reviews

It Follows (2015)

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threehalfstar

Horror movie villains are often our sadistic, cinematic moral police, sent to punish the corrupt masses (especially attractive, fornicating teenagers) for their sinful behavior. The curse haunting the sex-obsessed teenagers in It Follows, however, is slower, more cerebral than Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. It values psychological over physical torture. Its horror is omnipotent, never ceasing. It’s the kind of moral police that watches you from behind a camera, following your every move.

At the center of the demon’s wrath is Jay, a 19 year old college student who enjoys her idyllic suburban neighborhood with her sister Kelly and friends Paul & Yara. They spend their fall days drinking on porches, watching 50s horror movies, taking collective naps. Innocent, naive, happy.

Their feeling of security is soon shattered following an initially innocent sexual encounter that ends with Jay being drugged with a heavy dose of chloroform. She wakes up half-naked, strapped to a chair, and told by her brief fling Hugh that she has been infected with a sexually transmitted curse. The curse can take any human form and stalks the stricken in calm walking tempo. Its touch means death. The only way to rid yourself of the curse is to pass it along to someone else. Have sex or be killed.

The ingenious premise of It Follows and strong stylistic vision of director David Robert Mitchell turn Jay’s mundane suburban surroundings into a playground for dark forces. The curse takes shape in variety of ways; an abnormally tall man with his eyes gouged, the methodical walk of a naked demon woman. As these terrifying images invade her picturesque world, the juxtaposition makes them even more disturbing. The way the story unfolds in It Follows keeps you intrigued but doesn’t go into too much detail about the true nature of the curse. This keeps the curse vague, menacing. A sense of permanent dread and anxiety hangs over the movie. Rich Vreeland, stage name Disasterpiece, also kills it with his strange, ominous soundtrack that is reminiscent of not only John Carpenter, but video game music as well.

It Follows doesn’t get everything right. It loses momentum at several points and builds toward a somewhat tepid climax, but these are small grievances. Overall it is an exceptional horror film that plays around with horror genre tropes, but feels modern instead of regressive. There is also potent subtext about the nature of our sexual attachments and intimacy anxieties. The film can also be interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS and other STDs. Other movies like the body horror flick Contracted (about a zombie STD) have also played around with these themes, but none feel as refreshingly original as It Follows. If nothing else, it’s a convincing argument for abstinence if I’ve ever seen one.

-James Cohn

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

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threehalfstar

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Tokyo Drift, the third installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast and Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It’s also a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema.

Although there’s very little narratively connecting Tokyo Drift to its predecessors, it does share a lot of their surface pleasures: it brings back the rap rock from the first film (with Kid Rock in this case), it adds new toys to the vehicles (this time a revolving sports car vending machine, 3-D paint jobs, and nitros tanks shaped like champagne bottles), and the cars reach the cartoonish, blurred warp speed that the series finds so fascinating (although this time they’re moving sideways). The most important connective tissue here, however, is the stunt casting of a rapper in a supportive role. The first film had Ja Rule, the second had Ludacris. Tokyo Drift has (Lil) Bow Wow, playing a wisecracking sidekick who winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time. In the previous two Fast and Furious films Paul Walker served as the only common element between them; in Tokyo Drift, Bow Wow’s stunt casting makes that connection even more tenuous.

Substituting Paul Walker in the central role is the aforementioned teenage reprobate Sean, played by Lucas “The Kid From Sling Blade” Black. Never you mind that Sean is easily in his mid-twenties (and the rest of his American high school classmates are nearing their thirties). He’s a teenage dropout who burns his last chance for redemption in an opening street race with Zachery “The Kid From Home Improvement” Ty Bryan in an attempt to “win” his opponent’s girlfriend. By the time the girlfriend in question declares “Looks like I got a new date to the prom” it’s more than fair for the audience to ask “Who are these people?!” The answer to that question never comes (although their connection to the franchise is hinted at in that all-too-important last second cameo). Saved from going to jail for his street racing transgressions by his leopard print hussy mother, he’s promptly shipped off to Tokyo to live with his military daddy, who really only exists to occasionally give the film some girl group song levity in lines like “It was either this, or juvie hall” and “Have you been racing, Sean?” Sean himself isn’t a particularly essential addition to the Fast and Furious world, but it is amusing to hear him pronounce Japanese words in a thick Southern accent once he reaches “The Drift World” and the idea of a girl-group style teenage bad boy looking for his inner Drift headlining one of these movies is a bizarre enough detail on its own regardless of execution, given how far removed it is from the undercover cop intrigue of the rest of the franchise.

