reviews

Barbie (2023)

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When we were talking about coverage and discussing the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Brandon generously offered me the opportunity to be the one who covered Barbie, after I declared in no uncertain terms that I had no interest in Oppenheimer (sorry, Cillian). I did my part, going to the movie on opening night, wearing the only garment I own with any pink in it—a mostly-blue luau shirt with flamingos nestled in the pattern—and having my picture taken in the doll box that was being hastily assembled in the lobby when I arrived. It’s looking like this one will end up being a favorite for a lot of the Swampflix crew, and I’m happy to report that I had a good time as well. 

Barbie (Margot Robbie) is the most popular resident of Barbieland, a pink utopia inhabited by a seemingly endless series of Barbies, including President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Neff), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya), and Author Barbie (Alexandra Schipp). There are also a multitude of Kens, including the “stereotypical” Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach” and who is paired with likewise stereotypical Prime!Barbie. Also present is his primary rival Ken (Simu Liu), and several others (including Ncuti Gatwa), as well as one-offs like Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) and poor pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell). Every day is beautiful, as Barbie interacts with her dreamhouse, drinking imaginary milk from empty doll cups and bathing in a waterless shower, then goes about her adventures before retiring back to her home for a nightly dance party. Things couldn’t be more perfect, until one day Prime!Barbie asks the others if they ever think about dying, which brings the party to a screeching halt. The next day, nothing goes right; her shower is inexplicably cold, her imaginary milk is spoiled, her heart shaped waffles are burned and fail to land perfectly on her plate, and worst of all, she’s somehow become a flat-footed doll in a world of high heels. At the advice of her compatriots, she seeks guidance about her situation from “Weird” Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who was “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie sends Prime!Barbie on a quest to the real world to find the girl who’s playing with her so that she can cheer her back up so that her distinctly un-Barbie thoughts stop finding their way into Prime!Barbie’s head. 

In the real world, Gloria (America Ferrera) is the receptionist at Mattel, a company that, despite depending on the monetization of the fantasies of little girls, is run entirely by men in identical gray suits; she finds herself drawing concepts for new dolls that share/embody her personal ennui. When Barbie (with stowaway Ken) escapes the boundaries of Barbieland and enters California via a portal at Venice Beach, young Mattel employee Aaron (Connor Swindells, the third alum from Sex Education in the movie) is contacted by the FBI to warn the dollmakers about this breach, and he delivers the news directly to the CEO (Will Ferrell). Elsewhere, Barbie’s search for her doll seems to lead to a dead end as she finds Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), her presumed dollplayer, only to find that the girl has become a tween edgelady who dresses down the cowboy-clad living doll for her ties to capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and body dysmorphia. While this is happening, Ken comes face-to-face with the omnipresent patriarchal nature of the real world, wholeheartedly buying into the ideals of male domination because of his own lack of fulfillment in his non-relationship with Barbie. Upon his return, he spreads this anti-gospel around to the other Kens, which leads to all of the Barbies losing the memories of their impressive accomplishments in lieu of becoming servile dolls to the Kens with whom they are paired. With help from Gloria and Sasha, who are mother and daughter, Prime!Barbie has to try and wrest control of Barbieland back before it becomes the Kendom forever. 

