reviews

I Blame Society (2021)

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As often as I gripe about megacorporate movie products under the Disney umbrella—Star Wars, The MCU, and their loose collection of live-action reboots—cheaply pandering to wide audiences with Easter eggs & nostalgia triggers, the truth is that I also love to be pandered to. I absolutely loved the recent black comedy I Blame Society, but it did nothing to challenge me as an audience.  Everything about the film feels like it was aimed directly at my tastes, from its no-budget D.I.Y. aesthetic to the transgressive joy it finds in Misbehaved Women to its flippant meta commentary on movies as an artform.  If I vaguely described everything I love to see in movies in a focus group meeting, this is the exact end product I’d expect from the algorithm my feedback was plugged into (minus a few keywords like “drag,” “pro wrestling,” “witchcraft,” and “outer space”).  I slopped up everything the film dished out like a pig at a trough, completely content and undiscerning about what I was being served – the exact kind of passive, incurious media engagement I mock most audiences for when I’m at my snootiest.  It felt great.

The essential difference between I Blame Society and modern big-budget filmmaking is that it wasn’t focus-grouped & algorithmed into existence.  The reason the film is so sharply resonant & relatable is because it’s deeply personal & specific to the creative voice of its auteur.  Gillian Wallace Horvat writes, directs, and stars in this incredibly dark comedy about a struggling filmmaker who shares her name and (an absurdly exaggerated version of) her real-life persona.  In the film, she realizes that her unappreciated skills behind the camera mirror the skills needed to pull off The Perfect Murder, an epiphany that quickly turns her into a serial killer.  This premise is adapted from an off-handed compliment made by a real-life friend who said Horvat would make an excellent murderer, which she investigated in a short-length documentary a few years ago.  Footage from that short is included in I Blame Society as an abandoned project that Horvat intends to tease out into a feature, much to the horror & concern of the people who love her.  After years of not being able to land funding for her dark, off-putting screenplay pitches, she decides to throw all her creative energy & frustration with her industry into one D.I.Y. project that will prove to the world that she is a fully capable filmmaker . . . and, thus, a fully capable murderer.

Horvat is not shy about explaining exactly what’s pissing her off in her creative field and in the world at large.  I Blame Society is a vicious, angry film, often functioning as direct commentary on how difficult it is for women to participate in professional filmmaking as an artform.  In-character, Horvat attends pitch meetings with Duplass Brothers-type indie producers who use press-friendly buzzwords like “strong female characters” to signify that they’re changing with the times by unlocking the gates for women filmmakers to express themselves, but they don’t mean a word of it.  Horvat’s ideas are uniformly dismissed outright for their discomforting tone or “unlikeable” female leads.  The only work she’s ever offered is slapping her name on a man’s creative vision to meet a studio’s diversity quota.  It’s a cyclical, gendered rejection from her industry that eventually jokerfies her, to the point where the violence she commits in retaliation is intentionally designed to make the audience queasy – a giant fuck-you that undermines her “likeability” instead of aiming for easy “You go, girl!” cheerleading. 

Despite that seething, on-the-surface anger with the world, I Blame Society is relentlessly hilarious from start to end.  It combines the observational, no-budget filmmaking humor of Matt Farley’s Local Legends with the smiling, Influencer brain rot of last year’s ride-share thriller Spree.  Horvat smiles through her entire descent into murderous madness, often tossing out #girlboss catchphrases like “Lean in, baby” and “I’m living my best life” in the middle of her crimes to signal control & composure to her followers.  Even the low-tech equipment she uses to document her violence/art—head-mounted Go-Pros, hand-cranked wheelchair dollies, strategically hidden smartphones—read as visual gags, constantly undermining her surface-level calm with a flailing sense of desperation & lunacy.  The humor begins at a straight-forward angle of likening filmmaking to murder, as in a sequence where Horvat’s version of “location scouting” turns out to be stalking & home invasion.  From there, it only gets exponentially warped and esoteric; some of the funniest jokes are just the intensity in Horvat’s eyes as she chipperly explains the rationale behind her work.  You have to be locked onto her peculiar wavelength to fully appreciate that line of humor, but it’s just as relentless as it is sharply observed.

I Blame Society was shot in less than two weeks with a small crew of close collaborators and no concern for wide-audience appeal beyond Horvat amusing her own mischievous brain.  As much as I felt the film was aimed directly at my particular tastes, it’s clearly intended to vent & alienate, not to pander.  I’d say that it’s further proof that the personal is universal, but I don’t honestly believe it has that kind of far-reaching appeal, nor does it intend to.   If you have any personal affection for D.I.Y. filmmaking or Unlikeable Women, though, it’s the can’t-miss movie of the year.  Disney’s going to pander to everyone else on a near-weekly basis, but the rest of us have to pounce on the scraps that fall through the cracks whenever we can.  This particular trough doesn’t get filled very often.

-Brandon Ledet

French Exit (2021)

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There was a lot going on in Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical whatsit mother!, all of it worthy of many fractured, contradictory conversations.  To us, it was both a 2.5-star misfire and one of the very best movies of 2017.  To others, it was simply an embarrassment to all involved, most notably Jennifer Lawrence as titular mother figure, who rarely leaves the screen.  In all those heated debates over mother!‘s merits, metaphors, and malice, I think we may have still overlooked one of its wildest, most deliciously fucked up ingredients: Michelle Pfeiffer.  An eternally lovable screen presence who’s been shamefully sidelined in the past couple decades, Pfeiffer pounced into mother! like a cat hunting unsuspecting prey, batting Jennifer Lawrence around with a mean-drunk indifference I found thrillingly campy & cruel.  It felt like a seismic shift in Pfeiffer’s career at the time, but then nothing really came of it – conversationally, professionally, or otherwise.

Finally, a proper career resurgence vehicle for a post-mother! Michelle Pfeiffer has arrived . . . and it’s being met with the same unenthused shrug she got back in 2017.  French Exit expands Pfeiffer’s role as a cruel, vamping drunk in mother! to a feature-length drag routine.  She delivers nothing but deliciously vicious camp from start to end here, easily putting in one of her career-best performances.  The response has been muted at worst, divided at best.  Maybe the movie would’ve earned more momentum in non-pandemic times, when word of mouth would’ve reached the exact right audience for what Pfeiffer is doing here.  Maybe the world would never be ready for Michelle Pfeiffer to star in an erudite revision of Leaving Las Vegas for pompous, affluent drag queens.  Who knows?  All I can report is that every bitchy barb, quip, and eyeroll she lands in French Exit is a precious gift to the few jaded cynics on the movie’s wavelength.