Besides Bow Wow’s antics and Sean’s extended screen time, the real draw of the film is The Drift World itself. There’s an unashamedly trashy pleasure in Tokyo Drift’s world of Japanese sports cars sliding sideways in parking garages and down mountainsides, its Yakuza members who speak English even when they’re the only people in the room, and the live-action videogame feel of its downtown street racing. There’s a few innovations to the format here: it’s surprisingly the first film in the franchise to feature a car being built from scratch via montage; spectators discover a way to watch an entire race through a series of flip phones; this has got to be the only Fast and Furious movie to feature a Shonen Knife song on the soundtrack; and I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens. The most entertaining part of Tokyo Drift, however, is how little it is concerned with engaging with the rest of the franchise at all. It’s its own little side story about a young Southern boy trying to make his way through the class struggles of two worlds-apart high school hierarchies. Does he ever find his inner Drift? Yes, but does he get the girl? You betcha. As Sean himself says in the film, “It’s not the ride, it’s the rider,” and Tokyo Drift takes that lesson to heart, using the franchise as a vehicle to create its own space as a ridiculous, surface-pleasures action thriller with some ridiculous one-liners, a car racing fetish, and career high moment for rapper-turned-actor Not-So-Lil Bow Wow. I’m a little surprised by how much that formula worked for me and it ended up being my favorite film in the series so far.

-Brandon Ledet

Mall (2014)

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three star

Last summer I attended a Linkin Park concert in Houston, Texas and before the concert began, there were a buttload of advertisements for Mall. I was really confused as to why a film was being advertised at a concert, but I later discovered that Linkin Park’s DJ and sampler, Joe Hahn, directed the film. He also directed some of Linkin Park’s best-known music videos, such as “Numb,” “From the Inside,” and “ Somewhere I Belong,” so I wasn’t really surprised to find out that he directed an actual feature-length film. As embarrassing as this may sound, the main reason I decided to watch Mall was because Mr. Hahn directed it. Interestingly enough, it was very similar to a Linkin Park music video, due to its slow motion action scenes, futuristic visual features, and soundtrack composed by members of Linkin Park along with Alec Puro (drummer of Deadsy).

Mall is based on a novel of the same name by Eric Bogosian. The film follows the lives of several individuals that connect once a meth addict shoots up their local shopping mall. The film does a great job with bringing attention to the subplots of each individual character without losing focus on the mass mall shooting, but the film does have its share of problems. The biggest problem is that the script is poorly written. It’s difficult to keep up with what’s happening because there’s too much going on and none of it is very interesting. On a more positive note, the film’s visual elements were excellent. Mall is actually kind of similar to Blood and Black Lace (April’s Movie of the Month) because it is a film worth watching for the visuals rather than the story.

I can’t go without mentioning that the one and only Gina Gershon makes an appearance in the film as Donna, a dissatisfied suburban housewife. This role was perfect for Gershon and she was definitely one of the strongest actors in the film. While her character was my probably my favorite, she hasn’t come very far since Showgirls. Yes, she’s still the campy hot mess that I fell in love with years ago.

Unfortunately, Mall wasn’t as good as I expected it to be, but it certainly wasn’t terrible. It falls right in the middle, making it an “ok” film. The underwhelming script and lack of buildup are overshadowed by the amazing cinematography, so it’s definitely worth a watch. A lot of people are going to hate this film, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Mall is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Chappie (2015)

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three star

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As a sci-fi action thriller with prodding questions about private sector weapons production, the drone/surveillance state, and the nature of consciousness and personal identity, Chappie is an utter failure and deserves all of the vitriol that’s it’s been drowning in. As a feature-length Die Antwoord music video, however, it’s a winning success. I’m honestly happy to report that the distinguished pedigree of pop-music movie vehicles like Cool as Ice, Crossroads, Glitter, Spice World, and KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is alive & well in 2015. Honestly. I’m happy with Chappie for what it is: a two hour long commercial for a South African “rap-rave group”, a living, breathing internet meme that scored a surprise one-hit wonder status five years ago.