Early marketing for the movie featured that famous image of Margot Robbie, currently poised at the moment between memetic and iconic, with the tagline “Barbie is everything.” And not only is she, but Robbie is a star, baby. Although there may never come a day when society forgives Suicide Squad, it’s time for us to all try and forget it, because Robbie is really outdoing herself with each new project. As an actress, her absolute control over her every movement and facial muscle is astonishing. When confronted by a world in which she is frequently hated instead of universally beloved, it would be easy for this sort of narrative turn to feel like one of those “the regent learns their subjects hate them” plots, but because Robbie’s Barbie is kind, empathetic, fun-loving, and heretofore carefree, it’s emotionally devastating, and Robbie makes it work. That having been said, the beating emotional heart at the center of the film is America Ferrera, whose Gloria is the motivating factor behind all of the events of the film, and who gives a powerhouse monologue near the film’s climax that utterly steals the show. Kate McKinnon’s smaller part is also a delight, and the explanations of how she came to be the way that she is have a kind of quintessence of truth that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I was a bit disappointed upon the initial entrance into the real world with Gosling’s Ken instead of Liu’s, the latter of whom I found much more charming in their initial scenes, but given that specific Ken is called on to temporarily become the king of the jerks, literally and figuratively, I came to prefer that it was Gosling’s Ken who becomes the film’s antagonist for a bit. 

At the core of that antagonism is Ken’s deep and profound insecurity. Ken’s existence, his destiny, is to be “and Ken” to Prime!Barbie, secondary to her. Since Barbie—as the idealization of a certain idea of liberated womanhood—doesn’t need him the way that he needs her, he lives in a perpetual existential crisis in which he has no real job or purpose other than an  exaggeratedly asymmetrical relationship. It’s precisely this lack of security in his identity that leaves him open to being brain-poisoned by patriarchy, and he even ultimately admits that he got carried away and that what he really wanted to get into wasn’t phallocentric government so much as horses (it makes sense in context … sort of). There was no way that a movie like this one wasn’t going to end up on the radar of all the expected grifter outrage manufacturing machine mouthpieces, but the ones who can’t stop blathering on and on about film’s “woke” agenda with the fury of a man who’s mad that his wife put the cookies on a shelf he can’t reach; they’re really tattling on themselves with this outing, even more than usual. It takes a truly deep level of self-doubt and an utter dearth of self-reflection to take a look at this movie, which is about how sad, unfulfilled men unsuccessfully try to fill that void inside with toxic masculinity and be like “This is a movie that attacks me personally.” Do you not even see how much you’re showing your whole ass with that, bro? The Kens aren’t even doing the things that are violent, just the things that are annoying, like keeping a slovenly house, favoring patent leather couches, and mansplaining The Godfather. They’re not trying to entrap women through emotionally manipulative therapy lingo, or being shitty to their pregnant wife while she begs to be allowed to leave the house without administering veterinary medicine that she’s medically forbidden to handle, or isolating a woman with the intent to do harm. Don’t be like that. Just have a “brewski-beer” and teach yourself how to play a Matchbox Twenty song or two and let this one float past you in the stream, man. 

In this case, the MST3k mantra applies on a couple of levels. Remember, this is just a movie, and you should just relax, both in any attempts to make this light, effervescent, bubblegum movie into another wedge in the culture war, and in the more traditional sense of letting go of the urge to try to figure out the exact limits of the film’s internal logic. It’s not what anyone is here for. This is an aesthetic experience just as much as (if not more than) it is a narrative one, and that’s what art is, baby. Just have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

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The consensus opinion on 1979’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is that it’s a mediocre document of a magnificent concert.  Even its recent re-release was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 London concert captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker, not the anniversary of the documentary.  The newly expanded and remastered version of the film cleans up Pennebaker’s footage in digital 4K resolution and includes additional backstage & onstage tidbits “lost” in the original, 90min cut (including brief appearances from Jeff Beck and Ringo Starr).  It was alternately referred to as Bowie ’73 in its original theatrical run, again stressing the importance of the event filmed rather than the film itself.  By ’79, Bowie had evolved past the Ziggy Stardust glam rocker persona, moving onto more depressive, cerebral projects like his Low collaboration with Brian Eno and his Iggy Pop collab The Idiot.  The Ziggy Stardust project was already a satellite broadcast from a distant past, and this 1973 concert was billed as the farewell to the persona and to David Bowie as the public knew him, with announcements on the PA declaring “For the last time, David Bowie . . .”  So, the logic goes that it’s worth suffering through this shabby, low-lighting footage just so there was some remnant of the Ziggy Stardust band on the record before Bowie transformed into something else altogether. 