Pfeiffer stars as an heiress & former NYC It Girl who has completely depleted her dead husband’s fortune.  She decides to sell off the remainder of his estate for spending money, then fucks off to Paris with her adoring adult son (Lucas Hedges) in tow.  Her long-term plan is to kill herself when her funds run dry, something she announces in a matter-of-fact, smirking tone.  Despite the morbidity of that premise, there isn’t much grandeur or pathos to the film’s plot, as the mother-son duo aren’t especially emotional in demeanor.  Most scenes are slight, low-key episodes: a cross-Atlantic boat ride, an awkward dinner party, a search for a runaway cat, etc.  However, if you’re in tune with Pfeiffer’s scenery chewing (and Hedges’s studied impersonation of her faded, jaded glamour) there’s a dark humor to each of those episodes that will have you howling at even the slightest facial expression and casually tossed-off insult.

I’m surprised to learn that French Exit was based off a novel (adapted by author-turned-screenwriter Patrick deWitt himself), since its witty banter and for-the-back-row vamping feels so firmly rooted in stage play dialogue.  The best I can approximate its cruel, quirky tone is to imagine Wes Anderson directing an adaptation of The Boys in the Band, but even that description doesn’t cover its absurdist supernatural plot twists, which I will not spoil here.  Most importantly, French Exit is a Nic Cagian showcase for one of our greatest actors to go as big and as broad as she pleases from gag to gag.  Sometimes those payoffs are muted, finding her sharpening a kitchen knife in total darkness or absentmindedly musing about the sad nature of dildos.  At other times, she sets literal fires, slipping into full camped-up Cruella de Ville mania.  In either instance, she’s electrically, fabulously entertaining, and we all should be groveling at her feet for more performances in this vein.

-Brandon Ledet

The World to Come (2021)

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It’s become something of a meme complaint over the past couple years that too much Queer Cinema is pervasively about white women longing for each other in period costumes.  Sometime between the ecstatic praise for Portrait of a Lady on Fire and the collective yawn over Ammonite, pro critics & hobbyist bloggers decided that the biggest threat to the artform of cinema wasn’t Disney’s IP-hoarding or Netflix’s refusal to license its films to libraries & universities; it was white women sharing intense eye contact in a historical setting.  Google “lesbian period drama” and you’ll find infinite hit-piece articles with titles like “Why Are All Lesbian Films Set in the Past?”, “Shoehorning Lesbian Scenes into Historical Dramas is Anything but Progressive”,  “Lesbian Period Dramas: Have We Seen Enough?”, and “Enough With The Lesbian Period Dramas” from publications high and low.  Personally, I understand this subgenre fatigue when it’s applied in broad strokes to a wide range of films, but not so much when it’s aimed at individual titles as if they were a cultural scourge.  The problem isn’t that mediocre WLW romance dramas like Ammonite exist; it just sucks that other kinds of queer stories aren’t getting greenlit in bulk beside them.

I assume the relatively tepid response to The World to Come is a result of its arrival after this particular strand of Online Film Discourse had already run its course.  It’s a great film, presuming you aren’t burnt out on the prospect of another lesbian period drama (or its pre-loaded critical baggage) at first sight.  A delicately sweet romance contrasted against a brutal, unforgiving backdrop, The World to Come is splendid & bleak in equal measure.  Its tale of secretive queer romance in a time of intense scrutiny & oppression is so familiar it’s almost regressive.  Still, its historical environment at least rings true.  It reminded me a lot of a college course I took on the literature of women’s travel writing in 19th Century America.  The women in those real-life journals and this fictional novel adaptation share the same two threats to their freedom, happiness, and well-being: the cruelty of Nature and the cruelty of their husbands.  It’s a shame how rare it is to see queer people flourishing in friendlier environments on the page & screen, but the romance & misery portrayed here still feels true to life on the American “frontier.”

Katherine Waterston stars as a hopelessly lonely housewife on an isolated, flailing New England farm.  She has a rich internal life, furiously reading & journaling in her idle hours but unable to express herself aloud when the center of attention.  While nursing her own grief over the loss of a child, she meets her exact opposite: Vanessa Kirby as a bold, brassy lush with no discernible talent for the intellectual arts.  They hit it off in ways that Waterston’s journals struggle to describe.  She confesses “There is something going on between us that I cannot unravel,” as if the concept of genuine sexual attraction is so foreign to her life that she doesn’t have the language to express it.  Eventually, the two women do find the physical language to express their attraction to each other, even if it takes longer for the words to arrive.  Unfortunately, the respective prisons of their marriages to cruel, repressed nerds and their shared prison of harsh, American wilderness prevent that romantic spark from reaching its full flame.  Waterston’s careful, whispered language & passion is in direct opposition to the cold, uncaring environment she occupies.  She finds her perfect fit in Kirby.  It does not go well.

While the broader details of The World to Come may sound blandly generic in a post-Portrait of a Lady on Fire world, I found its in-the-moment effect to be impressively distinct & chilling.  Its frontier setting might as well have been repurposed for a woodland A24 horror film, given its harsh digi cinematography and its frightfully unnerving score (which during one especially horrendous storm sounds like seagulls imitating jazz).  It’s a highly subjective film that follows the tones & moods of Waterston’s journals as she flips through the pages of her life.  There are great jumps in time when she has nothing exciting to write about, as well as loopy, unfocused entries when she self-medicates herself through depression with laudanum.  Her voiceover narration is wonderfully overwritten, with Waterston delivering pained line-readings of confessions like “We were the very picture of anguish” and “I have become my grief.”  Even when it releases the delayed flood of romantic & sexual bliss that always accompanies these films’ early stretches of pent-up longing, it’s in the most devastating possible context, undercutting the two women’s passion with a deeply felt loss & despair.  This is an unrelentingly cold, somber film, and I respect that truthful brutality even if I agree that it’s not the only kind of queer story that deserves to be told.

-Brandon Ledet

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

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Every year I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself.  This year I caught up with the latest installment in the action star’s career-defining franchise, something I probably should’ve watched on the big screen when that was an option.  For the first half of Terminator: Dark Fate, I was worried that I had goofed up in my programming choice, as Unkie Arnie is nowhere to be seen in what’s mostly a star-making vehicle for Mackenzie Davis, the new badass in town.  Then, the film reunites Schwarzenegger with Linda Hamilton as longtime human/Terminator frenemies and all is right in the world again.  As a pair, their sharply acidic comedic rapport and stone-faced action heroism feel like they haven’t missed a beat since Judgement Day in 1992, even if the world has drastically changed around them.  Because I’m rapidly becoming an old man, that latter half’s familiar callbacks to the series’ James Cameron era are what really hooked me as a viewer here.  Still, Mackenzie Davis’s intrusion in the series as a self-described “augmented supersoldier from the future” provides some much-needed momentum to keep that throwback from feeling like stagnant nostalgia bait, and the movie generally does a good job of maintaining a balance between the old & the new.

