willem dafoe

The Legend of Ochi (2025)

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For decades, whenever someone cited the “uncanny valley” effect of modern filmmaking, they were referring to the off-putting resemblance of CGI to real-life humanity. As computer technology inches nearer to photographic accuracy, the ways in which the images are still just slightly off become monstrously horrific, especially when rendering human faces. As a result, movie nerds tend to fetishize the practical effects of yesteryear, preferring the blatant artifice of movie-magic techniques like stop-motion, animatronics, and latex makeup transformations to the uncanny computer effects of our current corporate hellscape. Ironically, that fetishism has recently led to an entirely new uncanny valley forming between advanced practical effects and the CG graphics they’re meant to counteract. For instance, when the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts were mostly made by Nick Park’s hands in the early 90s, you could see the lumpy imperfections of his fingerprints in the characters’ clay bodies, unmistakably marking them with evidence of human touch. Now that Wallace & Gromit features like Vengeance Most Fowl are being produced by hundreds of collaborators for major studios like Netflix, those fingerprints have to be artificially applied, intentionally warping the clay so the machine-printed faces can’t be mistaken for computer animation. Likewise, the new children’s fantasy-adventure The Legend of Ochi features an animatronic puppet so perfect in construction & operation that it uncannily resembles its CGI equivalents in movies from less discerning filmmakers. Music video director Isaiah Saxon has spent years perfecting the puppetry & matte paintings of his feature-film debut to revive an industry overrun by computer-generated tedium with some old-world movie magic and old-fashioned awe. He didn’t think to artificially muck up the final product like Aardman Animations, though, and the result is so uncannily similar to CGI that you have to wonder why he even bothered.

The titular Ochi are magical creatures brought to life via animatronic puppetry. The species largely resembles the golden snub-nosed monkeys of China, except that its bites are poisonous and its children are adorned with Mogwai ears for maximum cuteness. The Ochi are introduced to the audience in a scientific text titled Carpathian Beasts & Demons to help distinguish them from the real-life primates they resemble. Their presence on the fictional, Romania-adjacent island of Carpathia is treated as vampiric & monstrous, with a crazed patriarch played by Willem Dafoe training a new generation of boys to hunt & kill the supposedly demonic beasts on sight. His daughter is not so convinced of the nobility in this mission, and she quickly befriends a baby Ochi left behind by one of her father’s hunts. The rest of the movie is an E.T.-inspired children’s adventure, in which the sullen teenager runs away from home to safely return the Ochi to his fleeing family in a coming-of-age act of rebellion. If there’s any modern update to that familiar formula, it’s in Dafoe’s mockery of Jordan Peterson-style manosphere philosophy, which he preaches to impressionable young boys while driving around his monster-truck chariot in antique battlefield armor. He has no particular interest in his daughter beyond her value as “a father’s greatest treasure,” while she rejects her extremely gendered role in the house by donning costume vampire fangs and cranking heavy metal tunes from the fictional band Hell Throne. The goodbye note she leaves when she runs away proudly declares, “I am strong and cool and don’t believe anything you say,” speaking for all teenage rebels everywhere in their universal language of sass. As a result, the movie should spiritually speak to any depressed loner children who resent their bloviating fathers—of which there is always an infinite supply—regardless of whether they’ve already seen an E.T. riff or three.

The Legend of Ochi evokes all of the childlike wonder and sarcastic teen humor needed to make this genre formula work, but neither of those elements are entirely convincing. Its teenage characters (Helena Zengel as the Ochi’s bestie and Finn Wolfhard as a burgeoning fuckboy who’s “only nice when no one’s looking”) mumble their lines under mops of greasy hair to the point of near indecipherability. They aim for deadpan comedy but overshoot to land at dead-eyed monotony instead. There are also long stretches of the adventure to Ochi territory that have no dialogue at all, which would test audiences’ patience at any age and suggests that Saxon isn’t used to filling up a feature-length runtime with his writing. The real disappointment is that the psychedelic magic of his past music video work for artists like Björk & Panda Bear fall short of inspiring awe here. His puppetry & matte-painting visual tricks, while admirably old-fashioned, are too technically perfect to convey their construction by human hands. When the trailer for the film first dropped, social media C.H.U.D.s baselessly accused Saxon of boosting his budget with A.I.-generated imagery, which had to be heartbreaking for an artist who spent multiple years fighting to render this passion-project fantasy world through the most practical, tactile methods possible. Still, the final result is a little too machine-perfect to inspire genuine awe, and you can easily see what stoked those accusations. There’s an uncanny valley effect in how close its state-of-the-art puppets resemble computer-generated images, leaving them a little off-putting & soulless despite the passionate craft behind them. Saxon technically did everything right here. The aesthetic is distinct; the puppets are cute and smoothly operated; the gender politics are pointed and relevant to the moment; the kids are authentically mopey & rebellious. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the movie never fully sings, even if it can demonstrably hit all the right notes in perfect pitch.