I personally found the film much more substantial than that, at least in its new theatrical presentation.  All of the imperfections audiences have cited over the years are still present—if not expanded—in this restoration.  The 4:3 framing is frustratingly tight for a performer known for his galactic-scale glamour.  The dim lighting of the venue makes the crowd shots borderline incompressible, which undercuts the pleasure of scanning the faces & fashions of the audience.  The camera swings wildly around the room, finding a point of interest halfway into a shot instead of starting with a detail worth documenting.  Some shots go entirely black, the audio reel continuing to record while the film cartridges are switched out.  Maybe it’s my decades of being brainwashed by D.I.Y. punk aesthetics, but I found those grimy human fingerprints on Bowie’s pristine visual art to be a feature, not a distraction.  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a raw document of an immaculate art project, pulling great tension out of the disparate qualities of Bowie’s perfectionist songwriting and Pennebaker’s imperfect imagery.  The live arrangements of the Ziggy Stardust songbook work the same way, with guitarist Mick Ronson unraveling tight, familiar pop tunes into abstract, psychedelic noise.  The sweaty, sped-up performances of Bowie’s early bangers map out a solid bridge from glam to punk, which couldn’t be more direct by the time the band covers “White Light, White Heat” in raucous encore.

I suspect I had that rapturous, energizing experience with the Ziggy Stardust movie because of the newly restored sound mix.  Listening to a digitally cleaned-up, surround sound presentation of this concert in a modern movie theater is easily the best sound quality I’ve ever heard in a David Bowie recording, which certainly elevated the images captured by Pennebaker’s cameras.  This is the clearest case of “The work speaks for itself” that I can recall, given that a few minutes of Ziggy’s band performing “Moonage Daydream” in this shaky, cramped frame packs in more mystique & meaning than the entirety of the recent Brett Morgen documentary of the same name.  You do not need to dress Bowie up in iTunes visualizer kaleidoscopes to make his words & sounds intriguing to a modern audience.  He already dressed himself up in a slutty little kimono and put on a full show, so all Pennebaker had to do was show up with professional recording equipment, sit back, and gaze.  The low lighting of the venue and the chaotic movements of the camera evoke UFO conspiracy footage, desperate to catch a glimpse of this glam rock clown from outer space before he disappears back into the night sky.  Bowie often appears in orange monotone lighting against a black void, glowing as a strange visual object that just happens to produce beautiful music.  The sight of him is arresting, and so long-familiar tracks like “Changes” & “Space Oddity” are captivating in a way they haven’t been since I first heard their proper studio recordings on my sub-par headphones in high school.

My only lingering disappointment with this film is that I couldn’t get a better look at the crowd.  There’s enough strobe & disco ball lighting to catch glimpses of the queer nerds swooning in ecstasy over Bowie’s presence, but not enough to fully document their presence in the room.  Bowie’s sassy, talkative performances of “Changes” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” slow the momentum of Ronson’s guitar licks down to draw attention to the lyrics, which celebrate the eternal passion & progression of Youth Culture in a way I found genuinely touching.  So many of his early songs dwell on time, death, and impermanence that he comes across as a real Gloomy Gus, but he does take obvious solace in how those “changes” are a positive influence on the world from the perspective of youth.  So, I found myself scanning the youth in the crowd for their real-time reactions to his art – whether they were gently moshing to manic performances of “Hang Onto Yourself” & “Suffragette City” or they were awestruck by his genderless supermodel posing in various Space Age onesies.  It would’ve been nice to fully see those faces before the impermanence of time changed them into something unrecognizable, but there’s no way to fully go back and correct that mistake.  What this restoration was able to excavate & accentuate in Pennebaker’s documentary is well worth experiencing big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd of fellow Bowie obsessives.  Maybe the form doesn’t fully live up to the content, but in this case it’s difficult to imagine that any one movie ever could.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

Virtual Combat (1995)

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It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads.  Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library).  I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development.  I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi.  Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture.  Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy.  What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform.  Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway.  For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD.  Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.