Because of its self-fulfilling time travel plots and vague references to many “possible futures”, the Terminator series is free to blaspheme its own internal lore.  The last film in the saga, Genisys, was jeered for its own overwriting of past events in the Terminator timeline (wrongly, in my opinion), while Dark Fate was celebrated for the same disregard for series continuity (rightly so, imo).  In this “possible present” timeline, all Terminator films post-Judgement Day have been wiped from the series, positioning Dark Fate as an alternate Terminator 3.  Sarah Connor (Hamilton) has successfully stopped the Skynet apocalypse, but Terminator-assassins are still created in variations of the future that have nothing to do with Skynet at all.  One of these first-generation T-800 assassins has successfully murdered her son (whose services as a Human Resistance leader are no longer needed anyway), inspiring her to dedicate the rest of her life stamping out time-traveling Terminator bots whenever and wherever they crossover into her timeline.  This particular episode finds her joining forces with a human-machine hybrid from “the” future (Davis) to protect their own timeline’s version of a John-Connor-to-be from another shape-shifting T-1000.  To her horror, this mission must also enlist the help of the original-flavor Terminator who killed her son (Arnie).  Bitter banter, uneasy alliances, and money-torching chase sequences ensue.

Structurally, Dark Fate is smart in the way it gradually highlights each of its four main players as action-hero badasses in distinct layers.  We start with Mackenzie Davis as a fully-formed hero with no patience for Linda Hamilton to pass off the torch as her obvious successor.  Hamilton then forcefully wedges herself into the main action despite Davis’s protests, righteously announcing to the future-soldier and the moviegoers of the world that she’s still a formidable screen presence – complete with aviator sunglasses and a severe haircut.  Schwarzenegger is late to the party, but provides essential monotone humor and retro machismo to authentically tie this new chapter into the series’ decades-old origins.  Newcomer Natalia Reyes has the least to do as the damsel-turned-rebel these muscular brutes circle to protect, but by the end of the film her personality and her place in the future emerge convincingly enough for her to be more than just a human MacGuffin.  At the very least, it’s her character arc that provides the self-fulfilling-timeline tomfoolery that makes this franchise such a fun, resettable time travel playground to begin with.  The movie wouldn’t be anything special without Hamilton & Schwarzenegger growling at each other in reluctant collaboration, but Davis & Reyes do a decent job of refreshing that dynamic for our alternate present.

As a standalone action blockbuster, divorced from its long-running IP, Dark Fate is nothing exceptional.  Even so, it probably is the best sequel in its series since Judgement Day, which I’m saying as someone who has some affection for all Terminator movies – minus McG’s Salvation.  I’ll never enjoy these action-heavy sequels as much as the grimy Roger Corman sci-fi noir of the original The Terminator (Judgement Day included), but Dark Fate understands the exact balance between quippy humor & Hollywood spectacle needed to make them worthwhile.  I miss the tactile effects work that distinguished the original Terminator, and there’s a lot of modern-TV backstory plotting that weighs this thing down; but again, those are the grumblings of an old man who misses the old world.  Dark Fate includes just enough throwback Hamilton & Schwarzenegger rivalry to keep old grumps like me smiling, while also injecting some much-needed fresh blood to keep this machine running into “the” future.

-Brandon Ledet

Wrath of Man (2021)

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I’ve been warming up to Jason Statham’s appeal as a post-90s Action Star in recent years, starting with his self-parodic roles in films like Spy and then doubling back to catch up with his more sincerely over-the-top schlock in titles like The Transporter 2 (a personal fav).  In all that belated good will for the barroom brawling brute, I had forgotten why I was so behind on the Statham action canon in the first place: his collaborations with Guy Ritchie.  Snatch & Lock, Stock were dual star-makers for both Statham & Richie (with the help of already-established celebrities like Brad Pitt), but they never held much appeal for me as overly gruff, self-serious muscle mags in motion.  I like the idea of Statham continuing the tradition of the Stallone/Van Damme/Schwarzenegger action hero archetype into the 21st Century, but his star vehicles always lose that Old World luster whenever Richie’s at the wheel (or whenever similar snoozers like The Bank Job ape Ritchie’s style). 

2021’s Wrath of Man is a harsh reminder of just how efficiently Guy Richie can drain the fun out of a Jason Statham action vehicle by focusing on style & posturing instead of the action itself.  It starts with an excellent meathead action cinema premise, with Statham taking a job far beneath his mysterious supersolider skills as a driver for an armored cash truck company.  After thwarting several cash-delivery heist jobs with shocking tact & brutality, it becomes apparent that he’s hiding major details from his past & his motives for taking such a nondescript job.  The movie loses all momentum when Richie doubles back to fill in those missing details, scrambling the chapters of its story like so many half-assed Pulp Fiction knockoffs that littered video store shelves in the 1990s.  What should be a half-paragraph of dialogue in which Statham confesses the twisted path that landed him behind the steering wheel & gun trigger instead eats up two-thirds of the runtime, often removing Statham from the story entirely to detail the lives & motives of his crime-world enemies.  Ritchie thinks he’s being clever by chopping up & re-arranging the story this way, but I guarantee Wrath of Man would’ve been 100x more exciting as straightforward, Transporter-style action schlock about an undercover badass with a dangerous day job.

I had high hopes for Wrath of Man as a mean, oblivious action flick in its opening act, as Statham is getting acquainted with his instantly, insanely hostile coworkers.  The film starts off as the kind of quippy, aggro muscle show that’s so homophobic it’s blatantly homoerotic – wherein real tough guys with nicknames like “Boy Sweat” and “Sticky John” constantly make threatening jokes about each other’s dicks & buttholes.  It’s a miscalculated attempt at “witty” Shane Black-style dialogue, but that kind of homoerotic homophobia banter plays like a relic from an earlier, worse era that’s somehow adorably quaint in a modern context. The film works best when it completely lacks self-awareness of its own cultural obsoletion in that way.  The opening credits look like concept art for a late-90s Godsmack album, proudly displaying illustrations of flames, wolves, and fallen angels that you’d expect to find in the flash-art binders of your city’s worst tattoo shop.  Statham is introduced to his coworkers with the codename “H, like the bomb or Jesus H.”  A spooky Johnny Cash remix haunts the soundtrack as if it’s somehow still 2004.  This is a dour, self-serious film from the start, but at least there’s a shamelessness & authenticity to it in its earliest stretch.  Then Ritchie ruins the vibe by pretending what he’s making is cleverer than it is (or ever needed to be).

