reviews

Stories We Tell (2013)

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EPSON MFP image

three star

By definition, Stories We Tell is likely to be the most literally personal project of Sarah Polley’s career. An actress since she was just a small child (picture her as the youngster in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for context), her first documentary credit is just her third turn as a director, and the very first instance I know of where her own past & familial structure were the subject of scrutiny. This kind of navel-gazing has both inherent charms and flaws. The intimacy of Stories We Tell’s revelations about Sarah Polley’s past & family structure is striking. It’s highly unusual for a public figure to expose so much of themselves & their immediate loved ones in this honest of a way and that vulnerability alone makes Stories We Tell a memorable experience. On the other hand, the story at the heart of the documentary isn’t quite as fulfilling & engaging to outsiders as it is to the people who lived it and the film has a tendency to over-explain its own intent instead of simply allowing  the story to unfold.

Without revealing too much about the story Polley tells here, I’ll just say that it’s focused on a nagging question about her paternity. Interviewing her siblings, her parents, and friends of the family, Polley looks back to her birth & childhood and retraces the steps of her deceased mother to hopefully answer lingering questions about who fathered her. Because the story of her childhood is told through many voices, it has a fractured, almost Cubist structure that calls into question the difference between truth & observation. Even though Polley is mostly interviewing her own family, she is relentless in her pursuit of “the truth”, referring to her own tactics as an “interrogation process.” It’s her unforgiving honesty & tendency to push her loved ones to their limits that make the documentary an unusual & interesting experience.

As interesting as Stories We Tell is in concept & execution, the story does wear itself a little thin in the final half hour, especially once the truth about Polley’s paternity is revealed. After the story has effectively been told from beginning to end, the documentary makes the mistake of over-explaining itself. Polley directly tells the audience that her film’s not only about that story in particular, but about the nature of memory & storytelling in general. Polley’s not giving herself enough credit there. The film had already spoken for itself, especially in its fractured interview structure & super-8 recreations of significant memories (like a critical phone call & café meeting that cracked the story wide open). It would’ve been a much better movie if it had ended once the story was over, instead of continuing to provide context when it wasn’t needed in a conclusive half hour that felt more like a DVD extra than a proper part of the documentary. As is, it’s a fairly solid documentary that shows a lot of promise of where Polley’s directorial career might go in the future, but isn’t exactly essential or even necessary either. I believe she’s got even better, more important work in her that will play much more confidently once she allows it to speak for itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Paris Is Burning (1990)

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fivestar

Although the subject of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning (ball culture) is unmistakably NYC-specific, it’s not difficult to see its connection to a more recent New Orleans trend: sissy bounce. There’s very little connecting the two geographically-disparate movements in the decade or so that separates them, but there’s still a similarly effortless punk spirit & vibrant defiance that binds them in my mind, a superficial connection or not. NYC ball culture was a fashion-minded escape fantasy for the city’s POC, queer, transgendered, and often homeless youth who used the platform to feel empowered instead of disenfranchised. Where sissy bounce offers New Orleans’ queer & transgendered POC youth access to the largely homophobic & hyper-masculine world of hip-hop, ball culture offered that same minority access to wealth & the world at large. That access may have been to more of a fantasy than a reality, but it was a transgressive fantasy that was so goddamn fabulously punk that there’s really nothing else like it, sissy bounce included.

We don’t have a worthy documentary about New Orleans’ sissy bounce culture yet, but there is a more than worthy NYC ball culture doc to be found in Paris Is Burning. As a culture, the film’s subject has everything necessary for a great film: sights (in the homemade fashion), sounds (in the music & dancing that accompanies the runway “voguing”), and narrative (in its long history as told through the eyes of old-timers who had occupied the scene decades before the film’s camera crew arrived in 1987). Part of what makes the film so arresting is its combination of both surface pleasures & much deeper, more meaningful aspects. Sure the film is stuffed with lush, beautiful fashion and the absurd hyroglypics-inspired dance moves of voguing, but there’s a lot of real heartbreak at the center of the culture’s need for escape.