By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming.  Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.  It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date.  It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo.  It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget.  There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out.  Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones.  Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation.  Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025.  No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm.  Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights.  Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes.  The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far.  Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination.  Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand.  These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.

There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking.  Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis.  I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course.  Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation.  There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script.  The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss.  Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine.  There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi.  In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll.  I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.

-Brandon Ledet

Oink (2023)

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I don’t watch enough modern children’s animation to know what adults are supposed to get out of it, but whatever it is I do know that it’s missing from Oink.  The recent farm animal morality tale is billed as the first stop-motion feature ever produced in the Netherlands and, if true, that’s the only remarkable thing about it.  I assume that all most parents want out of children’s films is amusing flashes of vibrant colors to babysit the kiddos for a couple hours, accompanied by metaphorical messaging that’s wholesome & innocuous enough that it won’t poison their little developing brains (i.e., “Believe in yourself,” “Don’t be selfish,” “Obey your parents, your teachers, and the police state,” etc.).  Oink is passable on both counts, at least in my estimation.  It’s got an adorable hand-animated stop-motion technique akin to the recent French film My Life as a Zucchini, which offers a welcome, tactile counterbalance to our post-Pixar CG animation landscape.  Its messaging is a little more daring than its visuals, deliberately teaching kids vegan & vegetarian values in opposition to the evils of the meat industry.  Some parents will object to that blatant political advocacy, but only because there isn’t much else happening onscreen to distract from it.  There’s plenty of anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist messaging in modern children’s media, but it’s often buried under distracting, for-the-parents pandering like Shrek parodying The Matrix, or the Angry Birds dabbing, or the Minions twerking, or whatever.  Oink does feature a cute cartoon animal doing goofy physical comedy for the whole family’s amusement, but all of its drama is centered on children’s desire to not see that animal butchered for sausage meat, so that there isn’t much to it beyond its overt politics.  Essentially, it’s moralistic propaganda for children with a cute piglet mascot.  So, if you’re not a child who needs the moral conundrum of industrialized meat consumption explained to you in simple, black & white terms, there just isn’t much happening onscreen worth engaging with.

As you can tell by the title, the animal in peril is an adorable piglet named Oink.  The cutesy baby pig is adopted by a misfit Dutch girl with uptight vegetarian parents who cannot abide the chaos an untrained pet brings into their household, but they relent to their daughter’s infatuation with the animal almost instantly.  The pig is accompanied by an estranged grandfather figure from the United States, who’s reluctantly invited back into the family home despite past selfishness & cruelty to his own daughter.  It’s immediately clear that the grandfather encourages the protagonist’s affection for the pig because he wants to fatten & butcher it for an upcoming sausage-grilling competition, one he narrowly lost the trophy for decades ago.  There’s no twist or nuance to this foreshadowed villainy.  As the competition approaches, he kidnaps the pig and attempts to feed it directly into the meat grinder.  All butchers & meat eaters are monstrous in this shameless vegetarian propaganda.  They’re intimidating old men who lie to their families, sneak rat tails into sausage links, and chase children down the street, yelling “I’ll put you in the meat grinder!” at the helpless tykes.  Oink‘s anti-meat messaging makes Okja look subtle by comparison, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were literally any other moral or dramatic tension in the film.  I wasn’t especially shocked or offended by its vegetarian righteousness as an occasional meat-eater myself.  Although, I did object to a last-minute claim that vegetarian sausages taste better than pork; that’s just a lie.  It’s just that I’ve already weighed out the grey-area nuances of how my personal meat consumption affects my fellow animals and the planet we share, and I’ve ultimately decided for myself that meat is a sometimes treat instead of a dietary cornerstone (after a few sporadic years of cutting out beef & pork entirely, most recently inspired by the aforementioned Okja).  Most adults watching Oink have likely already wrestled with the nuanced morality of that personal decision, and so the film’s naked vegetarian messaging is only really useful to adults if they’re looking to convert children to a specific side of that internal debate.

