I remember discussing Aniaraand High Life as sister films when they first went into wide release in 2019: two ice-cold space travel narratives about the doomed prospects of humanity surviving the next few decades of Climate Change decimation. And now we have met those sisters’ goofy little brother in Voyagers: a trashy YA space thriller on a similar subject but without their sense of purpose or coherence. It’s difficult to say whether Voyagers is “about” the same existential concerns as Aniara or High Life. If Voyagers is about anything at all, it might just be a grim warning that teenage hormones are dangerous for space travel. Mostly, it’s just a mockbuster echo of themes that have been tackled in much more thoughtful, substantial works before it (including Equalsand The Lord of the Flies, among the two already mentioned), ensuring that it will only be exciting to a teen audience young enough to not have seen this exact ground tread before. Thankfully, genre filmmaking doesn’t have to be entirely novel to be worthwhile; it just has to be entertaining.
Like in Aniara and High Life, Voyagers follows a doomed, decades-spanning mission to preserve the human race in the farthest reaches of outer space, leaving a decaying Earth behind. It skips over the more complexly philosophical and moralistic conflicts of its smarter sister films so it can quickly get to the good stuff: shirtless teen boys wrestling on a spaceship. Where Aniara and High Life will ask big-concept sci-fi questions about the ethics of forcibly bringing children into a world that is already ending before our eyes, Voyagers instead rapidly ages those children until they’re hormonal powder-kegs, then smashes them together like Barbie dolls in PG-13 friendly make-out sessions. It occasionally pretends to be about the chaotic selfishness of human nature or the dangerous appeal of populist right-wing politics, but it’s heart not really in it. This is not a cinema of ideals or ideas. This is a thirst-trap movie for teens where everyone involved is their age, horny, inexplicably heterosexual, and the boys among them love to wrestle. The only reason it’s even set in outer space is that sometimes a hatch will open so the boys’ shirts will fly right off into the vacuum, revealing their abs for the swooning audience at home.
Voyagers is a bad movie. It’s also a strangely compelling one. There are some truly chaotic editing choices in its early stretch when the starbound teens first discover the joys of living horny & unmedicated, their minds’ eye opened to universe in rapid-fire montage of Ed Woodian stock footage. Not since Lucy has a film so confidently dived headfirst into stock-footage psychedelia on this level of sublime inanity. It’s too bad that editing-room giddiness cools down once the horny teen violence heats up; if they had worked in tandem this could’ve been worthy of Midnight Movie programming for decades into the future. Instead, it’s the kind of so-bad-it’s-decently-entertaining novelty that you shamefully watch on the couch alone, shuttering the windows to hide your shame from the neighbors. I wouldn’t recommend the film so much as I would bashfully admit that I had a fun time watching it – my appreciation crumbling under any scrutiny or pushback against its many, many faults. If you want a Good Movie, watch High Life or Aniara. That’s not what Voyagers is for.
There’s a thin line between dread & tedium and, unfortunately, the cheaper your film is the likelier it is you’re on the wrong side of it. It used to be that horror movies set on spaceships post-Alien would struggle most with that conundrum, as they often failed to match the exquisite tension of their inspo. Now we’re officially in an era where The Witch inspires that same mediocrity in bulk, just in a woodland setting. It took a lot of decent-to-great movies to get here (Hagazussa, Relic, The Other Lamb, The Ritual, Apostle, The Head Hunter, It Comes at Night, etc.) but we’re finally at the point where we simply just don’t need any more low-budget ~atmospheric~ horrors set in the woods, at least not for a while. I can pinpoint the exact moment that line was crossed too. It’s in the opening credits of Sator, which repurposes the final shot of The Witch as an early moodsetter instead of a last-second cathartic release. It’s literally picking up where The Witch left off, highlighting its diminished returns before it ever has a chance to stand out on its own. We’re done with the woods for a while, folks. Time to pack up the tents.
To be honest, even without the shadow of The Witch lingering across woodland-horror cinema at large, you’d have to dial the clock back to even before The Blair Witch Project for Sator feel fresh or exciting in any significant way. Its most attention-grabbing details are in the circumstances of its production: a no-budget family affair written, shot, directed, produced, edited and scored by Jordan Graham. You can tell this is a deeply personal project for Graham, not only because of his obsessively auteurist control over the entire production but also because of his casting his own grandmother, June Peterson, in a central role. Like the grandmother figure in Trey Edward Shults’s similarly underfunded Krisha, Peterson appears to be suffering enough from dementia that she’s not fully aware she’s participating in a movie production at all. The film is structured around several trips to grandma’s house in the woods, wherein Peterson pontificates about a local demon figure named Sator who possesses the bodies of the spiritually weak. She discovered the existence of this demon through automatic-writing exercises, which provide most of the loopy, vaguely menacing atmosphere the film can muster through her mumbled monologues. The film that Graham builds around that automatic-writing core is some pretty basic Indie Horror 101 material. Grainy black & white tours of a candlelit cottage are crammed into a boxed-in aspect ratio, scored with cassette tapes of Peterson’s audio journals and occasionally interrupted by the mythical Sator – a cloaked humanoid figure in a deer skull mask. As much as I admire the scrappy, D.I.Y. feel of its production values, I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve taken that exact haunted-cottage tour a dozen too many times in the past couple decades, if not just in the past five years.