Wrath of Man is neither great, nor terrible, nor much of anything at all.  I still have yet to see a Jason Statham action vehicle that satisfies like the first two Transporter films (nor a cash-truck heist film more fun than The Lavender Hill Mob), but I don’t think it’s the actor’s fault.  We’ve gotten to the point where American movie studios don’t make genuine Action Star Showcases anymore, so we have to settle for jokey, self-aware “subversions” of the format like Spy, Hobbs & Shaw, Crank, etc.  It’s unlikely that this era of mainstream filmmaking could ever produce something purely, obliviously schlocky enough to register as Statham’s Commando, his Hard Target, his First Blood Part II: Rambo.  The worst thing Wrath of Man does is briefly teasing that possibility, then devolving into just Another Guy Ritchie Movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Suicide Squad (2021)

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There is something hilariously ironic about James Gunn reviving the Martin Scorsese “theme parks” discourse while making the promotional rounds for his Suicide Squad sequel.  Over two years ago Scorsese off-handedly referred to billion-dollar superhero blockbusters in the MCU and DCEU as theme park rides (as opposed to legitimate cinema) in a one-off interview, and nerds have had their bedroom-mounted swords out for the auteur ever since, apparently Gunn included.  While promoting The Suicide Squad for the DC Comics brand this month, the long-time MCU Guardians of the Galaxy director defensively retorted (into the void, I’m assuming, since there’s no possible way that Scorsese could still give a shit), “It just seems awful cynical that [Scorsese] would keep coming against Marvel and then that’s the only thing that would get him press for his movie […] He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.”  There are two things that are cracking me up about this: Gunn is himself reviving a long-dead non-rivalry with a director way above his punching weight in order to promote his new superhero movie, the exact thing he claims Scorsese was up to.  Even more hilariously, “a theme park ride” is exactly how I would describe my experience with The Suicide Squad.  I had a lot of fun riding this Tilt-a-Whirl while it lasted, but forgot practically every detail about it the second it was over while seeking out my next amusement.

All told, I enjoyed Gunn’s latest big-budget superhero sequel with a gold-plated heart of rot about as much as I enjoyed his two Guardians films.  As with Guardians, this crass, colorful sci-fi action epic follows a misfit group of anti-hero outlaws who reluctantly save the day despite their communal and moral dysfunction.  There are bestial humanoids among the crew (this time a shark and a weasel instead of a raccoon); there’s lots of handwringing about fathers who fall miles short (this time pantomimed by Idris Elba & Taika Waititi, two more crossover Marvel contributors); and there are the requisite cameos from extended members of the James Gunn family (including Michael Rooker in a flowing Edgar Winter wig).  As you likely recall from the first Suicide Squad film, these particular imprisoned supervillains only fight for Good because they’re being controlled by a government institution that has implanted explosives at the base of their brains, basically holding them hostage in exchange for heroism.  And if you don’t recall that, it’s no matter.  The set-up is mostly an excuse for Gunn’s big-budget escalation of the same character-based splatstick horror comedy he’s been doing since he was a twentysomething Troma employee.  Cruel baddies crack wise, crack skulls, and crack open some cold ones with the boys, getting so chummy with the audience that you often forget they’re worthless scum who kill innocent people for fun.  If the gory action-horror sequences are this theme park’s rollercoaster attractions, at least you get to hang out in line with interesting friends who can tell some solid one-liners while you wait.

If there are any specific details about The Suicide Squad that will cling to your braincells, it’s likely to be a stand-out character among the misfit cast.  It was unanimously agreed that Margot Robbie’s interpretation of Harley Quinn was the stand-out performance in the first film, which led to the fantabulous spin-off sequel Birds of Prey (the only truly Great superhero movie of the past two decades, imo).  Declaring the stand-out character in Gunn’s sequel is more of a toss-up.  Robbie’s as delightfully devious as ever here, but she’s more of a tangential side character than a main member of the crew.  Lots of people seem to be drawn to the rodent-commanding sleepyhead Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) as Quinn’s successor, likely because she’s the only beacon of sincerity among her heartless comrades.  On the exact opposite end, I could see Sylvester Stallone’s slurred vocal performance as a himbo shark-man stealing the show for anyone looking for goofball one-liners, since his entire purpose is to serve as a joke delivery machine.  Personally, I was most enamored with John Cena as the fascist American “superhero” Peacemaker, who chipperly parodies the ACAB side of superheroics that usually goes unexamined in these types of movies.  There are a lot of reasons why Cena’s performance was the stand-out to me: I’ve never watched popular TV show The Boys—which parodies that exact superheroic fascism in the exact same way—so the humor was still fresh to me.  I’m also deeply invested in John Cena’s R-rated comedy work in films like Blockers & Trainwreck, to the point where I’ve turned around in the past decade from thinking he’s the worst thing about pro wrestling to thinking he’s one of the great entertainers of our time.  Speaking of which, my most anticipated match at this month’s SummerSlam PPV is John Cena vs. Roman Reigns, something I’m still wrapping my mind around considering both performers’ dull, repetitive ringwork in the not-too-distant past.  John Cena is currently at the height of his self-aware, image-subverting powers right now, and Gunn puts his surprisingly game, shockingly raunchy screen presence to great effect here.  If I were to visit this particular theme park again, Cena’s performance is the one attraction that I’d be looking forward to revisiting – the same way I used to eagerly anticipate riding the Gravitron at local fairs every year as a little kid.

Besides its gaudy, momentary thrills, the way The Suicide Squad most resembles a theme park is that it’s absolutely fucking exhausting.  The film is, at heart, a comedy, which makes its 132-minute runtime more of an affront to good sense & good taste than any of its amoral one-liners or post-Troma gore gags.  Even with forty fewer minutes weighing this thing down, it likely still would’ve felt like a never-ending game of bumper cars, but as is it feels like enduring that series of scrapes & jolts while keeping down a stomach full of corn dogs, cotton candy, and gallon-sized sodas.  I left the film amused but numb, hardly remembering any details of the sensory assault I just bought a ticket for.  The only way I know how to rate this thing is by scoring it slightly higher than the first Suicide Squad movie – a much shabbier, more sinister kind of amusement park run by some real scary looking carnies.  Even if this is technically a better film than the first, I don’t know that it’s the more interesting one of the pair.  At least in the original, there was a behind-the-scenes war between director & studio execs whose editing room bickering led to a singularly bizarre experience.  By contrast, Gunn seemingly got free reign to do his own thing here, and pretty much delivered exactly what you’d expect from him (an R-rated revision of Guardians of the Galaxy with some throwback gross-out aesthetics echoed from his Troma days).  It’s hilarious that he thinks this is the art that’s worth picking a one-sided fight with Scorsese over, not his darker, more idiosyncratic works like Super or Slither.  It’s a fun ride, but that’s about all you can say about it.