Oink is at its best when it functions as pure visual comedy.  There’s something classically funny about calm family gatherings being disrupted by a rambunctious pet, especially when that pet is as small & cute as Oink.  The film even goes a step further by disrupting that prissy decorum with scatological mayhem.  Oink shits everywhere, smearing long streaks of brown clay all over his hapless owner’s once-pristine family home.  He also continually farts stop-motion clouds of cotton and, eventually, saves the day with his overactive colon.  The film’s scatology is funny, but it’s never as shockingly over the top as the recent stop-motion gross-out The Old Man Movie, which was similarly billed as the first stop-motion feature from Estonia.  Its depressive outcast protagonist is adorable & relatable, but the movie doesn’t dig nearly as deep into her emotional turmoil as My Life as a Zucchini does with its cast of melancholy orphans.  The Netherlands may be lacking in stop-motion feature films to be gushing over, but the world at large is not, with plenty more novelty & nuance to be found in recent titles like Mad God, Wendell & Wild, Marcel the Shell, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and the still-not-released-in-the-US Little Nicholas, to name a few.  Everything that happens in Oink is meant to underline how cute pigs are and how despicable it is that Texan barbeque enthusiasts like to kill & eat them.  That dynamic is just far too morally & thematically simplistic for the film to amount to much, at least not for adults.  The best I can say in its favor is that it’s got an adorable visual aesthetic and I got a few solid chuckles out of the stop-motion pig farts.  Well, that, and at least it’s not another Shrek.

-Brandon Ledet

Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)

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Is there a sizable audience out there still steaming mad that the erotic firefighter sequences of Titane weren’t even gayer?  João Pedro Rodrigues appears to believe so, as evidenced by his pornographic firefighter musical Will-o’-the-Wisp, which is being pitched at the dwindling crowd of arthouse shut-ins who remember that Titane even exists (i.e., losers like me who pay attention to “the news out of Cannes”).  Or rather, its indulgence firefighter fantasia is shiny packaging meant to lure those art snobs into the theater.  Once ensnared, Rodrigues sits us down for abstract academic pontification about climate change, racial justice, and outdated governmental power structures, which helps give the film a sense of political purpose beyond its initial novelty.  Boiling Will-o’-the-Wisp down to any one genre or tone is a fool’s game; the arthouse curio is a one-stop-shop for art history lectures, environmentalist theory, gay pornography, rage-bait trolling, sitcom schtick, and interpretive dance – all in an hour’s time.   I’m something of a fool, though, so I’ll do my best to condense & summarize by declaring the Titane stage musical sequence at its center to be is its most attention-grabbing tangent, which makes it an effective Trojan horse for the million other things on Rodrigues’s mind.

In the year 2069, an ineffective Portuguese king waits out his last few days of hospice before death, wistfully watching his great grandnephew play with a toy firetruck.  The toy evokes the king’s most cherished memory: a time when he was a young, idealistic prince who abandoned his royal duties to join the local fire brigade.  This decision is partly influenced by his royal parents’ indifference to the global disaster of climate change, listening to news reports of wildfires and their son’s recitation of Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech as mild annoyances instead of immediate crises.  It’s also influenced by his childlike naivete, which approaches firefighter iconography and a mythical royal pine tree forest with the same awestruck fascination as the young grandnephew playing with the toy.  Once in training, the prince grows up quick.  He learns real-life, adult responsibilities & passions on the job, both physically combating the immediate effects of climate change and physically making love to his hot fireman instructor, a commoner hunk with impeccable abs.  The prince’s ferocious joy for his new, meaningful life is expressed through song & dance in the film’s erotic centerpiece, which is why it’s such a betrayal when he quickly throws it away the second his meaningless “royal duties” call him back to the throne – where he gradually dies a pointless life.