My overriding thought throughout Sator was “Do I want a snack or am I bored?” I ate some Ritz crackers, and the feeling did not go away. In the abstract, I’m in love with the idea of automatic-writing exercises leading directly to demonic possession; I spent too many years chasing down a bachelor’s degree in Poetry for that premise not to appeal to me. The actual text of those automatic-writing journals never feels specific enough in its mythology or iconography to land with any real impact, though. They mostly just recall Bray Wyatt’s pro wrestling sermons when his in-ring character was Insufferable True Detective Fan. They drone on with no clear sense of purpose, and the visual iconography that accompanies them never amounts to anything novel or substantial. It’s likely not fair to single out this particular example of post-Witch woodlands horror as the subgenre’s tipping point, but hey, this is the one that dares to repeat the final image of Robert Eggers’s A24 Horror linchpin in its opening minutes. Once that comparison is invited, it’s impossible not to look back to the steadily diminishing returns of the genre in the years since Black Phillip’s enticing offer of the taste of butter & a pretty dress and to long for the days when that kind of whispered oration felt goosebumps-fresh.
At this point, there’s nothing especially novel about a movie simulating the first-person, subjective experience of dementia. If nothing else, the reality-shifting dementia narrative has been attempted at least twice on the television shows Castle Rock & BoJack Horseman in recent years, which indulged in the exercise for one-off episodes. It’s already become a genre template with its own firmly established rhythms & tropes, not much different than the stuck-at-the-airport or trapped-in-an-elevator episode templates of 90s sitcoms. What those immersive dementia narratives don’t have in their arsenal, though, is the acting talents of Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (no offense meant to Sissy Spacek or Wendie Malick, who anchored their aforementioned TV episodes capably). I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but Anthony Hopkins is very talented. Get this: he even won an Oscar for Best Actor this year for his work in his own dementia-driven actor’s showcase, The Father (his first win since 1992’s Silence of the Lambs). And from the outside looking in, The Father looked like it was specifically designed for those kinds of Awards Season accolades, landing an already beloved, established actor enough highlight-reel worthy moments to look believably Oscar-worthy on a television broadcast. In practice, though, The Father gives Hopkins much more to do than to simply collect gold-plated statues in a late-career victory lap. It doesn’t reinvent the immersive-dementia-narrative template in any substantial, formalist way, but it does find a way to make it thunderously effective as an actor’s showcase, and Hopkins makes the most out of the opportunity in every single scene.
While Hopkins’s performance as the titular, increasingly demented father is the film’s centerpiece, much of the credit for that performance’s impact is owed to first-time director Florian Zeller. Adapting his own eponymous stage play for the screen, Zeller dutifully follows the standard tropes & rhythms of the immersive dementia narrative. We follow Hopkins through his subjective experience of place & time. The physical details of the apartment he occupies and the faces of his caregivers transform as he loses track of where & when he is in the labyrinth of his own mind. His nonlinear sense of reality prompts him to recall future events, while he also conveniently forgets past traumas in an endless loop of repeating, excruciating conversations. It’s a mildly surreal experience, but not an unfamiliar one if you’ve seen it done on TV before. What really distinguishes this example is the complexity and sudden stabs of cruelty in its stage play dialogue, all excellently performed (including supporting performances by other talented Brits like Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams, and Imogen Poots). Watching Hopkins viciously tear down the few people in his life trying to help him cuts through the narrative’s familiarity like a dagger, especially since you never stop feeling for him even when he’s at his worst. His basic persona shifts just as much as his sense of reality & time. Within a single conversation, he’ll transform from an adorable flirt to a heartless monster, devastating the family members & nurses who’re struggling to care for him despite his stubborn pride & prickly demeanor.