-Brandon Ledet

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

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After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it disappears, it reads “Oh, did another Wes Anderson film premiere to a muted response at Cannes only to turn out to be another masterpiece? I guess it’s summer again.” I mentioned last year in discussions around Asteroid City that I think Anderson is a filmmaker that we have started to take for granted, even if I personally didn’t care much for The French Dispatch (which Brandon reviewed very positively here). There was much consternation about Asteroid City among some of the people that I ran into at a Friendsgiving in November, and I mostly kept my opinion to myself. It’s a movie that requires you to get on its level and is the only one of his films that I would describe as genuinely surreal. If you didn’t like or get it, then I don’t know that I really have the language to articulate what about it spoke so clearly and effectively to me, or that “getting it” would automatically translate to “liking it.” What I will say is that Asteroid City is far from being an entry level Anderson film, or one with broad general appeal, and that The French Dispatch is also not one that I think should be anyone’s first. The Phoenician Scheme, however, with its mostly straightforward narrative structure, is one that I think will be of interest to a larger audience and range of viewers. 

Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is an international arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself surviving the most recent of numerous attempts on his life when his plane goes down in 1950. Unlike in his previous miraculous survivals, any of which may have taken the lives of his three dead wives, this time he undergoes a near death experience in which he faces divine judgment regarding his heavenly worthiness. Somewhat shaken by this, Korda reaches out to the eldest of his ten children and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), who is a novice preparing to take her final vows to become a nun. Although it’s been years, he offers to provisionally make her the heir to his empire, which would be flattering if all of her brothers weren’t children aged three to fifteen (Korda has adopted several in addition to his biological sons, in case all of his genetic progeny turn out to be duds). Further complicating matters is the widespread belief that Liesl’s mother, Korda’s first wife, was killed at his hands, and although he vehemently denies that he has ever directly or indirectly committed murder, his ongoing recognition of a large number of assassins whom he previously employed calls his veracity into question. Not to mention that he is completely unencumbered by any apparent ethical limitations, as his most recent and greatest work, an infrastructural overhaul of the fictional nation of Phoenicia, will require the use of slave labor, and that he claims responsibility for a famine in the area that’s destabilized local power structures in order for him to have his way. Although Liesl’s devotion to her faith calls her to return and take her vows, her own morals demand that she take the opportunity to agree to Korda’s offer on the condition that there are no more famines or slaves (and that her brothers are moved from a dormitory across the street into Korda’s gigantic mansion, and that some level of paternal attentiveness is provided for them).

For all his many, many flaws as a father and a human being, Korda has an endless thirst for knowledge, which includes the hiring of numerous tutors on various subjects to provide extemporaneous lectures to the boys and himself. The most recent of these is Norwegian entomology professor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), who ends up along for the ride serving as Korda’s new administrative secretary (the last one died in the plane crash that opened the film). Korda lays out the movie’s overarching plot quickly and in detail. Due to actions on the part of Korda’s industrial enemies, market manipulation of the cost of “bashable rivets” has suddenly created a funding gap for the whole titular scheme, so he must convince all of the other investors in his project to cover some percentage of “The Gap.” These include Phoenicia’s crown prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the brother duo of venture capitalists Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Korda’s second cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), Casablanca-inspired nightclub owner and gangster Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and “Uncle” Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s estranged half-brother. As Korda meets with each of them in turn, he finds himself returning to Heaven’s courtroom, where he is defended by an attorney named Knave (Willem Dafoe) before God (Bill Murray) and interacts with Liesl’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in her afterlife. Under the guidance of Liesl’s moral certitude and with things not going well for him “upstairs,” Korda grows as a person despite never losing his sardonic edge. 