-Brandon Ledet

Pig (2021)

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I thought I knew what to expect out of a Nicolas Cage revenge thriller about a disgruntled chef’s John Wick-style fight to recover his stolen truffle pig.  Even now, I can picture exactly what that movie should look & feel like from start to end.  Pig is not that film.  It defies all expectations of its over-the-top genre premise & Cage’s late-career casting in its violence, performances, purpose, and tone.  Just about the last thing I expected was that I would be struggling to see the screen for the final third of its runtime because crying into my mask was fogging up my glasses.  It’s not any showier in its emotional beats than it is in its revenge-genre payoffs, but it still choked me up in ways I’m finding difficult to articulate.  It’s a quietly powerful, surprisingly thoughtful film about Nic Cage’s stolen truffle pig.

Nicolas Cage makes dozens of movies every year—most of which are rightfully ignored straight-to-VOD action thrillers—but there are only two kinds that typically get any wider attention: muted actor-showcase dramas like Joe and mindfuck genre-flicks like Mandy.  Pig can’t comfortably be sorted into either of those categories, since it continually flirts with being both.  Cage plays his unwashed Oregonian wildman with a quiet dignity & deeply felt sense of hurt – both for loss of his pig and for a greater loss suffered in his mysterious past as a big-city hipster chef in Portland.  His journey to recover the pig is an exaggerated, absurd caricature of the Portland culinary scene, though, complete with underground BOH fight clubs & violent mafioso food distributors.  It’s an understated execution of a preposterous premise, refusing to behave either as a sober return-to-form showcase for the often-mocked actor or as fodder for his infinite supply of so-bad-its-good YouTube highlight reels.  It’s its own uniquely beautiful, tenderly macho thing, with more to say about culinary arts than the peculiar flavors of Nic Cage’s screen presence.

Like in the high-fashion revenge Western The Dressmaker, the violence & cruelty suffered by our battered antihero in Pig is not avenged with more violence & cruelty; it is avenged with art.  Nic Cage ends the film caked in blood, as he does in Mandy, but his weapon of choice in seeking revenge are his skills as a chef.  His carefully-worded criticism of another chef’s menu choices or his own perfectly balanced, deliberately unpretentious cooking are delivered as skull-crushing blows to his enemies, undercutting the typical hyperviolence of the genre with food-culture commentary.  Pig covers a lot of ground in its food-scene philosophizing, from the cutthroat competition of food trucks to the self-aggrandized pageantry of fine dining.  I specifically got choked up by its focus on the ways passionate, authentic food preparation can trigger powerful sensory memories in us, an emotional effect deployed here like the detonation of a well-placed bomb.  I started to sorely miss sharing luxuriant meals with people I care about, an experience that’s been in short supply over the past 17 months, and one I never expected to be weaponized in Nic Cage’s pig-themed John Wick knockoff.

Nic Cage is my favorite working actor.  I know that bias makes me sound like an irony-poisoned hipster, but I genuinely find his choices in roles & performance ticks to be thrilling in a way few better-respected actors allow themselves to indugle.  Even so, I admire how Pig breaks through the expectations and boundaries typical to the modern Nic Cage Film.  At the very least, it’s his best work since Mandy, which Swampflix highlighted as our collective favorite film of the 2010s.  It’s especially worth seeing for anyone who’s ever worked a BOH position in a commercial kitchen, since its draw as restaurant-culture commentary often overpowers Cage’s consciously muted performance.  There’s a chance it’s both too restrained and too absurd to earn its place in the Nic Cage Hall of Fame, but it deserves that kind of recognition.

-Brandon Ledet

Karnan (2021)

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On a recent lagniappe episode of the podcast, we returned to one of our collective favorite films of 2020: Bacurau, the ultimate “Fuck Around and Find Out” sci-fi parable.  I was happy to revisit the film to discuss it in greater detail, since it’s such a deceptively complex tale of political resistance and communal solidarity.  The patiently delayed payoffs to its “Most Dangerous Game” genre subversions, the total disinterest in raising one sole hero over the heroism of the community as a unit, and the truly liberated sexual & gender dynamics among the citizenry all feel purposeful and well considered in a way that only gets more impressive on rewatch and in post-credits discussion among friends.  Perversely, it’s the total absence of exactly those thoughtful, nuanced elements that makes Bacurau‘s mainstream Kollywood equivalent Karnan such a hoot.  Karnan‘s own tale of communal uprising against would-be outside oppressors starts with flashy music video pizazz, elevates a singular folk hero above the power of communal bravery, and is morally conservative to the point of censoring tobacco consumption and stick-figure graffiti of boobies in real time.  Karnan is the absurdly reductive, shamelessly melodramatic version of Bacurau, telling a very similar story without any of the nuance or restraint that made Bacurau so remarkable in the first place.  It’s also a delight.

While the fictional town of Bacurau stages its violent political rebellion in a near-future science fiction Brazil, the fictional town of Podiyankulam in Karnan stages its own in 1990s Southern India, loosely referring to actual historical uprisings of the era.  The titular Karnan is an explosively angry young man who feels hobbled by his remote, impoverished village’s status at the bottom of the regional food chain.  His journey is in learning to channel that anger into something useful, starting the film as an aimless hothead and ending it as a radical political advocate for the wellbeing of Podiyankulam at large.  First, he protests to establish a bus stop connecting Podiyankulam to the rest of the world (mostly so local women can travel to college).  When that demand is met with incredulous anger from the wealthier communities nearby—particularly their bully-staffed police departments—he then organizes his community in a literal battle against crooked cops.  And even though this is set in the 1990s, he rides into that battle on horseback wielding “the village sword” like a maniac, hunting down the vilest pig among his enemies for and old-fashioned smiting.  There’s also a spiritual component to the rebellion at hand, represented by dreamworld visits from the dead who whisper words of encouragement behind their painted plaster masks.  And because this is an Indian blockbuster, there’s also plenty of singing, dancing, and romancing to help fill out the three-hour runtime between all the ultraviolent bloodshed.