Sometimes Hopkins is deeply befuddled, his mind visibly buffering to reorganize the details of his environment until they make sense. Sometimes he’s scarily sharp, psychologically eviscerating his loved ones with a throwback Hannibal Lecter sense of caustic wit. That alternation between vulnerability and cruelty feels directly tied to stage play writing, recalling the tender-vicious turns of dialogue in works by Edward Albee, August Wilson, or Tracy Letts. This movie earned a lot of attention for the subtle shifts in its set design and the surrealism of its demented reality. Its real strengths are much simpler and even more familiar than its immersive dementia narrative, though. It’s most impactful for providing an astonishingly talented actor with complexly written dialogue and setting him loose on the stage. Unfortunately, time is linear, so it’s likely we won’t see many more virtuoso performances from Hopkins as the years march on, much less any of this high caliber. His Oscar win was mildly controversial due to this year’s messy, Soderberghian Oscar ceremony billboarding a tribute to Chadwick Boseman that never came together. That might’ve made for an embarrassing television broadcast and a major disappointment to Boseman’s most ardent mourners, but at least the work that was rewarded instead of Boseman’s stands out as something substantially, recognizably great. If Boseman’s nomination had been upstaged by Gary Oldman for Mank or Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody there’d be a lot more to be angry about.
I’ve been watching a lot of reality competition shows over the past year, as that format is about the upper limit of what my brain can handle right now. I particularly enjoy competition shows where contestants collaborate on art projects (especially fashion competitions), as opposed to the much more plentiful variety of shows where they compete for romantic connections. After 15 months of burnt-out pandemic brain, I feel like I’ve completely depleted the backlog of worthwhile, currently-streaming shows that hit that exact dopamine sweet spot. Since March of last year, I’ve watched Project Runway, Next in Fashion, Making the Cut, Legendary, Glow Up, Blown Away, America’s Next Top Model, Great British Bake-Off, Great Pottery Throwdown, Interior Design Masters, Big Flower Fight, Full Bloom, Nailed It, Making It, Haute Dog, Dragula andmore spin-off series of RuPaul’s Drag Race than I care to recount. I couldn’t tell that I was scraping the bottom of the competition show barrel until recently, though, when I found myself watching the Hulu show Exposure. Exposure is essentially a 6-hour commercial for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, presented as a competition show for aspiring “smartphone photographers” – i.e., L.A. area Instagram hipsters. It’s trash, and I watched the entire thing in a single weekend between hammering away at my own home renovation projects and hiding from in-the-flesh social interactions.
As vapid as Exposure is on a conceptual level, it did get me thinking a lot about the art of smartphone photography and Instagram curation. Yes, the show was cynically designed to sell one specific brand of smartphone, but it’s also one of the few instances of popular, legitimized media I’ve seen acknowledge the labor & artistry that goes into smartphone photography. Most of us take pictures with our phones, and most of us are atrocious at it. Despite the democratization of the tech, there’s a highly developed skill level and shared aesthetic among the masters of the artform that most of us will never put in the time to match. Exposure could’ve been a show entirely about the art of the selfie alone and still had plenty of formalistic challenges to cover over the course of a season. If most of the professional photography we engage with on a daily basis is now relegated to the confines of smartphone tech and social media curation, it’s outright odd that Exposure is one of the few instances of that artistry spilling out into other, more legitimized media. It seems inevitable that the look & feel of Instagram photography in particular would start to influence the formalist approach of proper cinema, if not only because most young cinematographers in the industry likely got their start taking photos on a commercial-grade smartphone.
Enter Some Kind of Heaven, a highly stylized documentary that owes a lot of its visual appeal to the visual language of Instagram. A sweet, lightly surreal portrait of the largest “retirement community” in America, Some Kind of Heaven is relatively reserved in its subject & themes. The people & setting are interesting enough to hold your attention, but it’s really the cinematography that makes it sing. The film’s boxed-in, 4:3 aspect ratio should probably recall the studio-lot artificiality of the Old Hollywood era when the similarly squared-off Academy Ratio was basically an industry standard. Instead, its fetishistic obsession with symmetry and its formalist, posed portraiture can’t help but feel driven by the visual language of Instagram. As a documentary, it’s a fairly standard exercise human-interest journalism. As an art object, it feels like an Internet Age update on Lauren Greenfield’s oeuvre, modernizing the art of formalist portraiture with an Instagram-driven sense of framing against a bizarrely artificial backdrop. Of course, those two aspects of the film cannot be detangled from each other. First-time director Lance Oppenheim credits editor Daniel Garber as the film’s “co-author”, and I assume he’d include cinematographer David Bolen in that sentiment as well, considering how much of its eerie, otherworldly appeal is due to its Insta-era visual slang.
There’s an obvious, blatant clash between form & content here. While there’s a youthful modernism to the film’s post-Instagram aesthetic, the subjects being profiled live in a world populated only by the elderly. Some Kind of Heaven is entirely contained to the sprawling “retirement community” of The Villages, FL. The conflicts suffered by its four main interview subjects are largely specific to geriatric life: drug dependency, homelessness, loneliness, declining mental cognizance and physical health, etc. Those conflicts just happen to play out in the surreally artificial world of The Villages, self-described as “Disney World for retirees.” The people are recognizably real, but their playground is an extravagant illusion, which is where the film’s form & content work together in harmony. When we look at a slickly curated Instagram feed, we know we’re seeing an authentic person abstracted & distorted by a shamelessly inauthentic artform. That exact clash is echoed in this film’s fascination with how its subjects’ messy lives contrast against the fabricated surrealism of their intensely Floridian backdrop. Some Kind of Heaven makes for stiff competition with Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar for the most Floridian film of the year, and it didn’t have to build sets to achieve that status. It merely stumbles into a pre-existing alternate reality to gawk at the set dressing already in place.