Although Die Antwoord has released three full-length albums and nearly a dozen music videos at this point, it’s still tempting to categorize them as a one hit wonder. Hell, pop star Tiffany has eight full-length albums and a documentary and she’s still defined by the success of “I Think We’re Alone Now”. Die Antwoord’s own “I Think We’re Alone Now” is a 2010 trash pop oddity called “Enter The Ninja.” Unlike a lot of Die Antwoord’s more repetitive, rave-friendly songs, it’s a real ear-worm in its own bizarre way and it had the added benefit of introducing a their then-fresh world of graffiti-soaked visual art in an eye-popping music video that went “viral”. In the five years since the release of “Enter The Ninja” their act has worn a little thin on me (as one-hit wonders often do), but they’ve developed a devoted niche audience for their version of the South African “zef” aesthetic, an audience that takes their music & visual art very seriously. If Die Antwoord was conceived as a joke or a meme, it’s impressive how committed they are to the gag, seemingly integrating it into their personal lives & physical appearances to the point where it doesn’t matter whether they’re “for real” or not.

It’s no surprise, then, that Die Antwoord’s singular hit “Enter the Ninja” plays over the final shot & end credits of Chappie. When I first spotted them in the trailer for the film, I assumed their role was a severely limited one, a glorified cameo. I was wrong. Die Antwoord are to Chappie what Vanilla Ice was to Cool as Ice, what Eminem was to 8 Mile, what The Village People were to Can’t Stop the Music. This is their vehicle. They play themselves. Their music dominates the soundtrack. They flaunt their own merch. Their visual aesthetic (crude phalluses, expletives, and all) is drawn all over every inch of the set. What outfits vocalists Ninja & Yolandi Visser are going to wear from scene to scene are vastly more interesting choices than what their far more famous co-stars Hugh Jackman or Sigourney Weaver are going to do or say. Even the basic appeal of the titular robot Chappie revolves around the duo, since they raise him like their baby and teach him to walk & talk their brand of zef culture. This is unmistakably Die Antwoord’s movie.

The movie vehicle for flash in the pan one hit wonders was an artform I had assumed long dead, but Chappie brings it back to life with the modern update that the group in question started essentially as a meme. Director Neil Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) tried to elevate the material with questions like “Where is our privatization of military weapons production & law enforcement headed?”, “Why are we so cruel to what we don’t understand?”, “What is a soul?” and blah, blah, blah. In this line of questioning, Chappie is nowhere near as insightful as its robot movie ancestors, like the near-30 years old (and near perfect) RoboCop or, hell, even the severely flawed Short Circuit. It is, however, particularly exciting as a return to form for fans of campy vehicles for pop music icons and one-trick ponies. In this case, Die Antwoord. If you’re looking for a thought-provoking sci-fi action flick with well-considered themes explored to their full potential, you will hate Chappie. If you like (or are amused by) Die Antwoord and wonder what a trashy action movie about armed robots & roving gangs ransacking Johannesburg that Ninja & Yolandi would imagine themselves starring in would possibly look like, you have a pretty good chance of enjoying yourself. The only thing it was missing on that end was a live performance.

-Brandon Ledet

Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985)

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three star

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Later today I will be cramped in a friend’s living room with a pile of fellow drunken weirdos shouting at a television screen as WrestleMania XXI unfolds live from Santa Clara, California. It’s an exciting, yet nerve-racking day to be a fan and a difficult feeling to describe to those who don’t share in it. I’m expecting a potent cocktail of camp & violence tonight (along with the usual variety of potent cocktails), the spirit of which is difficult to capture in words. It’s also difficult to capture on film. The allure of pro wrestling is an elusive, intoxicating, yet deeply flawed quality that’s better served experienced in a crowd than it is described on paper or depicted in film. Attempting to accurately capture pro wrestling’s appeal in a fictionalized setting and sell it back to its fans as a feature film has been a struggle for decades, a struggle that saw a significant uptick during the sport’s bloated spectacle heyday of the 1980s (as previously discussed on this site in our coverage of 1986’s Body Slam and 1989’s No Holds Barred). It’s a difficult task for several reasons, but not least of all because both the people making the films weren’t genuine fans of the sport themselves and because there’s a basic blending of reality & fantasy at play that’s entirely lost when a story is fully fictionalized.