These are marginalized people who’ve been abandoned by their families & society at large; they depend mostly on petty theft & sex work to get by. Although there is an aggressive, competitive aspect to ball culture, there’s also an intense comradery that includes makeshift families called “houses”. Ball competitors are seeking to better one another for a chance at a “legendary status” or at least a trophy for their troubles that night, but they also serve as their own support network, giving each other a place to go and something to look forward to when practically everything else has been stripped away. As the MC at one ball puts it to the more “vicious motherfuckers” in the crowd, “We’re not going to be shady, just fierce.” There’s a catty atmosphere on the surface of ball culture, but it’s a thin veneer on something much more thoughtful & fulfilling.

It’s a little sad, then, that the isolated act of voguing was assimilated & diluted into a much larger, uncaring pop culture by enterprising folks like Madonna the same way New Orleans’ bounce maneuver twerking was assimilated (poorly) by folks like Miley Cyrus. It’s sad that such a rich, complex culture had been boiled down to such a singular, somewhat superficial detail, but that’s often how mainstream success works. Part of what makes Paris is Burning so rewarding is that it arrived in time to capture that culture before it was exposed to the public at large. There’s still time for sissy bounce to receive the same reverent treatment , but not much. The recent national fetishization of twerking makes it feel like the moment has already passed. Of course, I may be oversimplifying both sissy bounce & ball culture by linking them with such a concrete tether, but I’m certainly not the first one to do so. There was even a huge event thrown last year celebrating their spiritual sisterhood. Although one had voguing & the other twerking and one was stationed in Harlem & the other in New Orleans, there’s still a rebellious, punk spirit of inclusivity for groups of young people who are normally excluded from everything. As one of the ball culture’s old timers puts it, “If more people went to balls and did less drugs the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?” If balls were anything like the way they’re represented in the near-perfect Paris Is Burning, I’m inclined to agree.

-Brandon Ledet

These Final Hours (2015)

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three star

Although I can’t name a film that tells the exact story of These Final Hours, it still feels like overly familiar territory all the same. A post-apocalyptic road trip story in which a grown man befriends a small child, These Final Hours is somewhat lacking on originality or something significant to say, but it’s still a pleasant viewing experience even if it’s not an urgent or essential one. The movie’s central message seems to be that familial bonds & compassion for fellow human beings are more important than cocaine & orgies, which is an admirable sentiment, although a rather obvious one.  As the protagonist James goes through his own self-discovery that drugs & casual sex aren’t the most significant facets of his life, you want to give him a sympathetic pat on the back, but it’s also tempting to let out a frustrated “Well duh, ya goof.”

It’s hard to blame James for having is priorities backwards considering the social atmosphere he’s operating in. The title These Final Hours is quite literal. The film depicts the Earth (or at least just the city of Perth) in its final hours as a world-ending heat wave (again, quite literal) threatens to end its very existence. There’s no real solution to this problem except in how to spend your final hours alive. James’ solution is to have sweaty sex, drink to excess, and indulge in ungodly amounts of cocaine. He even leaves behind a lover in search of a massive party where he can do all three at the same time on a much larger scale. As he puts it, “It’s going to hurt and I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to feel a thing. I just want to get fucked up.” Hey, there are honestly worse ways he can spend his time, as evidenced by the rampant suicide and machete-wielding homicidal maniacs that create a violent obstacle course for him to cross on the way to the party. The more James struggles to reach his destination the more empty his goals seem, something that becomes less lost on him as he befriends a little girl who wants to spend her own final hours at her family’s side.

Although Jimmy’s choice between drugs & family seems like an obvious one for the audience, it earns him the moniker of “killjoy” among his friends, who are going through some kind of hedonistic hybrid of Burning Man & MTV Spring Break in the late 90s. The frothing at the mouth criminals (who are reminiscent of the violent hellscapes of Mad Max, Death Wish, and Miss Meadows) killing themselves & each other in the streets are doing even worse. James is a mostly likeable dude in comparison to the decrepit world that surrounds him, but his spiritual journey is far from profound. Understandably the movie works much in the same way: it’s good, but not great; entertaining, but not life-changing. I would be down to watch it a second time, but in no particular rush to recommend it to others. In comparison to how agressively awful other movies in its post-apocalyptic genre can be, that’s far from the worst fate.