As far as I can tell, Some Kind of Heaven was filmed on professional-grade digital movie cameras, not smartphones. It’s a little reductive for me to tie its meticulous visual artistry so closely to Instagram formalism, then, but I can’t help making the connection. If bottom-of-the-barrel competition shows like Exposure are going to be the only legitimized media outlets that recognize the artistry of cell phone photography, we’re going to lose sight of what makes this specific era of photography visually distinct from better-respected modes of the past. It’s only a matter of time before the chaotic irreverence and rapid-fire edits of TikTok overtake the Insta generation’s cinematic moment, so it’s worthwhile to consider which films are actually preserving & engaging with the aesthetic while it lasts. Of the few Insta-driven movies I can think of—Ingrid Goes West, Assassination Nation, Woodshock, etc.—this might be the most visually striking of the batch. There’s something wonderfully bizarre about that achievement being tied to such an explicitly geriatric subject, since Instagram celebrity has been so closely tied to youthful beauty since its inception & popularization. And, hey, if anyone out there wants to borrow my idea for a reality competition show about the art of the selfie you can have it for free. I need more mind-numbing bullshit to watch on the weekends anyway.
The daily experience of working and living right now is exhausting on a cellular level. I’m not even referring to the specific context of the ongoing global pandemic, which has only amplified problems that have been humming in the background of our lives & work over the past couple decades. Everything is fake now. Meaningful, tangible experiences have been distorted and “disrupted” beyond recognition by the most power-hungry dipshits among us – tech bro vampires who mistake their inherited wealth for personal genius. Most jobs aren’t really jobs anymore; they’re one-off assigned tasks performed by “independent contractors” for mega-corporations with incredible talent for innovating new ways to avoid taking care of their own. Most personal interactions have lost their intimacy; they’re abstracted and commodified for social media broadcast, creating a constant pressure to be “on” all the time that makes even our idle hobbies feel like a secondary mode of labor – paid out in likes. The modern world is uniquely empty and cruel in a way that’s becoming increasingly difficult to satirize. There’s no artistic parody that could truly match the exponential inanity of the real thing, at least not in a way that won’t be topped the very next week by some other cosmic Internet Age blunder.
Lapsis gets close. A high-concept, low-budget satire about our near-future gig economy dystopia, it’s a bleak comedy but not a hopeless one. The wonderfully-named Dean Imperial stars as an old-fashioned working class brute who struggles to adapt to the artificial gig work of the Internet Age. Our befuddled, belly-scratching hero takes on a new job running cables in the woods as infrastructure for a new, so-called “Quantum” internet service. His daily work is assigned through an app that gamifies grueling, daily hikes with a point system and a competitive social media component with fellow contract “employees”. He struggles to comprehend the basic functions of the app, requiring constant assistance from younger hikers who find smartphone tech more familiar & intuitive. Yet, he ignores their attempts to unionize, focusing instead on sending all his hard-earned digital money back to a younger brother suffering from a vaguely defined type of medical exhaustion with the world called “omnia”. The app heavily regulates hikers’ rest, like Chaplin being chided for taking an extended bathroom break in Modern Times. They compete for tasks with automated delivery robots that trek on in the hours when their human bodies need sleep. Their wages are taxed into oblivion by small, daily expenses that should be funded by the mega-corporation that “employs” them. It’s all eerily familiar to the inane, artificial world we occupy now, with just enough exaggeration to qualify as science fiction.
The only other modern labor-exploitation satire I can recall in the same league as Lapsis is 2018’s Sorry to Bother You. Lapsis doesn’t aim for the laugh-a-minute absurdism of Boots Riley’s instant-cult comedy, but it’s maybe even more successful in pinpointing exactly how empty and draining it feels to live & work right now. Visually, it makes the most out of its budget in its art instillation set pieces that juxtapose its hiking-in-the-woods nature setting with impossible tangles of internet cables and the imposing cube-shaped modems they link to. Satirically, it’s most impressive for walking a tightrope between observational humor and moralistic allegory. Despite all of the tangible, recognizable parodies of modern gig-work tech it lays out in its early stretch, the film is most commendable for its more abstract, big-picture metaphors about inherited wealth, capitalist exploitation, and soul-deep exhaustion with modern living – all of which play out within the absurdist specificity of its near-future premise. I was especially delighted that it strives towards a hopeful solution for our fake-as-fuck hellscape instead of just dwelling on its compounding problems. It dares to sketch out a hopeful vision for labor solidarity between young, very-online Leftists and more traditional working-class Joe Schmoes, where it could just as easily point out the specific ways things are fucked right now without bothering to offer an exit strategy. We need that kind of hopeful vision right now, even while we acknowledge exactly what’s wrong with the world as-is.