Of the few 80s stabs at capturing this particular brand of lighting in a bottle I’ve seen so far, 1985’s Grunt! The Wrestling Movie was by far the most successful. A surprisingly funny mockumentary about the sport, Grunt! exemplifies both pro wrestling’s charms and (unintentionally) its crippling faults. You can tell the film was made by true fans of “sports entertainment” (as well as comedies like Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap). Grunt! captures both the camp and the violence of pro wrestling early and often (like in the opening scene when a competitor is comically decapitated during a match), but also has the good sense to lose itself to the action in the ring, knowing when to drop the mockumentary gimmick and “mark out” at the already-ridiculous-enough spectacle on display. It’s far from tastefully made and can at times be overwhelmingly corny, but those qualities make it all the more akin to the subject at hand.

Grunt! is a nerdy wrestling comedy made by wrestling-loving nerds, as is on full display when the director (as depicted in the film) explains, “Ever since I was a young child and I walked into my parents’ bedroom and my father said to me ‘Get out of here! We’re wrestling,’ frankly I’ve been fascinated by it.” That brand of juvenile sex humor isn’t the only thing the movie gets accurate (trust me, it’s accurate) about pro wrestling’s appeal. It also captures the chair shots, interfering managers, rings pelted with trash by booing crowds, snarling promos and shameless merchandising that surrounds the matches as well as the sport’s less savory features, like racial & cultural caricature and the embarrassing mockery of little people. Grunt! isn’t entirely purposeful in its documentation of the sport’s faults, but even when it’s incidental it’s fascinatingly accurate. For instance, the film’s absolutely horrendous rock & roll soundtrack is all too close to the reality of wrestling. Original songs that make declarations like “I’m only happy breaking bones”, “Do you wanna dance? Do you wanna body slam?”, and “Wrestling tonight! Everything is bigger than life!” are almost so bad that they’re downright punk and it’s that exact sentiment of unashamed cheese (along with the bone-crunching violence) that makes the sport appealing.

Grunt! isn’t a necessarily well-made movie, but it is one that serves its subject well. Its decision to tell its tale through mockumentary was downright brilliant in that it allowed the film to blend reality & fiction the same way pro wrestling does in the ring. There are some artistic touches to the way the actual matches are shot, especially in its disorienting reliance on a strobe light effect, but for the most part the film is a straightforwardly cheap comedy about a straightforwardly cheap sport. Much like the way Grunt! occasionally stops telling tawdry jokes and loses itself in the spirit of the in-the-ring action, there are times tonight when I will lose my grip on what’s “real” or what’s funny and lose myself in the actual consequences of WrestleMania XXXI. Even when the film’s jokes don’t land (though it’s surprising how often they do, considering its pedigree) it’s still incredible that they managed to capture that aspect of the sport on film, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

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three star

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In my review of The Fast and the Furious, 2001’s kickoff to the hyper-masculine car racing franchise, I supposed that somewhere down the line there would be some “sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels”. The series did not waste any time getting there. 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. Sure, we’re blessed here with sex god Tyrese Gibson (who wastes little time in removing his shirt, of course) instead of Vin Diesel and a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris instead of the much-less-captivating Ja Rule, but the two films are more or less the same. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem.

It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious delivers on the action end early, opening with a ridiculous high speed drag race that features hooligans breaking into a bridge control booth to create a makeshift ramp. The ramp, of course, results in Paul Walker leapfrogging the competition as well as a competitor comically smashing through a Pepsi advertisement. Later, in the cop drama portion of the film, a second car is launched into the air (this time into a yacht) and a much more brutal highway race results in some dude driving a convertible being unceremoniously crushed by an 18-wheeler. The vehicles themselves are updated with some nifty new features: weird lights, Barbie car paint jobs, fire-breathing tail pipes, steam-shooting pistons, and nitros-powered ejection seats. The cops have upped their technology game as well, employing a futuristic, electrified grappling hook that somehow disables car engines through a kind of EMP device. As far as the movie’s 00s ideas of cool go, the CGI camera movements are hilariously dated, there’s a not-so-sly verbal reference to Ludacris’ hit “Move Bitch” (which honestly should’ve been the theme song), the Universal logo in the title card morphs into a spinning rim, and in the opening scene we’re treated to the defining hallmark of only the uppermost echelon of classy movies: break dancing.