The set pieces that comprise this one are all a lot of fun. When I was telling a friend about it, the one with whom I had watched so many Final Destination films, I noted that this movie opened almost like one of those would, with an airplane blowing out part of its fuselage and a man being ripped in half as a result, except that it’s done in a typically Andersonian visual style, with string and stop motion bits in place of fire and guts, and it sets a great tone for what is to follow. Even while using his standard palette, Anderson is doing a few new things, including using a very shallow depth of field in several wide shots of the massive room in which Korda reunites with his daughter, which causes the image to appear diorama-like until people enter and the illusory spell is broken. It’s fun stuff, and calls to mind the experimental playfulness on display in, for instance, the tour of the submarine in The Life Aquatic. The aforementioned surreality of Asteroid City is not completely absent here, although it’s limited to the scenes in which Korda finds himself at his out of body inquest and its various asides, and they’re very funny; there’s something a bit Mel Brooks about the whole celestial spectacle, which I mean as a great compliment. They’re also much more palatable, as I can imagine the average moviegoer—a “normie” for lack of a better term—showing up to Asteroid City and being completely put off by some of the more esoteric choices, especially with regards to the “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” refrain that occurs near the film’s ending. Here, confining the more dreamlike elements of the piece to these near-death visions posits them in a rhetorical space that demands less suspension of disbelief (and which contains, perhaps, less whimsy) and is likely going to be more acceptable to the standard viewer. As such, The Phoenician Scheme could easily function as a very good introduction to Anderson’s body of work, since it’s much more straightforward approach would have a broader appeal. 

Del Toro is excellent in this, giving a truly outstanding performance. Korda is a bit of an Andersonian archetype in that his treatment of his children is absurd in the way it finds comedy in its outlandish neglectfulness. This, along with his desire for familial reconciliation, makes him a figure very much like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, but with a bit of a twist. Whereas Royal had a desire to reconnect with his family that was almost entirely selfish and self-interested and he was willing to fake having a terminal illness to get in close, Korda is the ultimate capitalist robber baron who seems to have never cared about anyone other than himself (and perhaps Liesl’s late mother) but who has a large, unloved family that he has no real desire to connect to (like certain other billionaires we could name). He seems more interested in having a family because he’s expected to have some kind of legacy, even if he hadn’t given much thought to what that could mean until he survives his seventh plane crash. There’s a great scene in the “Marseille Bob” segment of the film in which said gangster’s night club is invaded by socialist revolutionaries led by Richard Ayoade, and Korda gets into the middle of things and ends up shot by a trigger-happy rebel. Bob mistakes this accident as a sign of Korda’s nobility and immediately agrees to cover a part of The Gap, and although Korda clearly takes advantage of this error, Del Toro plays the moment as if the motor-mouthed cad is slightly taken aback at how good it feels for someone to believe you’re capable of change. There’s a talent to adding that kind of nuance in both performance and direction without skipping a beat in the dizzyingly-fast dialogue. 

As a counterpoint to all of this, we see Liesl slowly let go of the trappings of faith while retaining her sense of self (there’s a great bit where she admits she’s never heard God’s voice but that she imagines that she does, and He just tells her to do what she was going to do anyway). First, as a rider to her accepting provisional heirship, Korda has her give up her humble rosary for a “secular” one, which is gaudy and covered in jewels. Later, she is given a more ornate replacement for her corncob pipe, which is even tackier. When she tries to return to her order, the Mother Superior tells her that these worldly possessions (which she did not seek but merely received) indicate that she is among those who are simply not cut out for a life of cloistered humility spent in prayer. Part of the film’s genuine heart is finding out where Liesl and her father are going to meet in the middle, and the film is filled with objective correlative metaphors for this in the number of images of things which don’t quite connect, most notably a railway gap of about twenty feet that ends up becoming a makeshift basketball court (it makes sense in context). 