If there’s any one arthouse auteur whose films I’m desperate to track down right now, it’s Ulrike Ottinger. Her filmography still promises the thrill of discovery in a way her New German Cinema contemporaries no longer can, as their work has been routinely assessed & dissected over the decades while hers has been locked away, collecting dust. Surely, the recent critical push to rediscover & reappraise ignored female auteurs will inevitably result in an Ulrike Ottinger boxset from Kino or Criterion or some other film-snob curator. Her kinky, high-fashion, Lesbian cinema holds an enigmatic cool that can currently only be enjoyed in Google Image results (legally, at least), as most of her work lacks any proper American distribution. However, individual Ottinger films have populated in niche online streaming spaces over the past year, suggesting that a broader critical interest in her work is growing. Last summer, I was able to watch her feminist ode to alcoholism, Ticket of No Return, for free via the We Are One Global Film Festival. And now, this summer, The Criterion Channel has added Freak Orlando—her abstract perversion of the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando—to their Pride Month streaming package. These individual releases were frustrating in their obscurity and distance apart, but that presentation did help make them feel like an Event in a way most home viewing experiences have failed to over the past year. Each bite-size morsel of Ulrike Ottinger’s filmography feels like a small appetizer enjoyed one locked door away from the entire buffet.
With a year’s anticipation between them, I think I personally got more out of watching the more linear, coherent Ticket of No Return than I did its direct follow-up. “A theater of the world in five episodes”, Freak Orlando often feels more like a collection of performance art pieces than it does an actual Movie (especially in the way scenes defiantly loiter long past their welcome). The individual images in its living tableaus are undeniably sublime, but their overall effect swings wildly from patience-testing to hilarious to outright shrill with no concern for tonal modulation. Ottinger’s style lands much closer to Derek Jarman’s abstract, queer-punk headscratchers than it does to the aggro melodramas of R.W. Fassbinder, her New German Cinema contemporary. Some of her intended humor is lost across culture & time, but you can tell there’s a flippancy to her work that deliberately disregards both audience and critical expectations. I can’t even tell you with any certainty where the five individual “episodes” of Freak Orlando start and end; my only anchor in the film is Orlando themself – the one actor who maintains the same role throughout while all other feature players try on new personae from vignette to vignette. Still, I enjoyed being mesmerized and confounded by the experience. And I can easily see how being trapped in a movie theater with the film—unable to be distracted from its long, repetitive tableaus—would have made it even more abrasively hypnotic. That environment enhanced Jarman’s The Garden greatly, anyway, which is my closest reference point to what Freak Orlando appears to be up to.
Our titular time & gender traverser arrives at the gateway to Freak City, makes a brief pitstop to suck on Mother Nature’s teet, then proceeds to integrate themself among the freaks within. Orlando is presented mostly as a bearded lady in dominatrix gear (one of many in Freak City, it turns out), who takes a centuries-long tour of various horrors of violence and oppression leveled upon society’s marginalized outcasts. I won’t make any concrete guesses how individual tableaus like 1950s housewives tending to ovens on a castle lawn or a crucified Christ singing opera in a Taffy Davenport dress relate to that central theme, but the overall feeling is that social outcasts are inevitably steamrolled by the fascist majority – a tragedy that repeats itself across time as a cultural routine. This isn’t a misery piece by any stretch, though. In every instance of fascist violence, the oppressed freaks band together as a tight-knit, self-celebratory community, often with Orlando as their figurehead. The concluding vignette hammers this point home with an adorable talent show thrown by The Society of Ugly People, who have welcomed Orlando into their ranks with a “One of us!” style ceremony à la Tod Browning. If there’s any central thesis to Freak Orlando it might be that “a pain shared is almost half a pleasure”; this world may be shit for the freaks among us, but at least we have each other. Framing the film with any kind of clear meaning or messaging feels a little reductive, though. In a lot of the individual scenes you can tell Ottinger is just having fun projecting weird shit onto the screen, which is its own half a pleasure.
