Showing posts with label 2018. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2018. Show all posts

Sunday, January 26, 2020

COLD WAR (Zimna wojna, 2018)

Pawel Pawlikowski's follow-up to Ida, though mostly praised by critics, didn't have the same impact in the U.S. as the earlier, Oscar-winning film. The lack of a Holocaust angle in the new film may be the simplest explanation for this, but Cold War itself may have been a little too foreign -- which is to say too nationalist -- for American art-house tastes. It marks a territory of tragic Polish exceptionalism that has no true home in either the Russian-dominated east or the American-dominated west, though the film has little or nothing to say about the U.S.A. or actual Americans. Instead, it asserts a nebulous Polish authenticity apparently incapable of true expression in the film's Cold War setting. The nebulous element finds form in the film's heroine, the aspiring singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), who pretends to be a peasant in order to join a folk-singing troupe organized in the late 1940s by musicologists Irena (Agata Kuleza) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot). Wiktor falls in love with Zula, and the romance keeps him with the troupe after Irena quits in futile protest against the Communist government transforming it into a Stalinist propaganda vehicle. Its propaganda function allows the singers to tour the eastern bloc, including East Berlin, where Wiktor, as artistically frustrated as Irena, hopes to defect with Zula to the west. Alas, Zula never makes the rendezvous, so Wiktor defects alone.

Later in the 1950s, the troupe travels the wider world, and in Paris Zula encounters Wiktor again. Our hero will find a variety of work in the west, from composing film scores to playing in a niteclub jazz band. He still hopes to bring Zula to the other side, but his efforts to transform her into a jazz singer, including arranging a cool-jazz version of the folk tune that serves effectively as her theme song, only estrange them further. The issue isn't that she dislikes modern music -- she's seen dancing to "Rock Around the Clock" almost as a form of protest -- but that Wiktor is trying to make her into something she isn't for no good reason. Wiktor seems to realize this, too, and you could argue that for him she embodies the true Poland, to such a degree that he risks certain imprisonment in order to return home to be near her. In a melodramatic scenario mercifully underplayed by all involved, Wiktor can only be freed from prison by Zula marrying the party hack (Boris Szyc) who corrupted the folk troupe in the first place. In true melodramatic fashion, she becomes a lush until Wiktor finally emerges from prison, his artistic career apparently mangled (with his hand) beyond repair. With it already established that the west offers no real escape for them, the only remaining option is romantic suicide -- again carried out with respectable understatement. A point is made nevertheless, presumably one that found an appreciative audience in a newly-nationalist Poland. Cold War isn't exactly saying "a plague on both your houses," but it does say quite clearly that the freedom promised by the west wasn't really freedom, at least for some people -- or else that the west's freedom wasn't enough for some people.  Wiktor seals his fate, against the advice of a harshly realistic Polish diplomat, with the explanation, "I'm Polish." What being Polish entails, if not what it actually means, is Cold War's ultimate subject, and it should be no surprise that, good as the film is -- strongly acted, sharply shot, admirably succinct -- it doesn't travel as well as Pawlikowski's previous effort. It should do no harm to his reputation, however, and whatever he does next is sure to be, most likely deservedly, an art-house event.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

THE GOLEM (2018)

As portrayed by German actor Paul Wegener, the Golem was the first cinematic horror icon. Compared to other iconic monsters, there have been relatively few Golem films, the most notable in English being the 1967 film It! Now an Israeli film, with Doron and Yaov Paz directing Ariel Cohen's script, revives the legend, linking the lore of 17th century Prague with more modern concerns. In this account, a young girl witnesses the destruction of the Prague golem (and its creator) after it had massacred the congregation it was supposed to protect. A generation later, the girl has grown into a midwife and all-around wise woman in an embattled Jewish community in Lithuania. In this same village, Hanna (Hani Furstenburg), has a Yentl-like ambition to learn the Kabbala, volumes of which are smuggled to her in baskets. Hanna's son drowned some years ago and she's been barren ever since -- or so it seems. She's actually taking treatments to suppress pregnancy, but when nearby gentiles blame the Jews for a plague, and their leader threatens the midwife and the village with death if they fail to heal his daughter, Hanna suggests creating a golem for community defense. Against everyone's advice, she performs the ritual herself, but instead of the hulking entity Wegener played, or the shape we saw in the Prague sequence, her golem takes the fleshy form of a young boy, triggering a dangerous maternal instinct in his creator.