-Brandon Ledet

Starry Eyes (2014)

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fourstar

Independent horror films are a dime a dozen nowadays, so I didn’t have high expectations for Starry Eyes. I was definitely taken by surprise because it actually ended up being a really good horror movie. Far from campy (in my opinion), it was a good, solid horror film. To make things even more interesting, the film was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Knowing that donations from so many supporters contributed to the growth of such a successful film is mind-blowing.

The film starts out a bit slow, and quite honestly, watching the main character, Sarah (Alex Essoe), in her everyday life was a very painful experience. She is an aspiring young actress that has yet to land the role of her dreams. She has a horrible job, crappy friends, trichotillosis, and straight-up bad luck. Essoe’s acting was seriously on point, so much so that I wanted nothing more than to jump into the television and hug the life out of her.  Sarah is eventually given the opportunity for a leading role in a film produced by a major production company, but this is something that she will have to sell her soul to receive. Literally. Once she seals the deal with the production company, she starts to go through a few intense physical and emotional changes. Her “transformation” leads to a very memorable ending with a few twists along the way.

Throughout the entirety of Starry Eyes, there’s an underlying terror that’s difficult to ignore, and this is something that all good horror films should be able to offer. The film’s writers/directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, are two talented guys that everyone should be keeping an eye on. I’m hoping that they will eventually come out with Starry Eyes 2 because the ending ofStarry Eyes is almost like another film’s beginning, but sequels do have a reputation for being cinematic disappointments. I’m not going to hold my breath, but a girl can dream, right?

Starry Eyes is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Backcountry (2015)

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bear

twohalfstar

There’s so much going for the bear attack natural horror Backcountry that it’s a total shame when the film can’t stick the landing. The opening hour feels like familiar man vs. nature territory, but it’s a familiarity that works. An urban couple slowly losing their way while hiking & camping in the woods has enough built-in suspense that it doesn’t matter too much that it feels like it’s all been done before, especially once the threat of a bear attack begins to build. The problem is that when the shit finally hits the fan in the climactic half hour the mess is disappointingly brief & easy to clean up. After a few minutes of deeply disturbing bear-related gore the movie finds its way back to the trail and leaves the more unfamiliar dangers of the woods behind.

Quick question: Why are couples always calling each other “Babe” in movies? Do a lot of people actually do that in real life? Backcountry proclaims that it’s “based on a true story” and I have to assume that the “Babe” pet names were part of that truth. It at least feels authentic to these characters. The film’s central conflict (getting lost in the woods & stumbling into killer bear territory) is a direct result of a bull-headed alpha male refusing advice, maps, and directions because he feels petty things like safety & common-sense threaten his manhood. This hubris, of course, eventually leads to the life-threatening disaster at the film’s core. His girlfriend, to her credit, sees right through his macho bullshit the entire time, starting with some light bickering early in the proceedings and then resorting to calling him a loser & a fuck-up once things go horribly, horribly wrong.

If those “horribly wrong” things had continued for the entirety of the final half hour, I may have been more won over by Backcountry. The comeuppance is indeed disgustingly brutal, but it’s short-lived. There are about ten minutes of this film that will haunt me for a great while, but that does little to justify the other 80 or so. For the most part, Backcountry brings very little of interest to the table. There’s some killer suspense in the way the central couple is voyeuristically filmed from behind trees and there are a few menacing characters that threaten to take the plot into some unexpected directions, but none of it amounts to much. Ultimately, Backcountry is a bear attack movie that doesn’t have much to offer outside a brief, singular bear attack and a bullheaded alpha male you can’t wait to see punished. A little more effort & creativity in the final half hour and it could’ve been something much more special, “true story” be damned.