Like all visual fetishists, Ottinger has perverse fun with the costuming of the fascist state of Freak City, dressing its citizens in clear plastic future-couture and its military in leather kinkster gear. The film might be reluctant to participate in any straight-forward narrative cohesion, but it’s feverishly committed to pushing the D.I.Y. fantasyscape of its production design & costuming to the furthest possible extreme. Even when you’re lost about what’s happening or why, there’s still plenty to gawk at. It’s like recalling the details of a dream you had directly after watching Jarman’s Jubilee or John Waters’s Desperate Living – just as grimy as the films proper but much looser in its logic and sense of purpose. I personally crave a little more of a narrative anchor than what Freak Orlando felt like offering me, which is likely why I slightly prefer flippant nihilism of Ticket of No Return. Still, the ideas and images bursting out of this strange beast suggest there’s much, much more to discover in Ottinger’s inaccessible back catalog. There will likely come a time when all of her work is readily available and I’ll burn myself out by binging it in bulk; for now, every morsel offered is a delectable tease that has me salivating for more.
My biggest cinematic disappointment so far this year was the vulgar children’s horror comedy Psycho Goreman. The novelty of an R-rated version of Power Rangers is something I would have drooled over as a shock comedy and monster movies obsessed ten-year-old, but the film’s So Random! sense of humor was too poisonously self-aware to land with me in my much more cynical thirties. The practical gore effects of its various intergalactic monsters were fantastic, though, and I was frustrated that they weren’t deployed for a more sincere purpose. I mention this because the Brazilian splatter horror Skull: The Mask is much closer to what I wanted out of Psycho Goreman: 80s-metal album cover badassery that keeps its winking-at-the-camera self-amusement to a respectable minimum. And yet I enjoyed it even less than PG. I can’t say it was a bigger disappointment, since Skull: The Mask wasn’t hyped up nearly as much among friends & critics as one of the year’s shiniest genre gems, but it let me down in a very similar way: great effects wasted on a frivolous purpose.
To be fair, Skull: The Mask does at least take aim at a worthwhile political target (instead of just mining our nearly empty well of 90s retro nostalgia like Psycho Goreman). It’s a film about colonialist museums claiming ownership over Indigenous people’s artifacts for the sake of their cultural prestige, removing them from their original, spiritual purpose. In this case, that artifact is the titular mask: a ritualistic object that destroys the body of its wearer then transforms it into a vessel for a muscular, blood-spewing demon. All of the kills are aces, featuring victims’ faces macheted in half, hearts ripped from their chests, intestines wrapped around their throats, and blood pouring from their eyes in impossible geysers of gore. There just isn’t enough substance to the narrative tissue between those gross-outs to make the film feel worthwhile. Even the initial excitement of watching colonialist museum collectors get their cosmic comeuppance fades as the film devolves into a go-nowhere police procedural investigating the grisly deaths as if their cause was a mystery.
There is so much I love aboutSkull: The Mask, at least in the abstract: galactic psychedelia, black magic rituals, lesbian goths, pro wrestling body slams, heavy metal gore, etc. It’s a shame the movie is far too cheap and unfocused to stand out as anything exceptional despite all those individually badass details. It’s mostly recommendable as a practical effects showcase not as a Movie, which is starting to become a familiar kind of disappointment after recent genre titles on its budget level like Terrifier, The Void, and Aquaslash. I wish I could promote it as a vital antidote to the irony-poisoned ROFLMFAO humor of Psycho Goreman, but it trips over itself in other ways despite that welcome tonal adjustment. Psycho Goreman at least has an appeal as a primer for lifelong horror fandom among the kids who’ll manage to sneak it past their parents’ censorship filters. By contrast, Skull: The Mask is only useful for its eventual YouTube gore reel, which will save you at least 90min of frustrating tedium.
When the 2021 Oscar nominations were announced back in March, I put in a months-long effort to watch as many films nominated that I had genuine interest in, as long as I could access them for “free” (mostly via streaming services I already subscribed to). This meant that $20 VOD rentals of still-in-theaters titles like The Father & Minari had to simmer on the backburner, unless I could get my hands on them via a borrowed library DVD. Well, it’s June now and this year’s screwy, Soderberghian Oscars ceremony is only a hazy memory, along with any tangible critical discourse surrounding the films nominated. Even now, I’m still 23rd in line for my requested DVD copy The Father at the New Orleans Public Library, but Minari finally did arrive. The film is, to no one’s surprise, quite good. There are some big laughs, a few tears, and a heartwarming performance from the world’s cutest kid; it’s just a solid Indie Drama all around. But you already know that. It turns out there’s a price to pay if you want to participate in Online Film Discourse while it’s still fresh, and in 2021 that experience goes for about $20 a title ($30 if it’s Disney IP).