Where the film fumbled somewhat was with the Uncle Nubar character. Cumberbatch is done up in intentionally ridiculous facial hair, and he looks a bit like Ming the Merciless if he stopped grooming or conditioning his mustache and beard and let the whole situation get a little scraggly. It’s a little much, and Cumberbatch’s performance is at first a hard pill to swallow, but by the time he and Korda get into a knock-down drag-out fight, I had come around on it. Some people in my screening were enjoying it from the start, and what I noticed at this movie (which was actually the same theater in which I saw Asteroid City last year) was that it shared that film’s propensity to elicit laughs from different parts of the audience at different times. The jokes come at such a rapid pace that sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the music of the dialogue, and the guy six seats over is laughing at something that you’ve missed and the couple behind you are getting a lot more out of Cumberbatch than you are while you’re laughing at something that it seems like only one other person enjoyed. In my screening, there was one man one row in front of me and two seats over who fell asleep almost immediately and then snored for the remaining 90 minutes. A comedy that’s able to be funny to different people in different ways (and a great movie to take a nap to for that guy in Row C) is laudable, and isn’t to be taken for granted. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Nosferatu (2024)

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Wouldst thou like to live maliciously?

I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula.  It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before.  From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two.  It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.  So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented.  That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license.  Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate.  Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text.  What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.

Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale.  As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date).  He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.”  The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new.  If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult).  There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?”  Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material.  So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle.  Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story.  We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.

No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way.  Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps.  If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity.  When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives.  Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay.  It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity.  I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good.  If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on.  It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

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I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded. 

It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again. 

I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III. 

When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find. 

The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check! 

This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Streets of Fire (1984)

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I’m sure there are plenty of real-life biker gangs that have been a terrifying menace in whatever communities they rumble through, but I feel like most of my exposure to that culture has been sanitized & defanged to the point where I don’t see them as a threat.  From Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones to Vanilla Ice in Cool as Ice, there’s a long history of retro biker gangs that look tough on the screen but never actually follow through on their threats.  Likewise, most bikers I see in the streets these days appear to be bored men in midlife crisis, trying to muster up some Leather Daddy fashionability instead of just plain Dad Vibes.  Apparently, that de-emphasized biker menace bothered notorious genre filmmaker Walter Hill as well, presumably after growing up in the Marlon Brando era of biker-with-a-heart-of-gold dramas as a teenager.  Hill seemingly made an entire feature film just to make bikers feel genuinely dangerous again, terrorizing a 1980s audience with revamped black-leather bullies from his 1950s youth.

Streets of Fire is a 50s teen-delinquent throwback sleazed up with 80s music video neons.  Self-described as “a rock & roll fable” set in “another time and another place,” it exists in a make-believe limbo that covers both decades at once – the same neon-noir aesthetic as Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.  It’s basically The Wild Ones sped up for MTV sensibilities, with music-video crosscutting and a constant, aggressive drumbeat keeping the audience’s blood pumping like mad while its rabid biker gangs raise Hell up & down the streets of the fictional city of “Richmond” (read: Chicago).  Bikers get away with stripping innocent citizens nude in the street and dragging them across the asphalt trailing behind their roaring bikes as they smash every storefront window in their vicious path, but they cross a line when they kidnap a famous rock ‘n roll singer in the middle of her sold-out concert.  The heist mission to rescue that singer from biker-gang territory nearly burns the entire city to the ground, and it’s legitimately terrifying in a way few—if any—1950s biker films were allowed to be.

The only thing that really slows Streets of Fire down is its dead-eyed lead, Michael Paré, which is bizarre since the rest of the cast is packed with exciting, charismatic people you always love to see.  Willem Dafoe is a gorgeous sex goblin as the main biker villain, recalling his leather-clad brute performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless.  Likewise, Diane Lane’s performance as the kidnapped rock ‘n roll singer feels like an MTV-era update to her persona in The Fabulous Stains, right down to the red & black color story of her wardrobe.  Rick Moranis is maybe the only main player who’s cast against type as the tough-guy music manager who hires a vigilante to rescue his missing talent, playing the part of a macho bully that’s usually reserved for men three times his size.  Paré does not bring much to the table as the mercenary hero in contrast.  He’s generically handsome, but he’s got no personality to speak of.  Walter Hill directs every single character to deliver action hero one-liners in amphetamine-rattled noir speak, and Paré’s the only one who mumbles his way through them like a long-lost Stallone brother.