-Brandon Ledet

Russell Madness (2015)

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russell mania

fourstar

campstamp

Once upon a time Air Bud (known by his friends as “Buddy”) was merely a simple golden retriever with an inordinate talent for playing basketball. Not to be pigeonholed, Buddy gradually proved himself to be more of a canine Bo Jackson than just a run-of-the-mill basketball-playing dog, and found formidable careers in football, soccer, baseball, and volleyball. Even more impressive, Buddy found a way to extend his career beyond the playing field, a struggle that a lot of athletes fail to overcome, and has established a second life as a big-time movie executive. At first, Buddy made his film production choices based solely on nepotism, and released six vanity projects starring his own puppies, in what has been labeled as the Air Buddies series. Now, after seven years of straight-to-DVD movies that featured his offspring venturing into unlikely territory like space travel & supernatural crime fighting, Air Bud has finally gotten back to his roots: sports movies. Branching off from his work with Disney and rebranding his film productions as Air Bud Entertainment, Buddy has finally released his first film that does not feature his own progeny: a pro wrestling comedy called Russell Madness. As evidenced by the film’s prominence on the Air Bud entertainment website & this picture of Buddy working hard as a big time movie executive, he could not be prouder of the results.

As the title indicates, Russell Madness strays from Air Bud Entertainment’s usual preference for golden retriever protagonists by casting a Jack Russell terrier in the titular role of a rescued pound dog who finds fame & fortune in an unexpected pro wrestling career. As the title does not indicate, but as you can see in the film’s trailer, the character’s wrestling name is actually “Russell Mania”, not “Russell Madness”. The phrase “Russell Mania” is repeated constantly throughout the film, echoed even in Russell’s killer entrance music (a vital asset to any pro wrestler), but the phrase “Russell Madness” isn’t uttered even once. Why the name change, you ask? As a shrewd business dog, Air Bud was obviously side-stepping any potential legal conflicts with references to the WWE’s WrestleMania brand, dog-based puns or not. That doesn’t mean that WWE got the last laugh here. Oh, no. Air Bud Entertainment not only kept all of the verbal “Russell Mania” references in its debut feature, but also found more subversive ways to criticize the “sports entertainment” giant that robbed them of their movie’s intended title.

Although Russell Madness does not refer to the WWE directly, again thanks to Buddy’s shrewd business sense, its main conflict is built around a WWE surrogate. In the movie’s folklore, all local & regional wrestling promotions were eaten up by an amoral juggernaut that built its empire by violating long-respected business treaties of non-competition. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly how the WWE rose to prominence in the early 80s. Russell Madness even named its fake wrestling promotion the Wrestlers United Federation, or WUF. This not only serves as a reference to WWE’s past as the WWF, but also finds room for another stellar dog pun (“woof”, for those following along), of which there are plenty.  Now that’s efficiency! Just in case that wasn’t enough to drive the point home, a Vince McMahon stand-in, Mick Vaugn (played by Cliff from Cheers), is the evil capitalist head of WUF & makes constant references to his business as more “entertainment” than wrestling. He even goes so far as to ruin the illusion of the “sport”’ by suggesting that (gasp!) the results are fixed and the performers are (double gasp!) only in it for the money.

This little slice of pro wrestling history (with a talking, wrasslin’ dog added for flavor) may seem like familiar territory for even the least committed of marks, but to a child it sounds like ancient history. When the father figure of Russell’s adoptive family recaps the WUF takeover of his own father’s business as a bedtime story, he starts, “Back in his heyday, in a time called ‘The 80s’ . . . “ and instead of imagining the world thirty years ago, his kid (played by one of Mad Men‘s many Bobby Drapers) imagines a sort of dust-covered vaudevillian aesthetic that places the events about a century back. Indeed, even the Ferraro Family Wrestling (an Italian slant on the Guerreros?) arena looks like an ancient vaudevillian theater (that’s in incredible shape for a supposedly blighted building) or as the dad puts it, “midcentury guido”. There’s no denying that this one classy joint, especially once Russell’s family cleans it up & revives the old Ferraro family business. Once again, the comparison between the charming, warmhearted wrestling indies and the cold, mammoth WUF is made clear in how much more character the old-timey digs have than the blue-lit corporate arenas.