Of the two over-the-top Tamil-language action flicks I’ve seen so far this year, I slightly prefer the Dangerous Minds throwback Master, but Karnan is still 158 solidly entertaining minutes of cinematic excess.  Seeking out Kollywood & Tollywood action blockbusters over the past few years is the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing how video store nerds must’ve felt discovering Hong Kong martial arts flicks in the 1980s.  It’s outright baffling that these movies aren’t earning a more vocal, enthusiastic audience in the West, considering that they regularly exceed the supposed benchmark for modern delirious action in the Fast & Furious franchise.  Karnan may not launch any “streetracing” cars into outer space, but it’s the only movie I can remember where a populist folk hero earns his legacy by slicing down a cop with “the village sword”.  That’s not to say that its appeal is tied to its novelty as exported Indian pop culture.  It’s just genuinely badass to see someone kill cops with a giant sword, and it happens no other film industry is making mainstream action movies with that kind of climactic payoff right now.  The great thing about Kollywood action films is that their sprawling runtimes immerse you in their over-the-top, frenzied tones to the point where you stop gawking at the films’ audacity and simply become invested in their stories.  I really needed to see that sword slice into some cop flesh, and Karnan delivered.

The meditative, politically poignant vision of near-future communal rebellion in Bacurau is exquisitely realized.  By contrast, the brash, chaotic action movie version of that story template in Karnan is pure mayhem.  Watching both films in close proximity is like hearing a Philosophy lecture re-interpreted as a belligerent scream.  I found both experiences to be worthwhile, especially in tandem.

-Brandon Ledet

A Classic Horror Story (2021)

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C’era una volta, Italy was a world power … in horror. Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Michele Soavi, and of course my beloved Dario Argento were i re of horror cinema. But in the year 2021 … non così tanto. After all, there’s a reason that recent giallo throwbacks like Knife + Heart and Berberian Sound Studio don’t take place in Italy itself (the former) or, if they do, why they are set during the height of Italian horror exportation (the latter). When it comes to domination of the international horror market, Italy is a failed state.  So when Italy exported the recent Una classica storia dell’orrore, I was excited. And although A Classic Horror Story couldn’t live up to that legend, it does live up to its title. 

We meet young lawyer Elisa (Matilda Lutz) as she is preparing to return home to “visit” her parents, but in reality she is leaving her current city to seek to terminate her pregnancy and recuperate afterward with family before heading back to work. To get home, she is carpooling in a small camper with vacationing couple Mark and Sofia (Will Merrick and Yuliia Sobol), unfriendly doctor Riccardo (Peppino Mazzotta), and their driver, the nerdy and talkative Fabrizio (Francesco Russo). It isn’t explicit, but later dialogue between Mark and Fabrizio, in which the latter expresses annoyance with cultural assumptions that northern Italians make about southern Italians (in short, that everyone in the south is involved with the mafia), suggests that they are travelling from the north to the southern coast. Fabrizio plans to film parts of the trip for his YouTube channel, entitled “Friends of Fabrizio,” and asks the four riders to introduce themselves to the camera, saying that it’s important that his audience come to like them, even stocking the camper’s minifridge with beers to act as a social lubricant and get everyone to come out of their shells. Elisa is pressured into taking a sip but immediately falls ill, forcing them crew to stop by the roadside. While Riccardo argues on the phone with his recently estranged wife, a now inebriated Mark forces his way into the driver’s seat, and insists that he drive the rest of the way. The others accept that he cannot be talked out of it, and he does a fairly decent job for a drunk driver, even bonding with Fabrizio along the drive, until he swerves to avoid a dead animal in the road. 

It’s daytime when Elisa awakes, and the camper is now in a vast field, encircled by forest. Mark’s leg is broken and there are no signs of civilization other than a rustic cabin that also occupies the clearing. Riccardo and Fabrizio set out to look for the road, but seemingly trace a great circle instead, ending up back at the site where the camper and cabin are located. Another venture into the forest also results in the discovery of some kind of pagan altar to “three knights,” including pig heads on stakes. After their initial reluctance, the group (minus the still-immobilized Mark) enter the cabin looking for a way to contact or locate help when its door opens with a mysterious creak. Inside, they find ritualisting paintings that relay a local legend that Fabrizio summarizes: the tre cavalieri are Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, pagan deities who blessed local land in exchange for sacrifices, and that these sacrifices involve the ritualistic removal of individual victims’ ears, eyes, and tongue. The only other decorations in the cabin are photos of what appear to be generations of people wearing animalistic masks, or who perhaps have actual animal heads, as the result of their devil’s deal with the Cavalieri. When the clearing is bathed in a saturating red light while ominous sirens sound, Riccardo, Fabrizio, Elisa, and Sofia take shelter in the cabin’s attic, which gives them a bird’s eye view of three masked entities dragging Mark from the camper to the cabin and securing him to the table within and mutilating his eyes before killing him. As if this weren’t horrifying enough, they also discover a child in the attic in a cocoon made of sticks and straw; the group asks for her name, but she is unable to answer, as she has no tongue. 

The group makes another attempt to escape through the woods during the day, discovering a graveyard of abandoned vehicles that imply that this kind of sacrifice has been going on for a very long time. One of the vehicles belonged to the young girl’s family, and she reveals her name, Chiara, to Elisa by recovering her diary from within it. She also implies that they are all in some kind of inescapable purgatory, which is supported by their failure to escape the woods once again; worse, when they return to the clearing, the camper is gone. 

It’s all but impossible to talk about this much further without getting into major spoilers, so here ye be warned: spoilers abound from here on out. 

Elisa wakes in the night to discover that Ciara, Riccardo, and Sofia have been dragged out of the cabin and into the clearing, where a crowd of animal-headed cultists watch with rapt attention as Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso take the older victims’ eyes and ears, respectively. Elisa is rightfully terrified, and when Fabrizio reappears in the cabin saying that they have to escape, she all but collapses into an embrace with him. As they hold one another, however, she can hear a small, tinny voice … as it gives Fabrizio instructions over his earpiece. 

There is no sacrifice or ritual here, at least not in service of harvest gods. All of this has been of Fabrizio’s design, as he seeks to craft a classic horror story. He bemoans the state of contemporary Italian cinema, which consists entirely of insipid comedies and brainless YouTube fluff, and wants to make a new Italian classic. Oddly enough, he doesn’t invoke the names of the three giants of giallo cinema that I cited above, and instead draws on comparisons to extremely American representations of the genre: Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Titanic is also mentioned for good measure). The Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso that he mentioned are actually the supposed founders of the three Mediterranean crime families, tying back to his repeated references to the mafia, including a joke that he told to break the tension and lighten Chiara’s spirits during a particularly grim moment. Not that she actually needed this, of course; she’s still alive, and has been in on it the whole time. 