While Paré is a major liability as the narrative center of attention, Hill’s high-style visual theatrics more than compensate for his lack of screen presence.  Flaming motorcycles, S&M butcher outfits, neon crosslighting, and a music video performance of the soft-rock hit “I Can Dream About You” all violently combine to make a singular genre picture – one that revitalizes a long-subdued subculture that’s rarely as tough as it looks.  For the record, Cool as Ice is also a high-style delight; I just wouldn’t say that Vanilla Ice was exactly “scary” in it.  Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is a goddamn nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Kathryn Bigelow and the Loveable Scumbag

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On of the more popular theories as to why Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director is that she almost exclusively makes movies about men. Her prestigious war dramas aren’t exactly jingoistic love letters to American patriotism, but they do appeal to a kind of macho sensibility that helps explain why they would be praised over women-led projects with a quieter, more introspective bent. I don’t believe this is some calculated, cynical angle Bigelow chose in order to earn Awards Circuit accolades, though. The nature & textures of masculinity (and masculine violence) have been an auteurist preoccupation for the director dating all the way back to her early career as a genre film toughie. Her breakout success Point Break is a passionate bromance between an undercover cop and a dirtbag adrenaline junkie. Her cult classic vampire Western Near Dark follows the seduction & indoctrination of a macho farm boy into a subservient role among a clan of ghouls. Her Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days—our current Movie of the Month—follows history’s greasiest anti-hero’s exploits in worming his unwanted, uninvited way back into his ex’s life. Masculinity is the thematic through-line throughout Bigelow’s decades-long career. It’s even one that concerns her debut feature.

Bigelow’s debut feature as director, The Loveless, is an early 60s motorcycle gang pastiche. It essentially remakes the Brando beefcake classic The Wild One as in introspective art piece (as opposed to Cool as Ice, which remade it as a breakfast cereal commercial). A young Willem Dafoe stars as a tragically beautiful biker brute in his first lead role. Unlike the mouthy charmer Ralph Fiennes plays in Strange Days, Dafoe hardly speaks a word in his leather biker get-up. Rather, his classic machismo is communicated though intense stares and hardened body language. Occasional poetic voiceover about how “the endless blacktop is [his] sweet eternity” suggests there’s a poet’s mind behind his stern eyes and supermodel cheekbones, but that suggestion of vulnerability only makes his machismo more dangerous. When Dafoe’s biker gang parks in small-town middle-America on their way to the races at Daytona, his pronounced male beauty inevitably captivates local women – leading to their ruin at the hands of jealous, abusive townies. Dafoe’s biker beauty isn’t as actively malicious as Fiennes’s scumbaggery is in Strange Days or Patrick Swayze’s hedonistic thrill-seeking is in Point Break, but his leather jacket & rockabilly lifestyle is still a destructive force for those seduced by his allure. His masculinity is both a pleasure & a bane, something Bigelow would expand upon in later works.

Fortunately, her sense of filmmaking craft & narrative purpose would expand as well. The Loveless is visually sumptuous in a way Bigelow’s later features consistently are (reflecting her formal education as painter). However, it’s also frustratingly inert – often feeling like a nostalgic fashion magazine shoot rather than a proper feature film. Willem Dafoe is so goddamn beautiful to gaze at in his leather get-up that it’s hard to complain too much about the film’s narrative shortcomings, but its 82min runtime still manages to linger for a relative eternity. The closest the film comes to exhilarating action is in a climactic, crazed shootout at a townie dive bar. However, it’s a violet display Bigelow later perfected to a very similar effect in Near Dark – making this early trial run feel trivial in retrospect. The entire point of the film, then, is the visual seduction of Dafoe’s macho posing & posturing. It was Bigelow’s very first film and she was already fixated on what masculinity means, what it looks like, and what effect in manifests in the world. There can be a debate as to why that fixation is rewarded in critics’ and awards institutions’ circles over the preoccupations of other women auteurs, but it’s clear to me that the impulse in Bigelow is at least personal & genuine. Like Angela Basset in Strange Days, Keanu Reeves in Point Break, and Marin Kanter in The Loveless, she can’t help but fall for a loveable scumbag.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days (1995), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at the director’s continued fascination with police brutality in Detroit (2017), and last week’s comparison of its police brutality themes to those of Blue Steel (1989).