At this point it’d be fair for you to have a few lingering questions like, sure the arena is swell, but what about the wrasslin’? And how does a dog even wrestle in the first place? And we know about Russell’s entrance music, but what’s his signature move? First of all, Russell can wrestle. Oh boy can he wrestle. He’s a good boy, yes sir. Who’s a good boy? Russell is. That’s right. As a Jack Russell terrier, Russell obviously isn’t going to be dishing out any suplexes or pile-drivers, but he gets by on some surprisingly adept (CGI-assisted) choke holds and rope work. He may not have the height, strength, charisma, body mass, opposable thumbs, or lung capacity normally associated with pro wrestling’s top acts, but Russell uses his light frame’s aerial abilities to their full advantage and he’s got three very important things than many a wrestling legend have made careers out of in the past: novelty, heart, and raw talent. Of course novelty, heart, and raw talent alone won’t make a champion, but Russell finds a great manager in a (talking!) monkey (voiced by Will Sasso!) who has been haunting the Ferraro Family Wrestling arena since it shut down in the 80s, just waiting for a young talent to shape into a wrestling god. With his monkey manager’s help Russell proves himself champion in a sea of lesser opponents that include a mummy, a cave man, a pirate, a clown, an escaped convict, and a California surfer who says things like “Dude, that’s gnarly.” He even has a unique finisher: he pisses on the competition. It’s not a very physically taxing move, but it is wickedly brutal in its own demoralizing way.

If watching a (talking!) Jack Russell terrier fight his way to the top of the pro wrestling world with the help of his (talking!) monkey manager and a family who loves him sounds like a hokey mess to you, please keep in mind that Air Bud Entertainment is primarily made for children. Russell Madness is just one of the many hokey messes of children’s media, but it’s one with fairly deep love & understanding for both the art of pro wrestling & the art of the pun. Comedy workhorse Fred Willard resurrects his clueless sports announcer role from Best in Show here to deliver some of the best puns of the film, including a personal favorite of mine that involves chimney sweeps. That doesn’t mean he gets to have all the fun, though. Russell even gets a good one in himself when he tells the film’s central heel “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Of course, there’s some occasionally tedious humor to the movie that will cause many-a-eye roll (Will Sasso’s literal monkeyshines certainly push it), but that’s to be expected in a straight-to-VOD kid’s movie that was greenlit & produced by a retired-athlete golden retriever. What’s more surprising is how much of Russell Madness strangely works. There’s a particular shot of the child protagonist (Bobby Draper IV) enjoying his birthday cake with a life-size cutout of his absent father that has a particularly strong pathos to it. Also, as silly as the idea of a wrestling dog might be to some people, it works surprisingly well at garnering heat for his opponents. What heel behavior could possibly trump beating up a dog for money?

If you can get past the cheap CGI weirdness, the awful little moving mouths on the talking animals (à la The Voices), and the idea that people would somehow be more impressed by a wrestling dog than a talking monkey with managerial skills, you might find yourself enjoying this little wrestling cinema oddity. Personally, I marked out to the point where I was totally on board with even its most ham-fisted messages like “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” and “The strongest tag team is family.” Film producer “Air Bud” Buddy may not have touched every heart with his tale of a dog who takes the pro wrestling world by storm and finds a family to call his own (or even got the film title he wanted), but he at least touched my heart. I’m actually not entirely convinced that Russell Madness wasn’t made specifically with me in mind & it’s highly likely that it will remain my favorite “bad” movie of 2015. Once again, Buddy took it to the hoop.