There are two main narrative tracks running parallel in Minari. In one, an enterprising Korean immigrant (Steven Yeun) moves his family from San Francisco to rural Arkansas, sacrificing their urban social life to pursue his obsession with starting a self-sufficient, profitable farm – the supposed American dream. In the other, the amateur farmer’s youngest child David (Alan S. Kim, the aforementioned cutie) struggles to connect with his grandmother, who arrives directly from Korea to live on the newfound family farm. Of those two storylines, I was much more emotionally invested in the latter. The stakes are obviously much higher in the father figure’s risk-it-all obsession with starting his own farm, but the boredom and isolation his family suffers because of that choice is given equal emotional weight. I remember what it’s like to live in the South as a kid, just far enough away from a major city that you can sense its presence but never get to enjoy its benefits; your only company is your family, whether you get along with them or not. That tension is only amplified here by the arrival of an estranged family member who doesn’t have her own place in the group dynamic yet, especially when viewed through the eyes of the shiest, most sheltered member of the household.
David’s cautious relationship with his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung, who did take home an Oscar statue for Best Supporting Actress) is the emotional core of Minari. Her arrival on the Arkansan farm might as well be a UFO landing to him. Not only does she represent a parental home country he’s completely unfamiliar with in his short time alive (early on, he complains that she “smells like Korea”), but she also does not act like the stereotypical ideal of a grandmother he’s come to expect based on American pop media. She gambles, swears, loves pro wrestling, chugs Mountain Dew and, worst yet, she doesn’t even bake cookies. Of course, all of those qualities are rad as hell in an elderly grandmother, but it takes young David a long while to warm up to that obvious truth. Watching the two of them grow to truly know and love each other over the course of the film is a low-key kind of Movie Magic that cannot be matched by the flashier, more inevitable tragedies of the tear-jerking plot – most of which derive from the father figure’s almost entirely separate toiling on the farm.
Minari is seemingly aware that David’s inner life and personal relationship with his grandmother is its emotional anchor. At the very least, choosing to set the film in 1980s Arkansas, as opposed to current-day, affords it a kind of nostalgia-tinged remembrance that focuses on highly specific sensory details—flavors, smells, textures—that transport you back to an otherwise half-forgotten childhood. And because modern film discourse moves at such a rapid pace right now, even just thinking back to Minari‘s six Oscar nominations earlier this year is tinged with its own kind of nostalgia. The world has already moved on from discussing it, but it’s still a great film. My only real surprise in that months-late discovery is that my favorite aspect of the film was one of the few that wasn’t nominated by the Academy: Alan S. Kim’s performance as David. Cute kid.
I remember being incredibly skeptical of the sudden consensus a couple years back that 1999 was the pinnacle of modern cinema, as solidified by critic Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. As I already rambled on about in my review of The Talented Mr. Ripley when that book was still a hot topic, I believe every Movie Year is practically the same. Most movies are bad, but a lot of them are great, and it takes time to sift through the deluge to single out the gems. All we’re experiencing now is the inevitability of critics who were young enough to first start discovering a passion for film in the late-90s now aging into a role as legitimized tastemakers, so that they’re able to collectively repeat inane phrases like “1999: Best Movie Year Ever!!!” loud & often enough that they sound halfway legit.
I am also guilty of that exact nostalgia bias myself, no matter how skeptical I am of its validity. While the critical reappraisal of 1999 as the Best Movie Year Ever wasn’t entirely convincing to me in a broad sense, it did highlight a particular facet of that era that does stand out as exceptional to me: its immaculate collection of high school-set comedies. I will never fully be able to tell if the exquisite run of high school movies from 1998-2001 really was exceptionally great or if I’m just nostalgic for the era because I was entering high school around the time. Either way, this list of titles just from 1999 seems like a staggering canon of all-time classics to my biased eye: Drop Dead Gorgeous, But I’m a Cheerleader!, 10 Things I Hate About You, Jawbreaker, Election, Cruel Intentions, Drive Me Crazy, She’s All That, etc. And then there’s the one eerie, troublesome outlier from that 1999 High School Classics canon that feels like it drifted in from another place & time altogether – the debut feature from director Sofia Coppola.
The Virgin Suicides is less the social hierarchy satire that most post-Heathers high school comedies strive for than it is a modernized, American update to the eerie Peter Weir whatsit Picnic at Hanging Rock. Unlike most 1999 High School Classics, it’s not a comedy at all, but rather a melancholy drama about Big Teenage Feelings and the uncanny nature of nostalgia. Still, the film indulges in a bemused humor at the expense of the awkwardness of teenage dating rituals in the 1970s Michigan suburbs, often conveying the domestic imprisonment of its titular teenage virgins through a tight-lipped smirk. Under the severely over-protective eye of their parents, the five young sisters become isolated and lonely to the point of suicidal depression, and the movie sincerely engages with the impact of that tragedy (as opposed to, say, the way teen deaths are handled in Drop Dead Gorgeous, the other Kirsten Dunst classic from that year). Its amusement with that tragedy is mostly centered on how the girls are perceived by their clueless, infatuated peers.
