & a gremlin.

As with Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, and the Tales from the Dark Side television show, these stories have no significant connections outside of the wraparound segments, but rather function as individual short stories with their own narrative ups & downs. The opening mummy segment front-loads the movie with the recognizable talent & the most complex storytelling of the film. After that story concludes, it may initially feel like diminishing returns in the much sillier killer cat tale & the lackluster romance of the gargoyle yarn, but both sections actually pack a much stronger punch than they first imply. The narratives may become a little weaker as the films progress, but the intense body horror in their individual conclusions become increasingly intense. The cat’s final kill & the gargoyle’s transformation are both practical effects spectacles that rank among the best I’ve ever seen. Much like dated aesthetics & very loosely connected narratives, sitting through a couple underwhelming (and thankfully brief) stories to get to some prime gore also comes with the horror anthology territory. Tales from the Darkside might not be the most significant example of its genre, but it’s definitely worth a look for fans of the horror anthology in general, especially for that gruesome killer cat scene. That’s one for the ages.

-Brandon Ledet

Shaun the Sheep (2015)

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threehalfstar

Stop-motion animation masterminds Aardman Studios return to the big screen for the first time since The Pirates! Band of Misfits this year with the exceedingly charming Wallace & Gromit spin-off Shaun the Sheep. British audiences are likely to already be familiar with Shaun through his television show, but for casual, American Aardman fans this is probably the first introduction to the delightful little sheep. As always, Aardman delivers fantastic stop-motion work here, but although their films are consistently entertaining, there’s something particularly special about Shaun the Sheep that makes it feel like their best feature at least since 2005’s Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Because the movie is largely a non-verbal affair, its success relies entirely on visual comedy that feels like a callback to the silent film era & it’s incredible just how much mileage it squeezes out of each individual gag. It’s going to be difficult to determine just what children’s attention spans will survive that kind of antique entertainment, but for adult animation fans it’s quite a treat.

That’s not to say that the film is at all stuffy. It’s far more smart than it is intellectual. For every brilliant silent comedy gag (such as a black market in which ducks are paid in bread or the strange idea of birdwatching as a form of sexual voyeurism) there’s just as much pedestrian humor to be found in plumber’s cracks, farts, burping, and public urination. Children & adults both are likely to share a chuckle or two there, but I doubt many tykes are going to catch on to the on-screen references to films like The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver, and The Terminator. There’s also a plotline that poses celebrity culture & social media as forces that turn people into sheep for trends & fads that may be a little more adult than the kind of humor you’d find in Ardmaan’s (much less satisfying) Pirates!, but it’s a thread of thought that is somehow a lot more cute than it is cruel. Even if some children can’t connect with Shaun the Sheep at every single turn, there’s easily enough universally enjoyable positive vibes in the film’s pop music montages (which at one point include a bah-bershop quartet & beat bah-xing), plot-summarizing rap song at the end credits (something I genuinely wish more movies would bring back), physical comedy, and potty humor to keep a lot of them entertained.

The story Shaun the Sheep tells is perhaps its least interesting aspect. The fish-out-of-water tale of a herd of sheep traveling to “The Big City” (which is not too dissimilar to “The City” in Babe 2) to recover their lost farmer/caretaker/best friend leaves a chaotic path of destruction & an opening for a newfound villain in a heartless animal control bounty hunter, but nothing too interesting in the way of narrative invention. I’ve never seen the Shaun the Sheep television show, but I’m assuming that the urban landscape is a break from the daily drudgery of farm life portrayed in the series, since that’s how the movie version begins. For newcomers unfamiliar with Shaun’s traditional farm setting, the story is more or less a loose framework that provides a platform for Aardman’s genuinely amusing line of nonverbal humor. Shaun the Sheep is cute, smart, and thoroughly hilarious from front to end. No matter whether the movie inspires you to erupt into belly laughs or mild chuckles, it’s one that’s near-guaranteed to leave you with a positive feeling.

-Brandon Ledet

She’s Lost Control (2015)

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twohalfstar

It’s difficult to tell exactly how much of my disinterest in She’s Lost Control has to do with my personal tastes, which lean towards excess over understatement, but there really isn’t much in this film for me to recommend. I didn’t exactly expect a bright, ecstatic affair from a drama about a sex worker ostensibly named after a Joy Division song, but She’s Lost Control still surprised me in just how lowkey & somber it could be from scene to scene. I didn’t particularly loathe the film at any point during its melancholy proceedings, but I didn’t engage with it much either.

As a sexual surrogate, the protagonist Ronah toes the line between therapy & sex work. She doesn’t have johns; she has patients. Early on in the film, when she proclaims “You pay me for my time but you can’t control how I feel” (in a speech she apparently delivers often), she’s already establishing that her clients are men towards which she has an incredibly vulnerable potential for emotional attachment. These are broken men with deep-seeded intimacy issues (such as a difficulty being undressed in front of a partner or a mental block when it comes to physical contact) that Ronah attempts to coax out of their well-guarded shells. Her vulnerability in these scenarios reaches a breaking point late in the film that feels simultaneously inevitable & brutally cruel.

There’s a lot of potential in these fragile, intimate moments, but first-time director Anja Marquardt does very little to tie their meanings into something more than “These things happen.” I’m sure that this was a deliberate choice & it’s one backed up by a similarly somber visual aesthetic, but I still found very few memorable moments in the final product, despite the great potential. Other folks more tuned-in to the gloomy, low-key indie drama as a genre might find something much more fulfilling here, but for me She’s Lost Control was essentially a gray wash of uncomfortable intimacy that signified little more than how cruel people can sometimes be when you make yourself vulnerable before them.

-Brandon Ledet

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.

Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.

So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).

If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.

Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.

There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.

-Brandon Ledet