Fabrizio’s biggest problem is that, for all his supposed learnedness about the nature of horror, he forgot about one of the genre’s most important features: the final girl. After a brief interlude in which we learn that Fabrizio has the support (or at least the indifference) of local politicians and police, Elisa escapes from the wheelchair to which her hands are nailed, and she turns the tables on Fabrizio and Chiara, and she’s kind enough to film the whole thing before escaping into the woods and eventually finding her way to a beach, where horrified onlookers are briefly stunned by the bloody girl in their midst before they immediately take their phones out and begin to film her. 

The first hour or so of A Classic Horror Story isn’t anything to write home about, being more “serviceable” than “good.” But the final 35 minutes more than make up for the water-treading of the first and second acts. What’s also praiseworthy here is how much it fits with what I want to see more of in horror: wherein we are first led to believe that something supernatural is afoot, before we get the important reminder that all evil in this world is done by humans. There’s a genuine eeriness that permeates the proceedings as soon as the travellers find themselves in the clearing, especially with the apparent presence of pagan deities and sacrifices in creepy masks, as well as the strange lighting and the wailing sirens. Unfortunately, those elements suffer from appearing in a film that was released so soon after the higher-budgeted Midsommar, especially given that the source imagery from which both films are borrowing are similar. It’s not identical, of course, but neither are Garden State and Elizabethtown, which didn’t stop contemporary critics from making the same note about the short time between those similar releases. There are very similar scenes of an outdoor cultist feast with our heroine at the head of the table, and it’s even present in the various lodgings, which don’t look alike precisely, but which are both juuust unconventional enough to lend an air of uncanniness to the proceedings. 

I truly didn’t see that final act twist coming, and my opinion of the film took a sharp increase as it drew to a conclusion. It didn’t turn this into the instant horror classic that it was aiming for, and there’s an extension of its metacommentary into the end credits that I have mixed feelings about (it’s kind of dumb but the final moment of self-deprication amused me). That’s the element that I think will age the most poorly, but then again, only time will tell. A Classic Horror Story is streaming now on Netflix. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Green Knight (2021)

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It’s Christmas in July! Or at least it was last weekend when I saw David Lowery’s latest, long-delayed, gorgeous bombast, The Green Knight. There have been multiple failed attempts at bringing Arthurian stories to the big screen in a meaningful way in my lifetime (although that 2004’s King Arthur, 2006’s Tristan and Isolde, and 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword all have exactly 31% on Rotten Tomatoes is impressive in its own strange way), with the most successful being the generally disappointing First Knight, which no one remembers. Fun fact: Ralph Ineson, who plays the titular pastoral paladin in this film, was in First Knight. Sorry to get into the trivia portion of this review so early, but I don’t really have a lot to say about this one. Shocking coming from an overtalker like myself, I know, but sometimes there are films that you don’t see so much as experience, and like Lowery’s A Ghost Story before it, The Green Knight is one such film. 

Which isn’t to say that there’s not a clear narrative here. There is, and it’s fairly easy to follow. Gawain (Dev Patel) is the nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris) by way of his sister (Sarita Choudhury), who is traditionally Morgause but appears to be a combination of Morgause and Morgaine le Fay (also usually—but not always—Arthur’s step- or half-sister). On Christmas morning, he awakens beside his lover, the commoner Essel (Alicia Vikander) and makes his way back to the castle, where he washes up before appearing before Arthur, his queen (Kate Dickie), and the other knights of the realm. The elderly Arthur invites Gawain to sit beside him and tell him a story of himself, so that he may know his potential heir better, but the younger man admits that he has no great deeds of himself to share. “Yet,” Guinevere corrects him, “you have no stories to tell yet.” Elsewhere, Morgause/Morgaine and a few attendants perform a ceremony that appears to invoke or invite a large, green knight (Ineson, as noted) to appear in the great hall, riding a massive steed. He issues a challenge, asking only that one of Arthur’s fabled knights strike him a blow with the caveat that the following year Arthur’s champion goes to the “green chapel” and allow the knight to return the blow in kind. All refuse, and Merlin (Emmet O’Brien) shakes his head slightly when Arthur himself seems prepared to face the challenge. Gawain asks that he be allowed to do so, and is given Arthur’s own sword to face the knight. When the Green Knight offers his neck to the boy, he first laughs, then grows angry at the visitor for mocking him before lopping off the larger man’s head. Undeterred, the knight’s body retrieves his head, laughs, and says he’ll see Gawain the next Christmas. 

After a “too short year,” Gawain sets out on his journey to find the Green Chapel and the knight therein, with gifts like a shield which bears an image of the Virgin Mary and is anointed by a bishop and a green sash that his mother makes, and into which she inserts sigils. After departing Camelot, he first passes some older towers and buildings in decline, then through a section of deforested woods which are in the process of being cut down, and finally comes upon a field in which a battle has been fought and in which a few fires yet smolder. There he encounters a scavenger (Barry Keoghan) who points him in the right direction, but after he gives the poorer man a single coin, and even then only because he was guilted, Gawain finds himself the victim of two of the poor man’s fellow highwaymen. Now divested of his shield, horse, belt, and even the Green Knight’s axe, Gawain eventually frees himself, but is weakened. Eventually making his way to a seemingly deserted house, Gawain avails himself of the empty bed therein, only to be awoken in the night by the spirit of a woman named Winifred, who asks him to reunite her decapitated head with the rest of her body, which he does; once this task is complete, the Green Knight’s axe is mysteriously returned to him. He ventures further, facing starvation and madness, eventually meeting and becoming the traveling companion of a fox, and even encountering a group of mysterious giants as they wander in an apparent migratory pattern (this was my favorite part). 

Eventually, he comes to a castle occupied by a friendly noble lord (Joel Edgerton), his wife (Vikander again), and an unnamed, unremarked-upon sightless woman (Helena Browne). As in the poem, the Lord enters into an agreement with Gawain that would mean that anything given to Gawain in the Lord’s house would be given by Gawain in turn, and the Lady of the house tempts Gawain’s virtue. On his final day within the castle, the Lady returns Gawain’s green sash to him, claiming that she made it herself, and reiterating that it will keep him from harm; he accepts it, but not before finally giving in to her advances (albeit in more of a shortstop way, in that it’s between second and third base). Leaving the house, he encounters the Lord for the last time, but does not give him the sash (or the hand job) as their deal would require. Gawain reunites with the fox, who accompanies him all the way to a stream where a boat waits to take him to the Green Chapel, and the fox suddenly speaks, to give him one more warning to turn back and avoid his fate, but Gawain soldiers on. 