-Brandon Ledet

Faults (2015)

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fourstar

There’s a dividing line in Faults (a fault line, if you will) where the film goes from bitterly funny to something truly special. The first half of the film feels like a low-key, character-driven comedy inspired by the golden age of the Coen brothers. It’s manages a delicate balance between funny & depressing in its depictions of a once-famed cult deprogrammer pathetically milking what he can out of a complimentary hotel stay & a desperate, elderly couple who just want their daughter back. It’s an engaging slow burn of building tension, but there’s not much to conclude from this first half other than a general feeling that “This guy sucks.” As he delves deeper into his latest deprogramming case, however, Faults shifts gears and becomes an ambitiously deranged power struggle that transcends the low-key stakes of the first half of the film, but wouldn’t feel the same without them. It’s a deliberate shift that shakes the audience violently, snapping them out of the melancholy haze of the first half like a real life deprogramming.

The central power struggle between cult member & deprogrammer at the heart of Faults raises a lot more questions than answers, but the questions prove themselves more satisfying being left open ended. By the time we’ve followed the down-on-his luck deprogrammer, Ansel, as he shills a book no one wants & attempts half-assed modes of suicide, the cult member who supposedly needs saving, Claire, seems rather well adjusted. Sure, Claire makes ludicrous claims that she had sex with God or that she can make herself invisible, but she seems way better off than a once-famous man who now has to resort to stealing ketchup & 9 volt batteries to make ends meet. Claire has no problem discussing her past, saying that she was once “weak & stupid,” but has since grown as a person (and a divine being). Ansel, on the other hand, refuses to talk about his past, which is haunted by an outstanding debt & a former cult member he failed to “save”. In comparison to the rock bottom lifestyle Ansel is barely holding together, Claire’s religious organization Faults (which follows a single god, recognizes no individual leader, and encourages meditation) feels like a viable, or even preferable, way of living.

What’s most surprising about Faults is that it doesn’t allow itself to stop there. The contrasting lives lead by Ansel & Claire are merely a launching pad for the much stranger, more unnerving territory that their power struggle leads to. The conflict between the depressingly mundane and the divinely transcendent is apparent even in the movie’s sets, where strange, haunting lights invade wood paneling motel rooms & cheap diners. Words like “clear”, “free”, and “levels” make the film’s fictional cult Faults feel somewhat reminiscent of the real-life cult Scientology, but that comparison fades to reveal something much stranger in the second half as well. There’s something strange going on in Faults’ cult member vs deprogrammer power struggle that refuses to be fully understood or pigeonholed as it pushes through the expected territory of where that plot should lead and reaches for something more extraordinary. As an audience member you start to feel like the film has you sleep deprived, questioning your free will, and breaking down your personal identity just as you’d expect in a deprogramming. It’s wickedly funny in the way it manipulates you into feeling unease, but that humor does little to soften just how strange everything begins to feel once the conflict comes to a head.

-Brandon Ledet

The Final Member (2014)

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fourstar

The recent documentary The Final Member, which could easily have been a mutedly quirky tour through the famed Icelandic Phallological Museum, somehow manages to find a deeper purpose beyond simply profiling what is essentially a room full of severed dicks floating in jars. The basic concept of the world-class Nordic penis museum is fascinating enough in the abstract, but not really worth putting together the travel funds for the long trek. So, a simple guided tour through its collection would’ve most likely been enough for a decent, but inessential documentary to survive on. Instead, The Final Member explores ideas like artists fading before completing their life’s work, the near-extinction of larger-than-life personalities, and the ways penises relate to patriotism, elevating itself above the mediocre aims a more straightforward production would’ve achieved. For a penis museum documentary, it’s surprisingly moving & thought-provoking.