-Brandon Ledet

The Lighthouse (2019)

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Watching Robert Eggers movies at a corporate multiplex feels like getting away with something perverse. Eggers has seemingly signed a deal with The Devil (A24) that allows him access to wide audiences for every aggressively Not For Everyone idea he has; the only catch is that the rooms these niche monstrosities play in are plagued by incrementally audible discomfort. As with The Witch, the audience I watched Eggers’s latest film with stormed out of the theater in a disgruntled huff – muttering variations of “What the fuck was that?” amongst themselves on the trail to the parking lot. To be fair, their confusion & frustration is entirely justified, as The Lighthouse is the kind of artsy-fartsy indulgence that you’d usually have to go out of your way to see at a tiny indie theater at the edge of town. A black & white period drama crammed into a squared-off aspect ratio, The Lighthouse mostly functions as an unholy, horned-up mashup of Guy Maddin & HP Lovecraft. It has no business sharing suburban megaplex marquees with the superhero spectacle of the week; at least not before earning the perceived legitimacy of Oscar Buzz. We’ve designated an entire festival-to-VOD distribution template to keep this kind of challenging, deranged nonsense out of the eyeline of the unsuspecting public. Watching Eggers’s films break away from its designated playpen to cause havoc in the burbs feels like cheering on a puppy that runs across the dinner table at an aristocratic banquet. The more people protest the funnier it becomes.

That’s not to say this is a stuffy Academic art piece without traditional entrainment value. The Lighthouse’s tight frame is packed to the walls with more sex, violence, and broad toilet humor than you’d typically expect from high-brow festival circuit Cinema. If you can push past the initial barriers of Eggers’s patient pacing & period-specific dialogue, the movie is a riot. Willem Dafoe & Robert Pattinson costar as a lighthouse-keeper odd couple who gradually grow insane with hate & lust for each other as the only company available on an isolated island rock. What’s “actually happening” in the story is deliberately obscured, as the combative pair’s descent into drunken madness continually disorients the audience to the point where it’s impossible to get our sea legs. The back half of the film is a roaring storm where time, place, and meaning are all drowned out by the two bearded seamen’s passionate clash of wills, and the film becomes more of a deranged experiment in mood & atmosphere than anything resembling linear storytelling. Still, their horniness for each other (and maybe-fictional mermaids), their constant farting in each other’s faces, and their drunken penchant for fisticuffs means this is never a dry academic exercise, despite Eggers’s painstakingly researched dialogue that makes it sound like an ancient, cursed novel. He even buried the title card that announces those research efforts deep into the credits instead of allowing it to immediately undercut the impact of the film’s transcendent conclusion, fixing the one problem I personally had with The Witch.

As delightfully bizarre & idiosyncratic as The Lighthouse can be, I don’t know that I can claim that there’s nothing else like it. Between The Forbidden Room, Cold Skin, and my beloved The Wild Boys you could piece together a neat little modern canon that this antique fever dream is nestled in, even if it is one of the clear standout specimens of that crop. The main difference to me is the value of the A24 marketing & distribution machine behind it, as the other movies of this cursed deep-sea ilk only made it to tiny arthouse theaters nearby, if they played on the big screen at all. The Lighthouse features two recognizable movie stars devouring scenery & each other at top volume. It’s like watching two Daniel Day-Lewises battling to drink each other’s milkshakes at the seaport to Hell. Even if I was the only audience member present who was tickled by those handsome seaside ghouls’ drunken struggles with merfolk, one-eyed seagulls, and divine lightbulbs, it was still heartwarming to see those perverse monstrosities eat up screen space at a corporate multiplex. The fact that the movie is so darkly fun on top of being such an obscured art piece only makes it feel like more of an outright prank on Normie America. In an age when tentpole franchise filmmaking is quarantining most of these bizarro art pieces to the straight-to-VOD wastelands, I’m always going to root for the stray beast that breaks free & runs wild – even if all it really has to say is “Having roommates sucks. And seagulls suck too.”

-Brandon Ledet

Aquaman (2018)

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There are two distinct, directly opposed routes to take in adapting Aquaman to the big screen. My preferred angle would be to lean into the inherent absurdity of the character’s underwater superheroics, having deliriously over-the-top fun with the various sea creatures & Lisa Frank waterscapes that environment invites. The lesser, cowardly route would be to poke fun at that absurdity, to make Aquaman a gruff macho bro who wouldn’t be caught dead swimming with dolphins in bright superhero tights (at least not with a smartass quip about the indignity). The confusing thing about the DCEU’s Aquaman film is that it chooses both of these routes, embracing & rejecting the inherent silliness of Aquaman lore in what has to be the most perplexing mixed bag experience offered by a blockbuster since . . . the last film in the DCEU. Aquaman is a film that deals only in extremes. Its soundtrack must feature the ethereal beauty of Sigúr Ros and the obnoxious corporate party anthems of Pitbull, nothing in-between. It has to take the regal lineage & mythology of its underwater sea kingdom dead seriously and feature a cutaway gag of an octopus playing the drums. It has no qualms exploiting the cartoon energy of its setting as if it were an underwater Ferngully or an extended version of the “Under the Sea” number in Disney’s Little Mermaid, but it also feels compelled to cast Jason Momoa in the titular role as the broiest bro who ever bro’d, lest Aquaman come off as an uncool seafaring pansy. In the hands of an over-the-top Asian action spectacle craftsman like a Steven Chow or a Tsui Hark this all-over-the-place quality might have felt controlled & intentional, but coming from an American studio (with negligible influence from Furious 7 & Dead Silence schlockteur James Wan) it mostly plays like a confused jumble of self-conflicting ideas.