2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. As a cultural time capsule, there are a couple differences between its worldview and the one from just two years before. For one thing, there’s thankfully no more rap rock on the soundtrack and for another there’s an abundantly frequent use of the sharp uptick of the chin gesture that roughly translates to “What’s up?” The sequel also one-ups its torture game from force-feeding someone engine oil in the first picture to forcing a rat to eat through a stooge’s stomach wall in second one. For the most part, the two films are nearly identical, though. Although nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, 2 Fast 2 Furious is essentially a shameless retread of its precursor, but it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

Serena (2015)

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onehalfstar

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Serena is a masterclass in piss-poor editing. On paper, it’s baffling that a prestige costume drama featuring two of Hollywood’s currently best-selling acts, Jennifer Lawrence & Bradley Cooper, would skip a wide theatrical release and go straight to VOD. On film, it’s entirely understandable. Drowning under an endless flood of inept editing choices is the raw material for a potentially great movie that’s gasping for air, but never allowed to surface. Alternately, Serena is also just a few cuts away from being a brilliantly funny camp classic, but it’s not even allowed to be enjoyable as a terrible film. It’s downright fascinating how frustrating this movie can be. It’s rare that a Hollywood film is released this unpolished and . . . off, but that doesn’t help the fact that it’s not even entertaining as a total disaster.

On the side of the film’s fight for legitimacy there’s an oddly old-fashioned big studio classic feel to the whole affair. Having two of Hollywood’s biggest stars struggle to negotiate their romantic & professional dynamic in an ancient, treacherous locale feels like the exact kind of movie that would’ve been made by every major studio 50 to 80 years ago and it’s charming to return to that familiar Old Hollywood vibe. This is a world where brassy women assert their power with lines like “I didn’t come to Carolina to do needlepoint,” in traditionally male arenas occupied by lumberjack types with perma-stubble & prison tattoos. Cooper & Lawrence aren’t gruff enough to believably sell the dangerous frontiersman developer and his half-feral wife routine, but their natural charisma and the effortlessly pleasant nature of costume dramas in general makes me want to root for the movie to turn out well. If the pacing had the good sense to slow down and let any of these elements breathe it really could’ve been something. That is not what happened.

There is so much more arguing for the movie to go in the camp classic direction. We’re introduced to Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena as she’s galloping on a horse in slow motion, a horrendously tender acoustic guitar plucking away in the background. The music doesn’t improve from there, with its slow, sappy, meaningless musings poisoning nearly every moment. The emptily symbolic animal imagery doesn’t stop there either. Bradley Cooper’s character spends the entire film on a laughably maudlin, metaphorical panther hunt and Lawrence finds empty metaphors of her own in the repetitive scenes where she trains an eagle to hunt the snakes that have been biting Cooper’s workers. The animal imagery, like nearly everything else in play, is almost always followed by blunt interjections of Cooper & Lawrence fucking, as if the film were edited by a half-awake Russ Meyer on cough syrup. Immediately after we meet Serena on the horse she’s squirming under the sheets and she comes out of an abrupt montage a married woman. The same The Room-esque sex interruptions occur after her eagle kills its first snake and after she hits on her husband’s investors at a ball in yet another scene that goes nowhere (except back to the bedroom). The images in these montages all feel like placeholders for longer scenes to be added later, a task that no one ever got around to. Oddly enough, the one image afforded the most room to breathe is the most disturbing one of all, a vigorous bathtub fingering that I’m likely to never forget thanks to Cooper’s intense, empty stare. In time, that bathtub moment might be the only image from this film I remember all, both because it’s so uncomfortable and because the other contenders are way too brief to make a lasting impression.

The scale really is tipped for Serena to reach a camp classic status, but it just never gets there. Besides the sex & animals, there’s also an evil, jealous, homosexual henchmen and a mystic, murderous woodsman who has “visions” that both feel like odd caricatures out of a different, thankfully bygone era. Also, any credibility Serena’s struggle to assert herself professionally adds to the plot is severely undercut by her gradual transformation from a confident woman to a murderous Lifetime Movie sociopath in the wild, like a knife-wielding Nell. I promise that sounds so much more fun than the film allows it to be and just as the characters are prone to fast, flat mumbling, so is the film’s editing. Each scene in Serena bleeds into the next in a way that makes no particular moment feel any more or less significant than the one preceding it. A hand being chopped off feels just as important as miscarriage or a blood transfusion or a town hall meeting. It’s all fast, flat mumbling here.