The most important thing to understand about Will-o’-the-Wisp is that it’s a total troll job, a flippant provocation aimed at post-irony academics.  It’s politically furious, eager to throw intellectual bombs at institutional failures to address climate change and at the roles race & class play in the romance between the white prince and his Black fireman hunk.  It’s also seemingly resigned to the futility of attempting institutional change, throwing those bombs for self-amusement as the world burns to the ground regardless.  Its indulgence in incendiary race-play kink and coronavirus death feel no more serious than its erotic CPR training, its gay-porno restagings of classical art, or the absurdly fake ejaculating dildos featured in its climactic 69 set piece.  The Thunbergian urgency of its climate change activism is the only genuine impulse in its arsenal; it just also sees any response to the crisis beyond large-scale institutional disruption or intervention to be useless, amounting only to academic infighting.  Maybe the idea behind the Titane musical sequence is a nihilist one, trying to find a little novelty & levity in the world before it melts away.  A more generous reading is that it’s a novel attempt to draw attention to the urgency of a political issue that will kill billions of people if the wealth class who can afford to travel to Cannes don’t wake up and take charge.

-Brandon Ledet

Past Lives (2023)

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There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rhinestone (1984)

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Dolly Parton owes her half-century of success & popularity to two specific talents.  First & foremost, she’s a songwriting machine.  Parton’s distinctive, meticulously crafted image & voice would’ve only taken her career so far if it weren’t for her uncanny ability to crank out a hit song in an afternoon as if it were as easy as washing the dishes.  Over 3,000 titles into her songbook, her career is overflowing with anecdotes about writing “Jolene” & “I Will Always Love You” in a single session or tapping out the rhythm for “9 to 5” while she was bored between takes in her trailer.  She also owes her longevity to her talent for the business end of show business, always knowing exactly what moves to make at what time to expand her brand far beyond the typical boundaries of a Nashville singer-songwriter career.  When she started performing as a side act on The Porter Wagoner Show in the 1960s, she was able to reach a much wider audience than she would’ve just cutting records.  Once she had thoroughly charmed every country music fan in the US through their television sets, she left the show to become a main attraction elsewhere, aiming to charm the rest of America as a big-screen movie star.  Parton quickly accomplished that goal in her first couple roles, finding a perfect vehicle for her talents in the legalized-prostitution musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and stealing the show from legendary comedian Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5.  The only problem is that most Hollywood executives don’t share Dolly’s creative or business talents, and they weren’t entirely sure how to package her as a comedic lead without the ensemble-cast support of hits like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias.  Her awkwardly chaste chemistry with Burt Reynolds in Whorehouse was cute and a huge part of the film’s Broadway musical appeal, but by the time she was romantically paired with the eternal asshole cynic James Woods in 1992’s Straight Talk, it was clear casting directors & boardroom executives weren’t sure how to balance Dolly’s country-fried warmth with a proper love-interest leading man.  This disconnect, of course, was never more glaring than it is in her pairing with Sylvester Stallone in the 1984 romcom Rhinestone, the most notorious flop of Dolly’s career – at no fault of her own.

Rhinestone finds Dolly & Stallone at their Dolliest & Stalloniest, clashing their respective rural sweetness & urban gruff in cultural combat instead of romantic entanglement.  They fire incoherent line readings at each other for two schticky, jittery hours without ever once having an actual conversation, not even for a second.  Intentionally or not, it’s America in a nutshell, capturing the great, wide cultural divide between small-town hospitality & big-city living.  If that either/or cultural binary were a contest for moral & intellectual high ground, Dolly clearly wins the debate, sassing Stallone with the zinger “There are two kinds of people in the world, and you ain’t one of them.”  She’s correct.   Her costar is an Italian NYC cabbie & proud knuckledragger, navigating modern urban life like a drunk toddler who missed naptime.  Nothing he does or says makes a lick of sense, which makes Dolly’s simplified country livin’ sensibilities seem like the only reasonable way to live.  She did move to the big city herself to become a famous singer, though, which is how she gets involved in a classic Cinderella bet that she can turn the lughead city-dweller into a popular country musician in just a few weeks’ time.  When agreeing to the bet, she failed to take into account that she was working with subhuman raw material, which becomes apparent by the time Stallone is screaming half-remembered lyrics to “Tutti Frutti” while banging on random piano keys at his helpless parents’ family-owned funeral parlor (mid-service, of course, for full comedic effect).  Thanks to the touring Acrocats band, I have literally seen cats & chickens play musical instruments with a clearer sense of rhythm & song structure.  Dolly’s helpless country star-to-be also didn’t take into account matters of the heart, which catches her off-guard when the mismatched pair’s discordant rapport suddenly turns romantic without warning.  The first time they kiss & make love is a scarier plot development than anything you’ll see in director Bob Clark’s landmark slasher Black Christmas; it’s so wrong it’s haunting.  And yet there’s something sweet about watching these two crazy kids get together, if not only because the heart & social fabric of America itself hangs in the balance of their volatile dynamic.

As bizarre as Dolly’s chemistry with Stallone can be, she does have clear, coherent chemistry with New York City at large.  Although the song never actually plays in the movie, Rhinestone is “adapted” from the Glen Campbell novelty hit “Rhinestone Cowboy,” which it essentially boils down to the clash of big-city glam vs. simple country livin’.  If there’s anything about the film that “works” the way it’s intended to, it’s the fish-out-of-water humor of sending Dolly to the bright lights & mean streets of NYC.  In an opening song (penned by Dolly herself, naturally), she yodels over helicopter footage of the Statue of Liberty and complains “Life ain’t as simple as it used to be, since the Big Apple took a bite out of me.”  The Big Apple of Rhinestone is defined by discos, pizza, room service, and casual racism. Meanwhile, small-town America is all front-porch concerts, farm animals, and Christian sweethearts who are willing to teach a city boy how to honky tonk even though the city is way less inviting when the cultural exchange flows the other way.  Stallone’s fish-out-of-water humor as a boneheaded, punch-drunk cabbie who can’t walk ten feet in the country without slipping and falling in pig shit is much less convincing, but only because he’s much less convincing as a human being.  Dolly also wrote Stallone his own song to define his struggles in life, a novelty tune about black-out alcoholism called “Drinkenstein” that he barks & howls more than sings.  It’s difficult to tell how much of the film’s baffling, uncanny humor is a result of the miscasting of Dolly & Stallone as a romantic pairing vs how much is just a result of Stallone going off the rails in a Nic Cagian freakshow that disrupts the flow of the picture around him.  In Straight Talk, there is absolutely no chemistry between Dolly & Woods, who might as well have filmed their shot-reverse-shot “conversations” on entirely different shooting schedules.  In Rhinestone, by contrast, there is disastrously explosive chemistry between Dolly & Stallone – like, the poorly homemade pipe bomb kind of chemistry, the chemistry of an oil spill disrupting freshwater pH. 

In the short term, Rhinestone may have been a professional embarrassment for Parton, but everything that makes it so off-putting & ill-fitting for her rests on Stallone’s shoulders.  In the long term, it’s endured as one of her strangest, most memorable movie projects, one that inadvertently exemplified how refreshingly out of place she was in Big City show business outside her Nashville songwriting roots (and how bizarrely inhuman the show business urbanites could be on the other side of the table).  Or, at least, it could endure that way if those Big City lugheads hadn’t allowed it to slip into distribution limbo after its decades-old DVD went out of print.

-Brandon Ledet