Jason Momoa puts in the exact same Aquabro performance here that he delivered in Justice League, except now there’s more of it. So very much more. Instead of popping in for an occasional, cute bro-liner like his much-memed “My man!” in the previous film, he’s asked to anchor a sprawling mythology about the regal lineage of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, which is on the verge of civil war. Legitimate actors Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman, and Patrick Wilson admirably play the material straight as if there were actual stakes to this middling franchise entry and it wasn’t just a lavishly expensive, underwater episode of Wishbone. Momoa’s jockular, beer-pounding frat boy has a much more difficult time of it, especially in scenes where he’s asked to generate genuine chemistry or pathos with the sleepwalking Amber Heard (in one of history’s all time worst big screen wigs). It’s a shame that the mythology is so inert & self-serious, both because Momoa’s sex-idiot boytoy persona struggles to carry the weight and because the various underwater creatures that define the world are so pitch-perfect in their absurdity. Aquaman is packed to the gills with mighty sea horse steeds riding into battle, mounted laser sharks roaring in ferocious defiance, stingray-shaped submarines zipping around like underwater UFOs, a pissed-off Nicole Kidman hurling tridents in Burning Man drag, etc. I was often bored with the villain’s quest to become “Oceanmaster” (whatever the fuck that is), the hero’s search for the almighty trident McGuffin that would stop him, and the overall conflict of “uniting the two world’s” of Land & Sea, but every time I was about to give up on the movie entirely some mutated Lisa Frank monstrosity would emerge to reel me back in. For every shot of Momoa mugging to pure-cheese guitar riffs in embarrassing attempts to transform Aquaman into a badass, there’s equally weighted flashes of pure nerd-ass shit that accepts the character for the uncool goof that he is. I have no idea what to make of the result except to say that it’s exhausting.

There were moments of divine absurdity that had me thinking Aquaman might be the best film in the DCEU (a low bar to clear, but still). They were usually followed by 20 minutes or so of excruciating boredom before that pleasure resurfaced, choking on the flood of narrative glut. My disinterest in Momoa’s bro-flavored charms might have been what sunk my appreciation of the film to an extent (although I wouldn’t fault anyone for prurient interest in watching him get wet for three hours). Mostly, though, I think my inability to fully embrace the film’s live action cartoon energy resulted from its own half-commitment to its over-the-top, nerd-ass tone. When the evil sea creatures of Aquaman off-handedly cite land-dwellers’ pollution of the ocean as a reason to declare war, I couldn’t help but think of the more fearlessly committed overfishing politics of The Mermaid or the birds’ rights activism of 2.0, Asian blockbusters that are unembarrassed of their ludicrous premises. Aquaman, by contrast, constantly apologies for the frivolity off its underwater Ferngully by having a mugging macho class clown reassure the audience that everything onscreen is a joke and the hero is actually super cool, not nerdy at all. You can feel James Wan pushing for weird surreal touches in the background but the cultural monolith of the modern superhero blockbuster has a way of smoothing everything out into a routine monotony. The result is a picture at war with itself, like so many power-hungry Atlantians. A few years ago I might have rated this film a half-star higher for the moments of unbridled goofiness that do shine through the studio system muck, but I’m just finding the weight of this genre too exhausting to afford much more of my energy. A version of Aquaman that was an hour shorter and entirely relegated to the underwater sea creature civil war might have been something truly remarkable, but franchise filmmaking requirements constantly pull it out of the water so that another macho man can mug for the camera in all his heroic buffness and the repetition of the schtick is getting punishingly dull.

-Brandon Ledet