I truly believe someone could recut Serena‘s raw footage into something worthwhile, (starting by pulling brief images out of the endless montages to allow them room to breathe and scrapping the entire awful soundtrack wholesale) and come out the other end with a polished finished project that would have audiences counterintuitively rooting for Cooper & Lawrence to chop down thousands of trees as well as impregnate & murder their employees. It’s entirely possible. It’d be even easier to cut it into an over-the-top melodrama ripe with Lawrence going full, feral Mommy Dearest on the frontier folk. It’s almost there. In Serena’s fight for either legitimacy or camp, it was decidedly much closer to camp, but thoroughly disappointing as either. If nothing else, if someone wanted to learn how not to edit a film’s separate parts together into a cohesive whole, this would be a great place to start.

-Brandon Ledet

Mood Indigo (2014)

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fourstar

The word “twee” is a loaded descriptor that is sure to chase away a large section of any potential audience. A lot of people bristle at the mere mention of twee, generally construing it as a brand of unbridled, whimsical cuteness. That dismissive conception entirely disregards the bottomless depression of twee genre staples like Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, and the music of Belle & Sebastian. It’s a bookish, sentimental sort of sadness, but twee generally plays its grief so close to the heart that it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate it from the heights of its cheery sweetness. Any twee work that’s worth a damn is just as depressing as it is joyful; the problem is that a lot of audiences don’t find any of it worth a damn to begin with.

Director Michel Gondry has received near universal acclaim for his music video work with acts like Björk & The White Stripes, but whenever he helms a feature film his name has a tendency to be an automatic turnoff for a lot of folks just as much as some people are turned off by the mere mention of the twee genre he often gets categorized within. His films, (titles like The Silence of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) can be downright infuriating when you’re not on their wavelength, but they can also be deeply rewarding for those not alienated by their fanciful sentiments. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of Gondry’s, finding his films to range from pretty good to absolutely fantastic. My only slight qualm with his filmmaking style is that he always feels somewhat restrained by the format, like he needs to bend over backwards to justify the dreamlike loopiness of his practical effects visuals with a narrative purpose. In his short-form music video work, Gondry was free to experiment with visual techniques and surreal logic without having to provide context for their existence (like the video stores, dream sequences, and memory erasure in the titles mentioned above), but that sense of liberation has been difficult for him to translate to feature films.

In a lot of ways last year’s Mood Indigo finds Gondry at last discovering that sense of freedom on the silver screen. The film’s narrative makes no attempt to justify Gondry’s visual whimsy, but instead rolls with it as if it were a normal part of everyday life. It’s not a film that’s going to win over Gondry’s detractors, but it is instead one that caters to his established audience, assuming they are already game for the intricate, dreamlike quirk he is sure to throw at them. Entirely unrestrained, Gondry allows his imagination to run wild here, like an especially quirky Rube Goldberg contraption on the fritz.

Mood Indigo is just crawling with weird, loopy inventions like alarm bells that infest kitchen walls like bugs, pianos that mix hard liquor “harmonic cocktails”, see-though plexiglass limousines, elephant-shaped tanks, and a species of bird people that takes that concept even more literally than the movie Bird People. The film’s first half is a frantic flurry of Gondry whimsy that gets so overly excited that its elements blend together, causing a strange sort of synesthesia: vinyl records can be watched, food can be heard, sounds can be drank, etc. If the pace of the first half had kept up its blinding speed even I might’ve turned on the film. It’s a near-exhausting flood of strange ideas that begin to feel as if they are connected by no unifying concept at all, as if Gondry were the Richard Kelly of twee. Fortunately, if you stick with the film, it eventually relents and begins to reveal it does indeed have a very strict method to its madness. As the protagonist says to a friend, “Despite the complexity of your words you might be onto something.”

The loopy dream logic of Mood Indigo initially feels formless, but it’s eventually revealed that the movie’s fundamental reality is influenced directly by the mood of the characters that inhabit it. The film tells the basic full-cycle story of a life-long relationship from lovers being introduced by friends at a party to their blissful marriage to their eventual dissolution. The constantly shifting, optimistically energized mood of the first half (wherein everything from the food to the household appliances feels alive & happy) fades as the central couple suffers through sickness & poverty, a change sparked by a seemingly harmless water lily. As the mood sours, the pace slows tremendously; the walls literally start closing in, cobwebs form over once sunshine-blessed windows, characters age rapidly, and ominous shadows start coming to life. One character explains, “As you go through life spaces seem smaller.” It’s a sad statement that rings punishingly true as the ostensibly invincible young love from early in the film succumbs to the pressure of life’s heaviest burdens and the even the frame of the film itself begins to constrict & turn grey.