At long last, he meets the Knight, and after he flinches, the Green Knight teases him, and then Gawain flees. He returns to the place where the boat was left and finds his horse returned. He makes his way back to Camelot, where he is reunited with Essel (in the Biblical sense), knighted by a bedridden Arthur, and eventually becomes king. Essel gives birth to a son that Gawain takes to raise, leaving behind a few shekels on her bloody birthing bed; as time goes on, Camelot begins to degrade, perhaps because of her dishonored king, or simply because it is in the nature of “Camelot” to wane when Arthur is gone. Gawain marries a lady of proper aristocratic birth and she bears him a daughter, while his son dies in a battle in which Gawain himself does not participate. In all these moments, which play out with no dialogue, the sash is never removed. He becomes a pariah in his own kingdom, lacking the respect that the middling folk who adored his uncle. He finally faces his end as Camelot prepares to fall to marauders, and as he finds himself seated alone on the throne he does not deserve, he removes the sash at last, and his head falls to the ground … and then we return to the Green Chapel, and the realization that all of these moments are, to paraphrase Dickens, the shadows of things that May Be, not necessarily which Will Be. Realizing that he cannot flee from fulfilling his debt of honor, he once more submits to the Green Knight, who playfully traces his finger along the royal nephew’s throat. Credits!

That’s more of a summary than a review, but it was an exercise for myself as much as it is a recommendation for you, dear reader. When I walked out of the theater with my friends, none of us was completely certain what to make of it. When recording our recent Lagniappe episode about Stoker, Brandon referred to Nicole Kidman’s third act “I can’t wait to see the world break you down” speech as a “barn burner,” and this film has a monologue of the same caliber delivered with delicious righteousness by Vikander as the Lady; although, an equally apt comparison would be to call her speech this film’s version of “Rooney Mara eats a pie for 5 minutes,” as she describes all of the potentialities of what the color green could mean—nature, entropy, life, death, rebirth, sickness—in a way that becomes completely hypnotic. Is it “good”? I’m not sure, but it sure was huge. It’s so soporific that I’m not completely certain it even manages to tie into the film’s larger themes, but I certainly experienced something. 

This is a story about honor, and from whence it flows and how one can come to be anointed by it. Gawain, as a member of the aristocracy, fails to consider the small folk, which is traditionally the province in which Arthur succeeds, and from which his honor (and thus his power) flows. From the moment he first appears on screen, his casual disregard for those outside of the landed aristocracy is made apparent, as he ignores the burning of a commoner’s hut as he wends his way back to the castle proper. When he is followed into the plains by children who are entranced by the fledgling, yet-unbuilt legend of Gawain, he spares not a smile or a wave for them. When he meets the scavenger, he must be guilted into giving him a pittance, even though, as heir apparent to the king and a queen who has passed her child-bearing years, his funds are virtually limitless, and the man’s pitiable existence is explicitly the result of being a resident of the medieval equivalent of fly-over country during a skirmish fought in the name of kings he will never see or know. When asked by Winnifred to retrieve her head, he asks what his reward will be, and she’s shocked by his lack of chivalric benevolence. He even fails to uphold his end of the bargain he makes with the Lord in whose house he finds healing and comfort. 

Still, there is a seed of honor in Gawain which, if properly nurtured, could yet germinate and grow within him, just as the Green Knight is composed of the branches and trees which also make up the Green Chapel. After all, what is honor? What is courage? These things are not conferred upon a person by a higher power, or by that power’s earthly representative sprinkling holy water on a shield. They are not conferred upon a person by the stature of their lineage or through gifts from a progenitor, despite that this was the method by which power was transferred for much of human politik. They are not conferred by drawing a sword from a stone, or from the hand of the one who previously did so, nor are they conferred by regal clothing; although these things may stem from that which resides within, they are the noble flowering, not the source of the vine. Gawain may only complete his quest out of fear of the shame of returning home without having made good his word, but therein lies the nature of all courageousness: if we act with honor, even if it be for spite or in avoidance of shame, the performance of the thing becomes the thing itself, be it for the better and green in growth or for the worse and green in rot. Despite many opportunities to turn back and persistent discouragement from his pursuit, Gawain presses on, even passing what could be called his last temptation. He sees his life as it could be, and once more chooses to press on, and in so doing, becomes more than he had been. 

Lowery has said that, in his vision, Gawain does not survive this encounter. Which, first of all, how dare he? But secondly, this is your semi–annual reminder that, as for me and my house, we will follow Roland Barthes, so I reject that interpretation and substitute my own. I feel that, textually, we are seeing Morgause/Morgaine test her son, as the Green Knight is clearly summoned or even created by her magics, and Gawain is told explicitly that the Knight is someone he knows. Our very first image is of Gawain on Arthur’s throne and bearing his crown before he is, unflinching, covered in flame, as if all that was weak and chaff within him has been burned away. To see this purification trial to its end, in order to prevent her unready and unworthy son from pulling a total Mordred and ascending to the throne and hastening Camelot’s decline, she creates this series of tests that not only prove his mettle but create it. It’s worth mentioning, in case it’s been a long time since your last literature class, that Morgaine is revealed to be the blind woman in the house of Sir Bertilak (the rough equivalent of the unnamed Lord in the film), and that she was pulling the strings of the entire narrative all along. 

I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed that there was little exploration of the relationship between Albionian pre-Christian paganism and the rise of Arthurian Christendom. (Did I already give away that Mists of Avalon is my favorite Arthurian story by insistently calling her “Morgaine” and not “Morgan”? A pox on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s grave, though.) The very concept of “England” is thoroughly tied into the rise of Christianity as an influence on politics and world events, and the application of those motifs to Arthurian legend, which is thoroughly and inexplicably tied to pre-Christian magic, makes for a truly fascinating, if muddled, historiography. The way that Gawain was first girded by both his mother’s smoke-and-incense dark magic sash and the Marian image on his shield seemed to be setting up a narrative in that vein, but if that element was carried through in any way, it’s that religion, as a creation of man, is doomed to be destroyed and reclaimed, as demonstrated by the scavengers breaking his shield almost immediately, and the way in which the foliage of the Green Chapel is superimposed over and suffused through a Christian house of worship. 

I don’t know if you’ll like this. I don’t know if I liked it. But I did experience it, and I would again. After all this time being isolated, and with the possibility that we’ll have to do this all again on the horizon, if you need to be transported, take this journey.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond