reviews

Sound of Violence (2021)

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I never want to fault a movie for being too ambitious for its own good; I really do love an overreaching mess.  The low-budget sci-fi body horror Sound of Violence tests the limitations of that love, though.  Maybe it’s because the film doesn’t trust the audience to keep up with its plentiful, competing ideas – explaining its basic premise & the definition of “synesthesia” twice, once in opening voiceover narration and once in a classroom lecture.  Maybe it’s because some of those ideas are inherently more exciting than others (a killer drum machine vs. an unrequited romance between twentysomethings roommates).  Maybe it’s because its budget can’t always match its imagination.  Whatever the reason, Sound of Violence is overflowing with creativity & gusto that it can’t quite mold into something fully coherent or commendable.  You have to squint past its flaws to appreciate what it’s going for, but it’s mostly worth the effort.

An experimental musician (Jasmin Savoy Brown) seeks self-therapy for her hearing loss and childhood PTSD by creating rhythmic beats out of the recorded sounds of violence, quickly turning her into a serial killer.  That violence also triggers synesthesia, causing her to see cosmic swirls of CG colors.  And she’s in love with her oblivious roommate.  And the kills involve increasingly bizarre torture devices that double as musical instruments.  And we spend some time with the cops on her trail.  There’s a lot going on here once you get past the embarrassing cheese of the childhood prologue and opening narration.  The only problem is that the Color Out of Space-style synesthesia swirls and the musical torture devices that trigger them are 1000x more interesting than any of the other narrative quirks competing for attention.  When our trouble antihero is “composing” (i.e. rhythmically torturing victims to death in preposterous contraptions while effectively tripping balls) you feel as if you’d never seen anything like it before.  The budget, premise, and runtime can’t sustain constant hyperviolence, though, so it loses its way filling in the sequences around them with tons of plot & character detail that you have seen before—many, many times over—and the whole picture suffers in that contrast.

Its budget is an obvious, constant limitation throughout, but Sound of Violence has Big Ideas that often push its already heightened premise into full-on delirium.  It’s the kind of mixed bag that’s worth wincing through its momentary misfires, since the payoffs are so uniquely deranged.  At its best, it’s a pure sensory horror, combining intense sound editing and mad-scientist visuals to completely overwhelm your sense of basic reality.  At its worst, it feels like a pilot for a primetime CW soap about a hip, young serial killer’s unconventional way of processing #trauma (a hot topic on television these days).  It begins and ends with its weakest moments, but there’s tons of wild shit in-between that you won’t find anywhere else – from a dominatrix-spanking drumbeat to a tender performance of “Amazing Grace” on a theremin.  It’s glaringly imperfect, but it at least it’s playful & eager.  There are plenty of films that are technically better made but don’t take any risks half this interesting.

-Brandon Ledet

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

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It had been sixteen long months since I last saw a movie projected in a proper cinema.  Early in the pandemic, I went out for a nice restaurant meal and a screening of The Invisible Man on a Friday night, fully aware that it would be my last taste of either indulgence for a good long while.  Over a year later, I pulled up to AMC Elmwood listening to the mayor on the radio strongly “advising” indoor mask wearing again due to the rapid local spread of the Delta Variant (one week before that advisory snowballed into a mandate).  So maybe this long-delayed return trip would also be my last taste of moviegoing for a long while; maybe it would be the only chance I had to see a movie at the megaplex in all of 2021.  I made it count by watching some vapid trash.

The first Escape Room was a surprise delight: the rare example of an early-January gimmick thriller that actually lives up to its preposterous premise: “What if escape rooms, but for real?”  That premise was also smartly designed to support as many sequels as audiences could care to see.  There are some vague motions towards toppling the impossibly widespread conspiracy network that set up the film’s lethal escape room death traps, but for the most part the series is so far all about the rooms themselves.  Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions isn’t as surprising nor as tense as its predecessor, but its death traps are plentiful and plenty preposterous, including an electrified subway car, a city-block acid bath, and an “art deco bank of death.”  There’s nowhere for the series to go in terms of worldbuilding or metaphorical purpose, so all it can really do is continue to escalate the size & cruelty of its death traps until the entire planet and life itself are all one giant escape room.  I sincerely hope we see enough sequels for it to get there; these are great braindead popcorn flicks.

Foolishly, I borrowed the first Escape Room from the library the week before watching its sequel in theaters, thinking I’d need a refresher on the lore & surviving characters before diving into a new chapter.  After 25min of AMC’s trailers and commercials, Tournament of Champions included a recap highlight of the first film – effectively a “Previously on . . .” TV show recap of everything I needed to know, making that rewatch redundant.  I did appreciate a few things about watching both Escape Rooms as a double feature, though, even if was unnecessary.  As a pair, they were a much-needed balm after being repeatedly burned by the inferior Cube series in recent weeks, which has a similar knack for preposterous traps but only a small fraction of the follow-through.  They also best the Saw films in that regard, mostly in their aversion to torturous cruelty – solemnly acknowledging the lives lost without reveling in the grisly details of their demise.  As much as I’d like to praise these films as survivors’ guilt thrillers with a critical eye towards audiences’ bloodlust, though, the truth is their death contraptions are just entertainingly absurd.

Watching the original Escape Room at home, then watching Tournament of Champions at my old AMC Elmwood haunt only reinforced the things I miss about the theatrical environment.  I’m convinced the first Escape Room is the better film, but I had a lot more fun watching the sequel big & loud with a (sparsely populated but sparsely masked) crowd.  I was once again fully, properly immersed in a feature film, by which I mean I couldn’t check my phone every half-second my attention lagged.  I’d love to make that experience a regular routine again, even if for the inanest bullshit movies imaginable.  Sixteen months is a long, long wait for that simple of an indulgence, but I also don’t know how I often I want to sit for hours in a dark room with the general public right now, all things considered.

-Brandon Ledet

No Sudden Move (2021)

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I never tire of watching Steven Soderbergh play around with celebrities and camera tech.  It’s like babysitting a little kid who’s toying around in a playroom where each dolly & gadget cost millions of dollars.  I usually prefer to see Soderbergh’s playtime sessions projected on the big screen, and I like them best when they overlap with genres I’m already in love with – which is to say that it’s going to be hard to top the experience of seeing his iPhone-shot psych horror Unsane at the shopping mall multiplex.  Still, it’s been continually fun to watch a long-established director who’s remained excited by his job fuck around with Prestige Cable TV money as if he’s still figuring out the basic elements & limitations of his medium.

The big-picture details of Soderbergh’s latest direct-to-cable effort, No Sudden Move, sound like they belong to the pilot episode of a standard-issue HBO crime drama series.  Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, and Kieran Culkin star as three low-level lackeys who’re hired to hold a business man’s family hostage in exchange for a confidential document of great political import.  The job goes horrifically wrong, and the bottom-rung gangsters find themselves scheming across 1950s Detroit to hold onto the top-secret document as a bargaining chip for their lives . . . and an exponential amount of cash.  It’s a standard heist-gone-wrong plot, styled like a spin-off series about the crime-world decades following Boardwalk Empire.  And yet, it never feels boring or unsurprising thanks to Soderbergh’s flair for wryly funny stunt casting and behind-the-camera mischief.

The biggest hurdle most audiences have to clear to enjoy No Sudden Move is how absolutely fucking bizarre it looks.  While the set & costume design resemble the usual HBO crime series, Soderbergh shoots the entire movie with an extreme wide-angle fisheye lens, often backlit.  Whenever your eye momentarily adjusts to its skateboard video framing and chiaroscuro lighting, the camera pans or glides to make the whole thing look warped again.  I have to imagine it has a lot of unsuspecting audiences scrambling to adjust the picture settings on their TV, but I was personally delighted by that clash of modern camera tech against a vintage setting.  When the cowardly businessman mark, played by David Harbour, complains into a telephone “Everything is so weird right now” I felt like I knew exactly what he meant.  The film never stops looking strange, even if it’s narratively well behaved.

Beyond that extreme fisheye effect, I was mostly just tickled by No Sudden Move’s casting choices.  From the winking, referential casting of Jon Hamm in Mad Men-style G-man suits and Ray Liotta in pistol-whipped Goodfellas mobster mode to the chaotic screen presence of Uncut Gems’s Julia Fox as a bored, pouty moll (recalling Paz de la Huerta in the Boardwalk Empire pilot, come to think of it), you can tell Soderbergh and casting director Carmen Cuba are having a ball.  Otherwise, I can’t say the film really did much for me, at least not as much as the campier, more acidic Behind the Candelabra – the most recent example I’ve seen of Soderbergh playing around in HBO’s toy chest.  If these same fisheye lens or movie star stunt casting experiments had been applied to something more my speed—like a morally queasy horror movie or something draggy like Liberace—I could have fully fallen in love with it.  Knowing Soderbergh, I’ll probably only have to wait a few weeks before that next experiment in craft arrives.

-Brandon Ledet

Stowaway (2021)

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“They sure don’t make [X] like they used to” is something that I either never tire of hearing or can’t stand to hear someone say, depending upon who’s making the statement and what they’re complaining about. “They sure don’t make gender theory like they used to” is a statement that could go either way, varying wildly depending on whether it’s a radical person at your local DSA meeting or a talking head on any news outlet. “They sure don’t make Confederate monuments like they used to” is a delight to hear if the person saying it is pleased, but would be a huge red (and treasonous) flag if the speaker is wistful for the days when they could indulge in their Lost Cause nonsense without inspection. Nothing in life is ever really stable, but one thing that they’re still making just like they used to are contemporary(ish) medium-to-hard sci-fi dramas about Things Going Wrong in Space. 

Medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) originally applied for a position with space exploration agency Hyperion because she thought that “I was rejected by Hyperion” would be a funny story to tell at parties. To her surprise, she was accepted for a position for a two-year Mars mission, alongside biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim), whose work revolves around the possibility of using algae as a feasible atmosphere conversion medium. Leading the mission is Commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), for whom this is a bittersweet journey, as it marks her third and final interplanetary trip. Their ship, the MTS-42, has an interesting configuration: the upper stage booster remains attached to the ship proper by a tether, and using centrifugal interia, provides artificial gravity for the crew. After a bumpy takeoff, the astronauts get down to the business of making the journey to Mars, but it turns out that this was no run-of-the-mill shaky departure: the ship’s weight is off due to the presence of Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), a support engineer working as part of Hyperion’s ground crew, who was caught between two modules and trapped aboard the vessel. Worse still, his presence has inadvertently damaged the ship’s carbon dioxide scrubbers, which are needed to ensure a breathable atmosphere for the astronauts and their accidental stowaway for the entirety of their journey. 

Although Stowaway is set in the not-too-distant future, as evidenced by the way that a trip to Mars is treated as a semi-regular aeroscience practice and the lack of a NASA presence (Hyperion is never identified as a government agency or a private corporation; its international crew implies the latter but the genuine concern that home base demonstrates regarding the lives of its astronauts implies the former). It’s still part of the genealogy of films that can trace their ancestry back to The Right Stuff but were defined as a genre by Apollo 13: realistic space dangers. Stowaway doesn’t break the mold that also created The Martian and Gravity, but it’s also not really breaking the mold of Tom Godwin’s 1954 short story “The Cold Equations,” from which it draws its primary dilemma. “Equations,” which itself draws inspiration from works going back to the nineteenth century, takes its title from the calculations needed when a starfaring vessel whose margins of error are very small finds those margins exceeded by a stowaway (an intentional one in that text), in order to determine if there’s a way for both pilot and passenger to survive. There isn’t; the stowaway passenger in “Equations” makes the ultimate sacrifice upon realizing that her actions, however well-intentioned if poorly-informed, threaten the lives of an entire colony. 

That it fails to break that mold isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. “The Cold Equations” is considered a classic sci-fi story with values that resonate across time for a reason. Stowaway also circumvents two potential problems with updates to the central conflict of “Equations” as well: the ship in “Equations” is pretty clearly in violation of common sense safety standards (it was published 16 years before OSHA went into effect, after all) by failing to provide for even the smallest margin of error, and the teenaged stowaway intentionally boarded the vessel to see her brother. In Stowaway, we instead have an engineer who was accidentally injured and knocked unconscious before being sealed behind a panel prior to liftoff, meaning that he is an innocent in this situation; secondly, it’s not merely a matter that the ship can’t support more than three people, but that the scrubbers that are the safety precaution and could enable them to make it to Mars with an extra person on board are damaged. Every attempt is made to find another solution, including using the algae from Kim’s experiment to try and produce sufficient oxygen to make the rest of the flight, and a daring and thrilling climb across the tether to the second stage booster to collect any remaining oxygen from its tanks in an attempt to extend MTS-42’s atmospheric supply until they reach Mars, but ultimately, just as in “Equations,” not everyone will make it out alive. 

Stowaway isn’t likely to blow the average audience member away. Its appeal lies largely in its similarity to what’s come before in the Things Going Wrong in Space genre and applying hard contemporary science to its familiar plot, but therein lies its weakness; there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before. The minimal cast is strongly composed, but although no one’s phoning it in, everyone involved knows that this isn’t their opus, so it’s no one’s career best performance either. Anderson is a standout, given that he’s the least seasoned cast member, and Kendrick manages charm and gravitas in equal measures in a rare non-comedic role. I have a feeling that this would play better on the big screen; I certainly remember being captivated by Gravity and Interstellar while watching them in theaters, and Stowaway has sequences that feel stifled on my TV at home. Hopefully, we’ll see writer-director Joe Penna’s next feature large and beautiful, but in the meantime, this one’s on Netflix if you’re itching for a near-future sci-fi tragedy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Perfect Enemy (2021)

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In March 2020, I started reading Marie NDiaye’s novel My Heart Hemmed In about a week before Texas went into its first lockdown. It was a stunning book, beautiful and discomfiting, about a woman, Nadia, who suddenly and inexplicably becomes othered by her community. Friends, neighbors, amenable ex-lovers, strangers, her pupils: overnight, she becomes a pariah to them, something different and perhaps even obscene. As I was on the bus on the way home from work, not realizing that it would be the last time I would be taking that route, I was reading through a passage about Nadia also taking public transportation, and her growing awareness of being watched and observed, and that paranoid feeling surged through me as the eyes of my fellow commuters began to dart from face to face, seeking any sign of illness or contagion. It was a distinctly surreal experience that I do not recall fondly. NDiaye’s writings seemed, based on my own admittedly limited cultural knowledge, very French; Heart focused heavily not just on the feeling of being ostracized, but also on the confusion of it, and through narrative sleight of hand managed to let the reader know that there was something about her situation that Nadia unconsciously understood but forced beneath the surface of her conscious mind. Despite her constant claims that she couldn’t imagine the reason for her situation, the reader always knew that she was more aware than she let on. Although the novel upon which A Perfect Enemy is based, Cosmétique de l’ennemi, is Belgian (albeit written in French), the summaries of it which I’ve managed to locate indicate a similar self-deception at the original novel’s core, which does not (forgive the pun) translate to the big screen, nor am I certain it could have translated.

Successful and renowned Polish architect Jeremiasz Angust (Tomasz Kot) has just finished giving a lecture in Paris about his philosophy of design. In so doing, he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (probably best known in the Western Hemisphere as the author of The Little Prince): “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This is tied into his desire to design spaces which are to the benefit not of an aristocratic class, but to the societal underclasses, who deserve beauty as much as their supposed betters. En route to the airport to return home, he offers to share a cab with a rain-soaked young Dutch woman who gives her name as Texel Textor (Athena Strates). Despite the objections of the cab driver, they also turn back to retrieve Texel’s suitcase, which causes both of them to miss their flights. As they each wait for the next available flight, Jeremiasz politely attempts to rebuff Texel’s attempts to engage him in further conversation, especially once her interest in him is further aroused by the fact that he had designed the very airport in which they are currently stranded. He finally gives in to her begging to hear her out as she tells him stories about her childhood, promising one such tale about how she killed a classmate in her youth. As they adjourn to a very nice lounge, the miniature diorama of the airport shows two tiny figures inside painted to look just like Jeremiasz and Texel, in an otherwise monochromatic white sea. 

Texel tells three stories. The first is about her disgust with the sound of her stepfather’s eating as a child and how her own rejection of food due to textural issues led to her being punished by mixing up offal and other unappetizing food remnants to feed to the family’s cats, but forced herself to eat that mixture and discovered she loved it. The second story is about her friendship with another girl from school, who was much more well-off and of whom the poor Texel was deeply envious, even going so far as to destroy the wealthier girl’s toys out of spite. One night she prayed for the girl to die while stabbing a doll, and learned the following day at school that she had died in the night. Between these stories, Texel asks Jeremiasz about his wife, noting his wedding band, but he reveals nothing other than to say that he still loves her, which Texel doubts, noting that when someone loves another person, they can’t help but talk about them more than Jeremiasz is willing to speak of his bride. Jeremiasz says that Texel can’t possibly think that her prayers killed her classmate, but Texel tells her final story, about seeing a beautiful woman in a French cemetery, standing over a sculpture of a mourning woman that looks almost just like her. She falls madly in love with the woman instantly and pursues her, much to the woman’s dismay, and although Texel catches up with the woman and even knocks her down, the mourner manages to get away. Texel spends years trying to find her again, and when she does and realizes the woman does not recognize her from that day in the graveyard, she weasels her way into the woman’s home, only for the woman to eventually recognize Texel’s mad laughter, and then a tragedy occurs. 

Although there’s not much to spoil here for a first time viewer and I’m not giving this film a recommendation, I’ll still refrain from sharing too much about how Texel and Jeremiasz were connected prior to their “chance” meeting, although an astute reader may have already figured it out. That’s by far the least interesting part of the film. Maybe I’m simply still haunted by Hereditary, but I had really hoped that the recurring image of the tiny figures of Texel and Jeremiasz appearing in the model airport in the transitions between scenes would be a larger and more literal factor in the plot, and that perhaps Texel was some kind of avenging spirit or witch come to force Jeremiasz to confront or reckon with something from his past. I’m not saying that’s not what happens in the movie, but, again, I don’t want to ruin the ending or the journey should you find yourself with access to this film and time to kill. The twist isn’t telegraphed necessarily, but it is foreshadowed heavily enough that you’ll probably stay a few steps ahead of the reveal. Even if that doesn’t work, what does work in the “long conversation” part of Act II are Texel’s interruptions of her own stories to ask Jeremiasz what he’s imagining when she talks about childhood poverty or elementary school buildings, and corrects his mental images, which draw on his own experiences, with clearer and more specific ones that accurately reflect her past. I love movies about memory, and this is an interesting and dynamic way to confront, inspect, and visualize the imperfections of memory and imagination in a visual way. There’s also a striking scene in the final act of the film that’s evoked by the movie’s poster image, but to say more about it would give too much away.

Unfortunately, where A Perfect Enemy falls flat is in the performances. Although there’s something indescribably “off” about Marta Nieto, who plays the object of Texel’s affections, it’s Kot who delivers one of the strangest performances I’ve ever seen here, and not in a good way. At first I thought it might have been a language barrier issue and was fully prepared to, on this film’s behalf, argue that it might have been better to allow Kot to speak his native Polish and subtitle the movie instead of forcing him to speak English throughout, but I watched an English-language interview with him, and he speaks the language fluently. I cannot imagine what prompted the acting choice to deliver every line of Jeremiasz’s dialogue so stiltedly; as a result of it, Kot delivers a performance that is—and I hesitate to use this term without sufficient reason but there are truly no other or more accurate descriptors—Wiseaunian. I don’t think that Kot is a bad actor necessarily, but it’s such a huge distraction that one could almost (but not quite) overlook what an amazing performance Strates is bringing to the table. She manages to portray innocence, madness, and clarity of purpose in what could have easily been a textbook standard manic pixie nightmare girl, and I really look forward to seeing her in future roles. I’m also fascinated by director Kike Maíllo’s cinematic eye; there are a lot of breathtaking images here (most of which were included in the film’s extremely well-crafted trailer), and I can’t wait to see him take the helm of another thriller that’s less hampered by a familiar narrative twist and a wooden performance from its lead.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Unholy (2021)

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I am a man who loves a haunted doll movie, as long as it doesn’t involve acting like the Warrens were anything other than scam artists. You can imagine my disappointment upon the realization that The Unholy, which I thought would center around a possessed toy, turned out to be something different entirely. That disappointment was tempered by the realization that, although I wouldn’t see an ancient doll wielding a knife against Papa Winchester, at least this would be a possession horror, which is another genre that I’m rather fond of. It’s pretty rote and paint-by-numbers, unfortunately, but the ending was sufficiently unconventional that I can’t say it’s the worst of its kind. Spoiler alert, I guess? 

Following a prologue set in 1845, in which a woman is hanged for practicing witchcraft and her soul bound to a doll, we find disgraced journalist Gerald Finn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) travelling to rural Massachusetts to photograph a supposed cattle mutilation. Disappointed but not surprised to find nothing more than a teen prank on a farm adjacent to a church, Finn notices the gnarled tree from the prologue and, within its hollowed base, the “kern” doll. Seizing the opportunity to spruce up his underwhelming story, he breaks the doll’s china head and takes its photo, unwittingly releasing the spirit of the witch. While intoxicated later that night, he’s driven off of the road by the appearance of a local girl, Alice (Cricket Brown), in front of his vehicle. He tails her back to the tree, where she speaks in tongues and collapses. When relaying this to the girl’s uncle, Father William Hagan (William Sadler), both he and Dr. Natalie Gates (Katie Aselton) express surprise; Alice has been both deaf and mute since birth. Soon, however, Alice demonstrates that she can not only speak but has gained the ability to hear, and says that “Mary” is speaking to her, and has healed her. 

This attracts the attention of the local diocese, including Bishop Gyles (Cary Elwes) and Monsignor Delgarde (Diogo Morgado). Before long, Alice garners national and international attention, as she heals a boy who could not walk as well as Father Hagan’s terminal lung cancer, and the small town of Banfield becomes an epicenter of pilgrimages. Also rehabilitated is Finn’s journalistic career, as he’s soon fielding calls from his former editor Monica Slade (Christine Adams), who mere days before was dodging his calls while citing Finn’s previous career-ending lapse of journalistic integrity. When Father Hagan discovers the truth about the “Mary” with whom Alice is communing, and that she is in fact the spirit of the executed nineteenth century witch Mary Elnor, this revelation costs him his life, but puts Finn and Dr. Gates on the right track to stop Mary’s ascension on the night of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. 

There’s a fair amount of water-treading going on in this 99 minute budget horror, which could easily have been trimmed to a tight 80 and gone straight to streaming, perhaps as a surprisingly star-studded episode of Into the Dark or some other horror anthology. First time director Evan Spiliotopoulos has been working in the industry for over two decades now, with some noteworthy (if not praiseworthy) writing credits under his belt: the live action Beauty and the Beast, for instance, as well as The Huntsman: Winter’s War and the 2007 CGI animated Battle for Terra, which I don’t think anyone has ever heard of except for those of us who’ve seen the unskippable trailer on every single Wolverine and the X-Men DVD more times than are reasonable to admit. One wouldn’t think that the man who penned Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, and Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween Movie would be up for the reinvention of possession horror, and that assumption would be correct. This is a script full of dialogue that you’ve heard a million times before (Slade: “I know you; you would sell your soul for a story.” Finn: “I’m pretty sure I already did.”) as well as some painfully embarrassing attempts at being hip. For instance, when Finn makes a mix for Alice, he cites Tupac as “old school” but mentions cites Billie Eilish as contemporary youth music in the same breath as The Smashing Pumpkins, as if Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness came out in 2019 and not 1995 (sandwiched directly between Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me). It doesn’t strike me as being intentionally ironic, either, as Morgan is a fine actor and could have easily delivered a wry lack of self-awareness if that had been appropriate. 

Of course, that Spiliotopoulos wrote Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure may actually be important to this movie’s ending. After reviewing various plot synopses of the novel from which the film is adapted online, I can’t determine if this is new to the adaptation or within the book, but Mary’s ultimate defeat isn’t the result of an exorcism. Instead, Finn wields his sullied reputation to sow doubt about Alice’s supposed miracles among the mass of congregants who have made their way to Banfield, preventing Mary from sucking up their souls and sealing her infernal pact. Mary, like Tinkerbell, has the “clap if you believe in fairies” limitation that requires faith in order to fuel her return, and by inverting this, Finn and Gates are able to weaken Mary’s hold over Alice and the populace. Of course, since this is a movie, the demands of the modern viewer require that we still be subjected to a show-stopping climax in which Mary appears in the burned flesh and her worshippers flee before her, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the fact that the narrative, which was theretofore about as canonical as a film of this kind could be, took a bit of a left turn into using skepticism as a weapon. It’s still not great, but if you’re stuck with limited options, there are worse possession retreads to spend some time with. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Toll (2021)

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CW/TW: Discussion of rape culture as a source of anxiety and sexual assault. 

Cami (Jordan Hayes) is not having a good day. She’s en route to see her father (James McGowan), and since her flight touches down at 2 AM due to delays, she tells her dad she’ll take a rideshare to his place instead of expecting him to pick her up. Her mood does not improve when her driver, Spencer (Max Topplin), makes awkward attempts at small talk that tend toward the sinister; he reveals that he’s a bowhunter and, when asked what he hunts, includes “humans” on the list as a bad joke. Or is it? Cami’s suspicions are further aroused when Spencer attempts to take a turn onto a rural road that Cami doesn’t recognize, and she is not assuaged to see that the turn is indicated on the rideshare app’s navigation screen. As their path takes them through a deeply wooded area, Spencer’s car suddenly breaks down, stranding the two of them alone . . .

A few years ago, I looked up the reader reviews for Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a book that I read on a flight in 2014, beginning my trip to New York with a good, hearty cry as the plane touched down at JFK. I was surprised by the negative reviews of it, until I dug a little deeper and saw that most of them were centered around the book’s length (178 pages) versus its cost (MSRP of $16.95 at the time). I had picked it up at the airport on my way out, so I knew exactly how much I was getting and at what cost, but it struck me as an immature (and grossly capitalistic) way to evaluate a piece of art. In fairness, during my more economically insecure (and less mature) days, I sometimes was affected by the same kind of thinking: “How can [band] charge full price for an EP that’s only 8 tracks?!” was a thought that passed through my brain more than once, and it fills me with shame to look back on it. It’s a toxic way of thinking, and from time to time I still have to remind myself of this, especially when it comes to movies. When I was a kid, movies (and of course books) were the only way I could escape an unhappy home environment for a little while, and when I was allowed to rent something from our local video store or borrow only one tape from the library, I felt cheated when it ended up being shorter than I expected. The anguish of wasting the one rental I was allowed that month in 1996 on a 45 minute tape of Carrotblanca that contained shorts I had already seen irrevocably changed my interaction with movies for the rest of my life; I still can’t pick up any form of physical media without immediately checking the run-time before I look at anything else. To me, the purported ongoing “bloat” of films to lengths greater than three hours isn’t a turnoff the way that it is for others; if anything, every time I see that a film is 150+ minutes, my interest is piqued like that Stan Kelly image that became a meme. This is decidedly not how Swampflix at large operates, where the “tight ninety” (™ Alli) is the preferred vision. 

All of that is (as is my wont) a needlessly and pointlessly indulgent digression and lead-in to the fact that I loved this 80 minute(!) thriller. Like Lucky, The Toll is a recent thriller that taps into —and unfortunately necessary—anxieties about existing in public spaces as a woman. In this month alone, my best friend expressed her concerns about parking in a pay garage so that we could meet her family downtown to watch the Independence Day fireworks; days later, she mentioned how fraught with danger it would have been for her to take the bus alone instead, and I have seen enough with my own eyes to know that her hesitancy is valid. Even without the benefit of hearing about the day to day horrors from countless first and secondary sources, as a man, I know how other men talk about women when they’re not around, and it’s terrifying. It’s easy to immediately sympathize and empathize with Cami, trapped alone in the woods with a stranger, even before things get “really” scary. 

Where The Toll plays with expectations is in what happens after the breakdown, which coincides with Spencer’s phone glitching and Cami’s dying. The audience watched as Spencer selected Cami specifically from a list of riders and this, along with our knowledge about the general shitshow that is patriarchal entitlement, primes us for where this story is presumably headed. However, once the characters are stuck in the woods, as they discover more and more reasons to mistrust one another, the audience is tipped off that something equally as pernicious but more ethereal is afoot. After several false scares, Cami opts to take off on foot towards the main road and leave Spencer behind, but discovers that there are now warning signs in the road that would prevent a vehicle from passing, warning of a road closure and graffiti’d with small notes and smiley faces that warn of the need to pay a toll of some kind. She soldiers on, and although she stays on the path, she finds herself back where she started, with one hiccup: she started walking away from Spencer back towards the main road from which they came, but she approaches him from the front, as if coming from deeper in the dark, dark woods. Spencer makes his own attempt to leave, but is likewise thwarted; in a beautifully underlit scene, he leaves the road altogether and sets off into the woods at a perpendicular angle, only to re-emerge from the forest onto the road from the opposite side. 