Mood Indigo is almost certain to alienate the twee-averse very early in its proceedings and may even push a large part of the remaining audience a little too far (the same way an increasingly fussy Wes Anderson has seemingly been testing how much Wes Anderson people can take in recent titles like Moonrise Kingdom & The Grand Budapest Hotel). From what I understand, the film’s original European cut was a full 40 minutes longer than the American home video version and that massive edits were made to cut down on its overabundance of ideas. Honestly, that extra 40 minutes probably would’ve poisoned even my viewing experience and I really, really liked the movie. As is, Mood Indigo is a spontaneous, lively film balanced out by the soul-crushing dread of its final hour. For audiences already on board with Gondry’s hyperbolic visual imagination, it’s refreshing to see the director set free by such a vague narrative structure as a gradually shifting mood and Mood Indigo might rank among titles like Eternal Sunshine as his best work. For those who find the idea of that lack of restraint insufferable, it’s best that you stay far, far away. If nothing else, the movie finds Gondry at his Gondriest, which can go either way for you depending on your tolerance of the heights & depths of both Gondry & twee.

Mood Indigo is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

The Congress (2014)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

It’s difficult for a film to blend animation with live action in a credible way. It’s been more than 25 years since the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and I can’t think of a single picture since that does half as good of a job combining the two techniques. Last year’s The Congress sidesteps this problem by keeping its live-action & animation segments almost entirely separate. There’s a purpose to its partitioning of its separate halves, though. The front, live-action end of The Congress depicts a drab, near-future full of anxieties, disease, fears, and oppressive commercialism. The animated second half is an escapist fantasy that offers sanctuary from that depressing world, its own crippling faults buried deep underground. There’s a vibrant world of possibility (both elating & horrifying) offered by The Congress’ choice to animate its outlandish, dystopian future. It was a wise decision that saved the film from being a decent sci-fi exercise and instead made it an engaging cinematic oddity.

The opening, live-action segment of The Congress has an interesting way of providing flat, nonchalant reads of big concepts. Playing off the idea that movie studios literally want to own their talent (like in early Hollywood, if not like now), the not-quite-fictional powerhouse Miramount Pictures offers Robin “Princess Bride” Wright (playing herself here) a life-changing professional opportunity. They offer her a large sum of money to “hermetically scan” her likeness using a futuristic technology that would allow them to insert her digital self into any film project they want. The contract would prevent her from ever acting in the flesh again, but if she doesn’t sign it she’s also risking the studio erasing her work from the screen forever. It’s an interesting concept that brings to question a lot of notions we have as an audience about celebrities (real-life, breathing human beings) as consumable products. In addition to her contract negotiations with Miramount (she eventually signs the contract, of course) the film also interweaves some half-baked, purple prose musings about her son’s deteriorating health and obsession with kites & airplanes. The overreaching sentimentality of these scenes reminds me a lot of the soft sci-fi of the over-the-top camp fest Upside Down and a lesser movie would’ve stopped there and not pushed its crackpot ideas any further (like in Upside Down). The Congress, thankfully, keeps pushing.

After Wright allows herself to be “hermetically scanned” the film jumps 20 years further into the future into a world where people escape from the shackles of an unfulfilling reality by snorting a chemical that allows them to live in a vibrant, animated fantasy world. The “Animation Zone” is a complicated mess of art influences; like an art deco take on Dr. Suess’ wavy line landscapes with whales, dragons, constellations, rainbows, and genitals-shaped fish populating its blinding, neon color palette. It’s stunning. From this point on, it is difficult to tell exactly how much of the film is “real” and how much of it is happening only in Wright’s mind. As one character puts it, “Ultimately everything makes sense and everything is in our minds.” Playing off the celebrities-as-commodities concept of the first half, film studios in the animated future have found a way to convert actors into chemical compounds that can be eaten, drank, and ultimately copied. Instead of watching your favorite celebrities act out fantasies onscreen, you can now become them, so the world is littered with endless copies of familiar faces like Tom Cruise, Ron Jeremy, Jesus Christ, Michael Jackson, Zeus, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, and Muhammad Ali. It’s terrifying.