There are three boisterous personalities at the heart of The Final Member’s success. The museum’s founder, Sigurdur “Siggi” Hjartarson, is of course the main subject and commands attention expertly. An educator & a family man, Siggi explains that a lot of people find his dedication to penile preservation off-putting, mistaking him for a pervert instead of the total sweetheart & academic taxonomist he truly is. He describes how he started the museum as a joke 40 years ago in his home with just a few animal specimens for show. It ballooned from there, resulting in Siggi’s now massive specimen room that features at least one penis specimen from every mammalian species except for one: human. His collection’s largest piece is, of course, the penis from a sperm whale and the smallest is the penis bone from a hamster. It’s adorable how Siggi proudly shows off his specimens (as well as his handcrafted penis art) even if most of it looks like organic garbage “with testicles!” (emphasis Siggi’s). As a guy who seems to have it all (penis-wise anyway), it’s heartbreaking to hear Siggi worry about whether or not he’ll be able to finalize his collection with a human specimen before he dies. He explains that often “artists die without finishing their work” & that thought visibly weigh heavy on him as his health deteriorates. That’s where the other boisterous two personalities enter the story.

As the title indicates, The Final Member is less about the Icelandic penis museum in general and more about the race to complete the puzzle, to provide the missing piece: a human penis. There are two viable contenders aiming to fill this role, an aging Icelandic celebrity adventurer & a simple American cowboy. The Icelandic candidate, although ancient, is vocally proud of his past sexual prowess, so he has a sort of a famous penis that could bring a little bit of cultural cachet to the museum. When Siggi asks him, “Do you have any use for your penis after you’re dead?” he finds himself shrugging and offering his specimen for the collection. Not to be outdone, the American candidate offers to donate his penis to the museum while he is still alive. You see, although he is a simple cowboy, he is a simple cowboy with a deep affection for his own dick. As he puts it, “I didn’t want my penis to go away when I die,” and as the story escalates it becomes increasingly clear that he really is so proud of his American man meat (which he assumes is automatically better than the Icelandic competition based on its nationality alone) that he is dead serious about mutilating himself to become the first human entry in the collection.

The Final Member does a lot of what you might expect from a film about a penis museum: it tours the specimen room; it provides a history of the museum’s origins; it asks questions like “Why is it so taboo to talk about the penis in the 21st century?” That’s all fascinating stuff, but what’s really special is the way it finds a real story to tell at the heart of the museum’s legacy, complete with a race to the finish line and a clear contender to root for, but without adopting a mocking or a get-a-load-of-this-weirdo tone for anyone involved. It’s a story about patriotism and the satisfaction of completing your life’s work just as much as it is a profile of a room filled with thousands of penises. I expected the film to be entertaining in sort of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not kind of way, but what was delivered was a lot more revealing about both the legacy Siggi will leave behind when he dies & the differences between Icelandic & American national pride. It’s a much greater film than I expected.

-Brandon Ledet

Kink (2014)

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EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

There’s a crippling sense of pointlessness at the heart of Kink, a recent documentary about the BDSM pornography company Kink.com. It’s not just that anyone who would be inclined to watch the film in the first place is already likely to be on board with its “kink porn is not unhealthy” message; it’s also that the film plays more like a long form advertisement than a proper documentary. Kink is more akin to an infomercial, a DVD extra, or a decade-late episode of HBO’s Real Sex than it is to a fully invested exploration of the subject at hand. By focusing on a single production company’s output & ethos, it feels less like a document of where kink porn is today and more like an aggressive PR assertion of where Kink.com is today, which is not necessarily as worthwhile of a subject.

As practicing sadists, Kink.com is obviously very much worried about coming across as “axe wielding maniacs”, so much of the run time is softening that image. Actors are shown expressing “pain” & then practicing the expression of “pain” off-camera. There are a lot of looming hard-ons bouncing around the set, but they’re slapped & tickled in an irreverent manner that says “We’re having fun here, y’all! I swear! So much fun!” The producers try to pose the company as a sort of mom & pop operation that started in a college dorm room (every young perv’s dream) and somehow blossomed into a successful business. But not too successful, though. They want you to know that in comparison to other porn giants, they’re the small-time outsiders, saying “If pornography was high school, we would be the goth table. We’d be the art kids.” All of this aggressive PR is supposed to make the company’s scary flogging, spanking, and out-of-control fuck machines more palatable to a wider audience, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s winning anyone over who wasn’t already down with what it’s selling.

Preaching to the choir is not the only problem with Kink’s assertion that Kink.com’s brand of BDSM porn is a-okay. It also just doesn’t have much to say once it establishes that consensual BDSM play is healthy. That’s not to say the film is completely devoid of entertainment. If nothing else, it’s kind of cute in its matter-of-fact pre-coitus negotiations of what will & won’t go down. As I mentioned in my review of The Duke of Burgundy, the sub is firmly in charge in most BDSM scenarios, despite what most people would expect, so it’s amusing here to watch them call the shots before shooting scenes.  Even at a mere 80min, however, this message isn’t enough to carry the film and there’s a lot of redundant feet-dragging that sinks any good vibes it had cultivated along the way. The closest the film comes to challenging itself is in a brief questioning of how money muddles consent and (after its assertion that BDSM porn doesn’t promote rape) the filming of a home invasion scenario that is very much a distinct rape fantasy. Otherwise, it lets its subject off the hook. As a documentary, Kink is mostly harmless. I was a little bored with its repetition, a little cynical of its blatant advertising, and very much annoyed with the obnoxious, wailing orgasm moans that droned on & on & on, but its biggest fault is that it didn’t push itself harder, instead opting to cover one small facet of a truly fascinating topic that deserves a closer, more critical look.

Side note: When the end credits revealed that Kink was “Produced by James Franco” I thought to myself, “Of course it was.”

-Brandon Ledet

Outcast (2015)

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hobbit

onehalfstar

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This is not the first time I’ve been burned this exact way before, but there’s an incredibly cruel lie in Nic Cage’s top billing in the period action cheapie Outcast. If anything, Cage’s role in the film is as a glorified cameo, mostly leaving Hayden Christensen & a cast of unknowns to their own lackluster devices. There’s some vague traces of entertainment value to be found in seeing a once-a-moody-teen Anakin Skywalker all grown up, high on opium, and getting pissed on, but by the time Nic Cage returns late in the film, ravenous for scenery to chew, it feels like a huge cheat. At one point a character admonishes Adult Anakin’s opium addiction by reminding him that the drug “dulls a man’s senses.” He responds that, “Some things are better dulled.” This is advice Outcast takes way too close to its exceedingly dull heart, over-stuffing the screen with long traveling sequences and underwhelming martial arts when all I really wanted as an audience was Nic Cage sporting a terrible wig & accent. Normally it’d be unfair to punish a movie for not being what you expected, but when you promise Nic Cage antics as your main attraction, you best deliver.

Here’s what we are afforded, Cage wise: early in the film he appears sword-fighting in knight’s armor; he then disappears for an entire hour, returning only for a few, sparse, bizarrely hilarious speeches that make you wish his character (“The White Ghost”) were the focus of the film, as promised. Seeing an armored Cage wield a sword definitely has a novelty to it, as I don’t think it’s something I’ve ever encountered before, but the moment is fleeting. When he returns to sweat & curse & act like a martial arts pirate it’s a godsend. He describes things as being “thick as flies on a farting goat’s ass”, tells crazy stories about his human prop wife, and makes direct references to his distractingly artificial hair. If we had a whole film of this stuff, it might’ve actually been worth the time & money. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Unlike actually-enjoyable films like Vampire’s Kiss & The Wicker Man, which are done a disservice by being reduced to memes, Outcast might be best viewed as a YouTube highlight reel. Endless traveling montages & a piss-soaked, opium addicted, too-adult Anakin Skywalker are all well & good in their own place & time, but it’s just unfair to deliver such trivialities when there’s a foul-mouthed pirate Nic Cage just begging for more screen time. Stylistically, the film doesn’t have much going for it either, recalling a decade-late Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon knockoff with enough superfluous Dutch angles to give Battlefield Earth a run for its money. That could be a forgivable offense, though, if they had just delivered what they promised.

Side note: The score’s main theme sounds hilariously similar to Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. Either that or I was just desperately looking for ways to occupy my mind.

-Brandon Ledet