Other messages begin to appear as well. A warning about “The Toll Man” appears, written in the dust on Spencer’s back windshield. Cami discovers a cache of photos of herself in Spencer’s car, leading her to accuse him of stalking her and orchestrating the evening’s events, while he in turn is dumbfounded by this turn of events and accuses her of planting them; while neither are looking, the pictures disappear as suddenly as they appeared, as if they never existed in the first place. Assuming that someone in the woods is harassing them (The Strangers is mentioned), the two prepare to defend themselves, but they are eventually discovered by an older woman (Canadian treasure Rosemary Dunsmore) on a tractor, who offers to help them. When they relate their experiences, however, she realizes with horror that she will be unable to assist. “It’s been a long time; I’d forgot,” she says. “I’m not where you are. We’re looking at each other like we’re close, but you’re someplace else. You’re in his place. The Toll Man.” Like a malevolent fae, The Toll Man traps wayward travelers who have the scent of death if they should be unlucky enough to find their way onto his road; someone with suicidal ideation or bound for an accident is then diverted into his realm so that he can extract his toll: death. 

This has the potential to be more goofy than scary (The Bye Bye Man, anyone?), but in spite of its possible pitfalls, this one manages to work. I’ve recently been watching The X-Files for the first time, and although I know it’s a huge part of the show’s iconic imagery, every time Mulder and Scully go into the woods with their giant flashlights that are all-but-unnecessary simply because of how brightly backlit the trees are, I have to stifle a laugh (while watching the pilot, I turned to my best friend and almost shouted “Is that supposed to be moonlight?!”). That bled into the pop culture landscape a lot, and I’m pleased to say that the darkness that surrounds Spencer and Cami definitively looks like real, arboreal darkness. Their flashlight barely illuminates the first row of trees closest to them, and beyond that lies nothing but dread, inky blackness. The creepiness of it lingers, even after the Toll Man shepherds them away from the car and toward an isolated house, which contains other illusions that aim to warp their perceptions of reality, including images of Spencer’s dead mother (Jana Peck), who taunts her son with the secrets that she took with her to the grave when she killed herself. When the duo is separated, Cami is also confronted with images from her past; a canopy bed appears in the woods, where a younger version of herself is terrified after being assaulted by an “upstanding” young man (Thomas L. Colford); present-day Cami comforts her, but past Cami is in her head, and knows that although the wound is gone, the scar persists. A similar blending of indoor past and outdoor present was part of the visual language in The Ritual, and I loved it there as I do here. There’s something deeply uncanny about it, and as Cami is hounded by visions of the people who were present in the aftermath of her assault (very similarly to Lucky, although no one sings here), the impossible largeness of the darkness just beyond the treeline merges with the impossibly large weight of her past, while also descending on her in a way that can only be described as claustrophobic. 

The ending comes at the viewer fast, and I won’t spoil the conclusion here other than to say that the circle is fully closed. What we learn in those final ten minutes paints a new picture of everything that came before it, and this is the first film of 2021 that has made me feel like I’m already ready to rewatch it and see what I missed the first time. Although it feels like a Shudder release, it’s currently only available for rental or purchase, but when it comes to streaming, make sure to check it out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

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Unless we’re discussing titans of the medium like Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon, I’m shamefully unfamiliar with most anime.  As the last thriving refuge for traditional hand drawn animation, I respect the artistry of anime greatly.  I’m just more of an admirer than I am a “fan,” since claiming that latter designation implies you’re extremely well versed and deeply opinionated about the medium in a way I’ll never be able to match.  Saying you’re an Anime Fan is like saying you’re a fan of superhero comics or Star Trek or any other extremely nerdy artform with a decades-spanning history; you better know your obscure, inconsequential trivia down to the last detail, or you’re in for a gatekeeping headache.  Case in point: I finally watched the landmark anime series Cowboy Bebop for the first time since it popped up on Hulu last year, over two decades after its initial run.  If I were an anime fan, that kind of blindspot would be a source of shame I’d have to hide from my cannibalistic anime nerd friends.  Since I’m a casual admirer, though, I get to walk away unscathed — the same as I did when Netflix started streaming Neon Genesis Evangelion a couple years back.

Unsurprisingly, the Cowboy Bebop series is pretty good.  A mash-up of neo-noir, neo-Western, and space travel sci-fi tropes, it’s fairly accessible to casual anime admirers with an appreciation for old-fashioned genre filmmaking.  I found it to be hit-or-miss by episode, but mostly as a matter of personal taste.  The standalone villain-of-the-week episodes were mostly fantastic—especially the ones that veered into my beloved subgenre of spaceship horror—but I was largely indifferent to the show’s overarching Spike vs. Vicious storyline: a prolonged, vague neo-noir plot with no sense of propulsion or purpose.  If I were recommending the show to a similarly anime-ignorant friend, I’d try my best to save their time with a Best Of list of standalone episodes to burn through: the ones with the killer fridge mold, the virtual reality cult, the mushroom trip, the annoying cowboy, and the deranged clown.  If you haven’t seen Cowboy Bebop by now you likely don’t need to watch all 11 hours of the series; you just need a taste, if not only for general pop culture familiarity.  I likely would’ve said the same thing about the monster-of-the-week episodes of The X-Files, though, and I watched that show religiously as it aired, so your mileage may vary.

Luckily, you don’t even have to watch those five Best Of episodes (“Toys in the Attic”, “Brain Scratch”, “Mushroom Samba”, “Cowboy Funk,” “Pierrot le Fou”) to get a proper taste of Cowboy Bebop.  The series conveniently concluded with a standalone villain-of-the-week movie that also sidesteps the energy-draining Spike vs. Vicious storyline entirely, allowing for one final ride with your new favorite spacetraveling bounty hunters.  Cowboy Bebop: The Movie dials the clock back a few episodes into the series before the bounty hunter crew is disbanded (and partially killed) to offer a taste of the show at its prime.  In this extended, posthumous episode, the crew is attempting to capture bio-terrorists on Mars (styled to look suspiciously similar to 1990s NYC) before they release a deadly virus in a densely populated crowd.  The viral outbreak is planned to be staged at a jack-o-lantern-themed variation of the Macy’s Day Parade, making the film a low-key Halloween movie of sorts.  The crew selfishly bickers among themselves, tries to score the bounty on their own, falters, then reforms at the last minute to save the day.  It’s quintessential Cowboy Bebop in that way.

The problem with recommending Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (subtitled Knocking on Heaven’s Door) as a crash course overview of the show is that it’s way too goddamn long.  You could watch all five of the Best Of episodes I mentioned in less time than it would take you to watch this one feature film, and it never hits the same highs as the series proper at its best.  You’d have to trim 30-40 minutes off this thing to make it an enticing alternative for newcomers, and I imagine even long-time fans of the show had their own patience tested with this two-hour standalone.  Cowboy Bebop: The Movie isn’t Cowboy Bebop at its most creative or most exciting.  However, it is Cowboy Bebop at its most functional.  The main draw of the film is seeing a somewhat scrappy, experimental series funded with proper time & budget to get its details in order.  The personal & professional dynamics among the space crew are never as clearly defined on the show as they are in the movie, where even lesser side characters like Ein & Edward are fully integrated into the daily business of intergalactic bountyhunting in a way that finally makes sense.  More importantly, the animation itself is afforded way more resources to flourish.  On the show, the intrusion of CG animation felt like a budget-cutting measure; here it looks purposefully surreal in a more thoughtfully mapped-out hand drawn backdrop.  Whereas most “The Movie” versions of TV shows go big with their plots, locations, and scope to justify the jump from the small screen, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie only goes big on its look.

If I had only watched Cowboy Bebop: The Movie for an overview taste of the show, I might’ve assumed the series was a lot more creatively limited than what the best bounty-of-the-week episodes had to offer.  It’s a good episode of the series, but it’s too long and too tame to be a great one.  However, I did find it to be a great “What If” illustration of how much more visually spectacular the TV show might’ve been if it had the time & money to luxuriate in production the way the movie did.  It’s fun to look back on the production limitations of the five Best Of episodes I mentioned and imagine them even more visually extravagant in their animation, since I now know what that might look like.  Regardless of that hypothetical, I very much love them as-is.  You might even call me a fan.

-Brandon Ledet

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

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I love the 1996 sci-fi comedy film Space Jam, by which I mean I was 10 years old in 1996.  Even as an adult, I find the movie fascinating as a corporate cashgrab mash-em-up of two disparate but popular brands—Looney Tunes & Michael Jordan—that accidently stumbled into sublimely silly post-modern absurdism.  The contortions Space Jam forces itself into to highlight both a post-baseball, career-reflective Michael Jordan and a hyperviolent, physics-defying cartoon bunny are incredible to watch, both from a place of ironic detachment and as in-the-moment entertainment.  Of course, it’s impossible for me to claim that Space Jam is objectively good, considering that anyone who was not a child in the mid-90s seems to despise it as a cultural scourge rather than just a middling, studio-made kids’ film.  I just want to confess up-front that I’m a Space Jam apologist; I even prefer it to the Joe Dante Looney Tunes film that supposedly fixed all its faults (according to more respectable tastemakers).  That way I can I credibly say I went into Space Jam: A New Legacy genuinely hopeful that I would enjoy the experience.  I did not watch this long-delayed sequel just to lazily dunk on it or call it out as the death knell of modern cinema.  I thought it might be fun.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is devoid of fun.  It succeeds neither as intentional comedy nor as accidental absurdism.  It lacks the shameless commitment to its own crass commercialism that the pushed the original Space Jam to the point of post-modern delirium.  Like the worst cash-grab sequels, it does its best to retrace the steps of its predecessor while suppressing all its strangest, most exciting ideas to the margins.  A New Legacy simply subs out Michael Jordan for his modern-day equivalent in LeBron James, then hangs up the towel.  James teams up with Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters to win a cosmic game of basketball so he can get back to his family . . . except this time the game is staged in a computer server instead of outer space.  That venue change allows the new Space Jam to rope in as many background characters as it can from the full library of Warner Bros. Entertainment IP – including blasphemous “cameos” from “cinematic universes” like The Matrix, The Devils, Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.  That’s the kind of naked corporate-synergy flexing that has professional critics decrying the film as “an abomination”, “an apocalyptic horror movie”, and a “swirling CGI garbage tornado.”  Those layup hit-pieces were preloaded before the movie was actually screened for critics, though.  What really holds A New Legacy back is that it keeps its only new, exciting idea—that intrusion of characters from classic films outside the Looney Tunes brand—relegated to the background.  King Kong, The Penguin, and Baby Jane Hudson should have been shooting hoops alongside LeBron James and Bugs Bunny, not cheering them on from the sidelines in blurred-out crowd shots.

It’s most widely being compared to Spielberg’s post-apocalyptic VR thriller Ready Player One (which is much more critical of this kind of self-aggrandizing IP worship than it’s given credit for), but the basic premise of Space Jam: A New Legacy actually lands much closer to the underappreciated sci-fi bummer The Congress.  In a dystopian vision that only rings truer to out shithole reality every year, The Congress imagines a world where celebrities no longer physically perform in mass-distributed art, but instead are scanned-into a computer system that simulates their screen presence in AI emulations.  It’s the ultimate movie studio power grab, one we’ve seen echoed in real-life simulations of deceased performers in films like Rogue One (Peter Cushing), Furious 7 (Paul Walker) and, most recently, the ethically-shaky documentary Roadrunner (Anthony Bordain).  In Space Jam: A New Legacy, LeBron James is offered the same opportunity: being scanned into the Warner Bros. “serververse” so his likeness can be plugged into whatever intellectual property the mega-corporation can scoop up before Disney gets to it first.  A New Legacy even maintains some of the dystopian undercurrent of Ready Player One & The Congress, with human beings cheering on the Looney Tunes team on one side of the court, fictional-product characters cheering on the opposing team of villains, and Don Cheadle orchestrating the entire event from the center as an evil algorithm MC (the film’s only decent, fully committed performance).  No matter how much its pile-on of disparate IPs in a single locale is supposed to register as Fun! and Cool!, the Warner Bros. studio itself is clearly positioned as the main villain of the piece, in direct opposition to its human, terrified audience, which it literally holds captive. 

It’s a shame that idea wasn’t pushed further.  If the entire point of this movie was for Warner Bros. to show off its extensive collection of intellectual properties, it should have just flooded the screen with them to the point where the audience was crushed under their immensity. Instead, it just sweeps them to the background so LeBron James can cosplay as a late-career Michael Jordan by recreating the exact plot beats & character dynamics of the original Space Jam in a new locale.  At least doubling down on its grotesque display of corporate synergy could’ve been memorable. As is, there’s nothing offered here worth sitting through A New Legacy to see, which I’m saying even as the rare dumdum who loves the original Space Jam, The Congress and, to a lesser extent, Ready Player One.  There are technically jokes in this movie, but none of them are funny (save maybe a couple throwback Silent Cinema gags featuring Wile E. Coyote).  It’s a full half-hour longer than the original, sacrificing the breakneck pacing that makes it such a breezy watch.  LeBron James is too concerned with being lauded as both the greatest basketball player to have ever lived and the ultimate family man to do anything risky or interesting with the material.  Even with all those missteps, though, A New Legacy‘s greatest sin is that it doesn’t push its one deviation from the original Space Jam to its furthest possible extreme.  Humorless movie nerds were already going to be pissed about it dragging characters from beloved classics down to the level of a Space Jam sequel no matter what, so there’s no reason for the movie to be timid about its shameless Warner Bros. IP promotion.  Fuck it.  Show Pennywise spin-dunking in Immortan Joe’s face, then high-fiving Free Willy and planting a sloppy kiss on Lego Catwoman’s blocky lips.  If you’re going to be blasphemous, at least have fun with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Nobody (2021)

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I’ve lost track of how we’re supposed to react to Bob Odenkirk as a screen presence.  After all the obsessive rewatches of Mr. Show DVD sets in my college years I’m trained to receive Odenkirk as a sight gag, where his very presence is meant to read as a joke.  Given the barely stifled laughter that echoed his titular line reading of “My little women!” in my theater screening of Gerwig’s Little Women, I assume I’m not the only one who reacts to him that way.  Bob Odenkirk is synonymous with sketch comedy in my mind, making any scene he’s in inherently feel like a bit.  What’s confusing about that association is that Odenkirk has been much busier and more widely popular in recent years in a medium I know very little about: Prestige Television.  His roles on shows like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Fargo appear to be occasionally comedic in the way most TV dramas dabble in dark humor from time to time, but for the most part they’re played straight.  Bob Odenkirk is just as much of a legitimate actor now as he was a visual punchline in the past, and it’s up to the audience’s personal familiarity with specific pockets of his work to determine how he’s going to register onscreen (the same way I can’t watch Toby Huss in a serious dramatic role without first thinking of Artie, The Strongest Man in the World for at least a half-second). 

That muddled screen persona makes for an initially confusing experience in Odenkirk’s post-John Wick action vehicle Nobody.  At first glance, it’s absolutely absurd that Odenkirk would be starring in any kind of action movie at all, much less one styled after the bone-crunching ultraviolence of John Wick.  You’re not immediately invited to laugh at that casting choice, though, since Nobody plays its John Wick in the Suburbs premise entirely straight.  Odenkirk plays a self-identified “nobody”: a suburban dad with severe home invasion anxieties and an exponentially distanced relationship with his nuclear family, who’re bored by his stability.  The only early wink towards the absurdism of Odenkirk’s casting is in the brutality of its close-quarters violence.  Once a bloodlust is awakened in the milquetoast suburban dad, he over-commits to his role as a macho protector, and it’s absolutely bizarre to see Odenkirk smashing windows and crushing throats as if he were a retired, middle-age Rambo.  As that violence escalates and the suburban-America nobody’s list of enemies grows to include the entire Russian mafia, it’s clear that this is very much an intentional action-comedy; it’s just one that’s incredibly patient in paying off the set-up to the punchline.  Odenkirk starts the film in his Prestige TV Drama mode but by the end he’s a full-on sketch comedy player.

I had a lot of fun with Nobody once it fully sketched out what it’s doing.  Based on its marketing (and the involvement of producer David Leitch), I expected it to be a fish-out-of-water action comedy about suburban dad stumbling into a John Wick plot.  By the end, I was more convinced it was a direct parody of every post-Taken Liam Neeson thriller about a dad on the verge.  All the signs were there if I had known to look for them.  My borrowed library DVD started with a Liam Neeson trailer; Odenkirk grimly refers to his secretive military past, hinting at a “very particular set of skills” that could be deployed to save his family; he breaks into thieves’ apartment to retrieve his daughter’s beloved kittycat bracelet instead of, you know, his entire daughter; etc.  The opening montage is even a direct spoof of the morning-routine sequence from The Commuter (aka Taken on a Train, not to be confused with Non-Stop, aka Taken on a Plane).  The only way the Neeson spoofing could’ve been more obvious is if Odenkirk were speaking in a gravelly Irish accent, and I still didn’t catch onto what it was doing until about halfway into the runtime.  Nobody is a Mr. Show level parody of the post-Taken dad thriller; it just doesn’t make that satirical target immediately apparent.

The tonal confusion of what eventually turns out to be an over-the-top action comedy here feels both purposeful and effective.  Odenkirk’s mid-life macho fantasy of being an untapped protector of his household just waiting for a threat to quash is already funny enough when it’s played straight in the opening act.  Watching that fantasy meet the harsh reality of a suburban dad bod being pummeled by Russian mobsters mid-film is even funnier.  Then, the whole thing farcically escalates into live-action cartoon mayhem by the finale, boldly underlining the absurdism of its premise to the point where it’s unignorable.  If I were more confident on where Odenkirk is in his acting career (basically, if I watched more cable TV dramas) I might’ve caught onto that parodic sense of humor a lot sooner, but it took me a minute to get my footing on the film’s tone.  In retrospect, that makes it the perfect Bob Odenkirk vehicle despite the unlikeliness of its genre: a comedy where you’re not initially sure whether you’re supposed to treat the actor as a joke but it’s funny either way.

-Brandon Ledet