The animated back end of The Congress is by far the more impressive half of the film, but its slow introduction through the “technophobic”, soft sci-fi of the first half is partly what makes it work. There have been a lot of recent films that attempt to tackle the emptiness of celebrity culture (Birdman & Maps to the Stars, for example), but none push their concepts to such a far, overreaching end as The Congress. The film isn’t entirely successful. The significance of the kite & airplane metaphors, while serving as a decent through line between the two segments, were difficult to grasp as a viewer; there’s an uncomfortable line of thought near the climax that risks making the entire film feel like a screed on anti-depressants; the stilted nature of the dialogue on the front end can be alternatingly amusing & frustrating, etc. However, its faults feel trivial in consideration of how ambitious & assertive the film plays as a whole. The Congress may be an overwrought mess in some ways, but it’s a fascinatingly idiosyncratic mess that’s impressive in its aspirations of pushing its musings on celebrity culture to the most far-reaching ends possible, putting good taste & tact aside in favor of a thorough, bizarrely unrestrained exploration of its themes. It’s the exact kind of mess I like.

-Brandon Ledet

Mother Night (1996)

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inaworld

threehalfstar

Mother Night is an outstanding novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., arguably his best work outside the holy trinity of his titles that get the most attention: Slaughter House Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night is surprisingly just as great (if not better) than any of those books, but what makes it even more surprising is that was remarkably adaptable for film. In addition to hitting my costume drama sweet spot (a low bar to clear, for sure) 1996’s Mother Night was also the best Vonnegut adaptation I’ve ever seen (another low bar, since I’ve only seen the not-very-good Breakfast of Champions). It obviously doesn’t touch anything near the greatness of Vonnegut’s novel (how could it?), but it was effective as a summary of the film’s best touchstones with some inspired casting choices helping bring his words to life.

Playing a role that would likely be filled by Bruce Dern if it were released in 2015 and not 1996, Nick Nolte is damn good in the film’s central role as Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright turned Nazi propagandist during World War II. In some ways Vonnegut does for the Nazi scumbag what Nabokov did for a pedophile in Lolita: he makes Campbell a complicated, richly human character that is at times sympathetic and at other times beyond contemptible, even to himself. Especially to himself. Campbell is a Nazi propagandist who says gut-wrenchingly evil things about Jews as a people in his radio broadcasts, but he’s also an American spy who transmits sensitive information about the war in those very same broadcasts. Nolte carries the gruff, broken spirit of Campbell well, selling the alternating self-hatred and self-aggrandizing of his inner conflict exactly as I imagined it while reading the novel.

Vonnegut’s plot allows a lot of room for consideration in the ways morality during war is a lot more questionable than the typical good vs. evil narrative that’s usually depicted. For Campbell that means that the coded spy language that’s infused into his hateful Nazi broadcasts makes his sin & his virtue inseparable. As his German father-in-law puts it, it does not matter whether he is a spy or not, because the hate in his propaganda is so effective that there is no way he could have served the enemy (America) as well as he served his adopted country (Germany). Campbell tries to remain impartial to the Nazi/American divide, saying that he only feels allegiance to his marriage (“a nation of two”) but the impossibility of that lie is a lesson he learns too late. It’s a moral he summarizes as “You must be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end you are what you pretend to be.”

Mother Night is not only commendable in its competence at capturing Vonnegut’s tricky sense of humor on film; it’s especially praiseworthy because the task in this particular case is made even trickier by the story’s habit of culling amusement out of the horrors of Nazism. It’s partly successful because of its willingness to let the hateful things Campbell says ruminate, like in a scene where a filmed version of one of his broadcasts is projected onto his horrified face as he truly listens to his own words for the first time. Although Campbell is occasionally sympathetic, the movie rarely lets him (or the audience) forget that he is a monster. Besides Nolte’s excellent turn as the central propagandist, there are plenty of other performances to praise here: Alan Arkin’s role as his best friend; Sheryl “Laura Palmer” Lee as his German wife; a perfectly cast John Goodman as the American agent that recruits him as a spy; and Kirsten Dunst as an adorable, pint-sized Nazi moppet, among others. There are some really dark touches to the film’s humor, like when Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” plays over images of a concentration camp or when Campbell makes sensual love to his wife while one of Hitler’s impassioned speeches blares on the bedside radio. These touches all feel oddly subversive, as the whole film has a decidedly old-fashioned feel to it, like black comedy version of The Rocketeer. As a film, it’s more than just a rushed, abridged version of a great novel; it’s also a handsome, well-acted historical drama that finds a peculiar line of humor in narcissism, self-hatred, and genocide.

-Brandon Ledet