While The Virgin Suicides is technically about the suicidal sisters, the girls’ story is told through the eyes of their romantically starved neighbors – a group of inexperienced young boys who saw them mostly as a window into the supposed enigma of femininity. All the Picnic at Hanging Rock supernatural mystery surrounding the girls is an extension of their distanced male admirers’ POV, who try to solve their lives and deaths as if they were a curious puzzle and not simply victims of a neurotically repressive parenting style. By tapping into that nostalgia-tinged teenage longing, Coppola evokes something intensely powerful untouched by any other high school movie of its era. She stated in an interview, “I really didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done. I immediately saw the central story about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.” You’re not going to find that kind of shit in 10 Things I Hate About You, as fun as it is as a more typical literary “adaptation” from that era.
I love The Virgin Suicides. It feels more complexly funny, dreamlike, and femme every time I watch it, especially since I was a clueless, romance-starved teenage boy myself when I first rented it from a Blockbuster in the early-2000s New Orleans suburbs. There was a spoil of Teen Movie riches flooding video store shelves in that era, but none of them hit the exact dazed, Hanging Rock tone Coppola’s film did. I won’t cosign the broader 1999: Best Movie Year ever discourse (which really doesn’t matter, since I appear to be the only person still hung up on it), but if can we narrow that claim down to 1999: Best High School Movie Year Ever the argument is much, much more compelling – and this inclusion in that canon is one of the most impeccable standouts.
In recent months I’ve been enjoying floating round in the grey area between classic noir & melodrama with a few Joan Crawford classics like Mildred Pierceand The Damned Don’t Cry. While I still have a few more titles to visit before I abandon that track (I particularly look forward to traveling down Flamingo Road), the Gene Tierney psych-thriller Leave Her to Heaven was an excellent detour on the journey. I don’t want to suggest that anyone but Tierney should’ve been cast in the film’s central, villainous role, but Leave Her To Heaven is the exact kind of sinister romantic obsession story that Crawford excelled at in the best of her melodramatic noirs. The difference is that Joan would’ve gobbled up the scenery with a fiery passion, hurling cocktail glasses at the wall and clawing at her victims like a wild animal. By contrast, Tierney is ice cold in her own femme fatale villainy – passionate in her romantic obsession, yet inhumanly ruthless in eliminating that romance’s minor obstacles. Her red Technicolor lipstick is louder than she ever raises her voice, yet she leaves behind a shocking trail of dead as she inevitably gets her way. It’s an entirely different mode of femme villainy than I’m used to from the genre’s more animated, expressive titans like Crawford & Stanwyck, but it’s just as stunning to watch.
A large part of Leave Her to Heaven‘s novelty within its genre is in seeing the femme fatale archetype interpreted as a Too-Dutiful Housewife, as opposed to a Sultry Seductress. Tierney’s major crime is that she wants to spend too much time with her husband. Well, that and the murders. Her main crime is probably the murders. The first act of the film is a slow-moving courtship ritual in which a bestselling author (Cornel Wilde) is allured by the charms of a fiercely independent socialite (Tierney) whose family is quietly terrified of her. The doomed author feels compelled to position himself as her macho protector, but it’s clear from her family’s unease with the courtship that he should be protecting himself. It isn’t until their inevitable marriage that the exact nature of that threat becomes clear. Ferociously possessive of her husband’s time and attention, Tierney takes her newfound role as a housewife far too seriously. She announces early on, “I have no intention of hiring a cook, or a housekeeper, or any other servants, ever. I don’t know want anyone else but me to do anything for you.” The husband finds this proclamation sweet, but she really means it. Any possible distraction to their alone time—whether family, visitors, his writing, or their baby—is in danger of being obliterated by her possessive jealousy. In becoming The Dream Wife, she’s a total fucking nightmare.
There’s a pervasive, harmful myth in modern Western culture that your romantic partner must be your Everything, that no other relationship matters once you make that all-encompassing monogamous commitment. Leave Her To Heaven turns that expectation into something incredibly sinister, thanks largely to Tierney’s ice-queen ruthlessness. Even when she suffers her unavoidable punishment for her transgressions under the dictums of The Hays Code, she still finds a way to weaponize that punishment and continue her campaign of preemptive revenge upon her marriage’s potential distractions. Between its Academy Ratio framing and lush Technicolor sheen (something that was especially eye-searing on my shiny new Criterion Blu-ray), Leave Her to Heaven is dressed up in some remarkably classy Old Hollywood packaging. Meanwhile, Tierney’s femme fatale housewife feels like she stepped out of a trashy novel from Ira Levin or Gillian Flynn. She’s one of cinema’s greatest, most delectable monsters, and she achieves that all-timer status by dutifully following the basic tenets of modern monogamy. As much of a sucker I am for Joan Crawford’s explosive fury in her own melodrama-noirs, I was totally won over by Tierney’s more reserved, slow-simmering resentment here. I need to make a point to watch more of her own 1940s crime melodramas once I’m done chasing down all of Joan’s.
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