Cohen and the Paz brothers reshape the golem myth to fit their thematic concerns and genre ambitions. Hanna develops an empathetic relationship with her golem, feeling the pain it doesn't when it's attacked, while he turns his fury on people, both Jew and gentile, Hanna perceives as threats. When she's unconscious (or preoccupied with sex) the boy golem's own defense instincts kick in. Though the golem looks like a child, it remains a super-strong force of destruction, enabling some cheap and sometimes laughable gore effects. Since the filmmakers didn't have the means to show the boy fighting his enemies, those unfortunates usually get torn to pieces off-screen, their bloody limbs flying across the screen. Better still, this golem is a scanner, causing his foes' heads to explode without touching them. Meanwhile, Hanna goes through the "my precious boy can't be evil" denial arc before the golem's inevitable, indiscriminate attack on villagers and gentile attackers alike forces her to do the necessary thing. That undermines whatever feminist message or other commentary the filmmakers intended while reducing the golem legend to all-too-common horror tropes. The awkward mix of thematic ambition and genre crassness renders this golem film a disappointment and leaves this reader wishing that someone with real ambition and genius would put Marge Piercy's great golem novel (crosscut with science fiction) He, She and It on the big screen. Until then, however, there aren't so many golem movies that people shouldn't try again.

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

DVR Diary: MILE 22 (2018)

A couple of years ago I was intrigued by an announcement that Iko Uwais, the star of Gareth Evans' Raid films, and Ronda Rousey, the onetime mixed-martial-arts champion and "baddest woman on the planet," would be making a film together. You expect a certain kind of film with those names, but with Peter Berg involved as a producer and eventually the director, a somewhat different film, with Mark Wahlberg starring, probably was inevitable. The film first imagined was the sort of martial arts/action epic Uwais is known for, with Rousey as a natural added attraction. The actual product predictably focuses on the Wahlberg character's quirky personality while marginalizing Rousey, but Uwais does get several moments to shine. Wahlberg and Rousey's characters are part of a super special-ops team who in the field are in constant contact with a near-omnipotent remote support team led by a shockingly hirsute John Malkovich. The team is first seen taking out a Russian spy house on American soil, killing all inside including a possibly innocent teenage boy. Before you can ask whether President Trump approved such a thing -- he's acknowledged with a bobblehead doll alongside his predecessors in one scene -- the team is off to south Asia on an apparently related mission. The Russians were and are preparing some sort of mass-casualty chemical attack, but a rogue agent of the mythical land of Indocarr (Uwais) happens to have the info to thwart the attack. That info is heavily encrypted and the disc it's been burned on will become useless unless the U.S. meets the Indocarian's demand for asylum. For whatever reason there's a limited time window for an American plane to land and depart with this Li Noor as a passenger, and our team is tasked with transporting him over the 22 miles from the embassy to the airstrip. This operation pits the sweeping power of the Americans, who can change traffic lights and black out random houses at will, against a determined foe that anticipates every move they'll make.

This sprawling scenario means that gun and car action will predominate, though occasional stops is supposed safe houses and other shelters provide opportunities for close-quarter hand-to-hand action. Uwais has already had his best fight scene by this point, his character having slaughtered a number of assassins in a hospital room while handcuffed to a bed. Only then is the film remotely like what I originally anticipated when I first heard of the Uwais-Rousey project. Rousey, meanwhile, never gets to show off her judo and MMA skills. This has been explained as an attempt to showcase her acting ability, but there's something unconvincing about that, given that Rousey's character is randomly killed off about halfway through the picture without really developing the sort of character arc entrusted to Wahlberg and the actual female lead, Lauren Cohan.  When you consider that Rousey's acting has been vigorously criticized by fans of professional wrestling during her time as WWE women's champion, Berg may have decided that less from her would be enough. She didn't miss much by being denied character development by screenwriter Lea Carpenter. Wahlberg's character is talkative, somewhat hyperactive, and plays with rubber bands on his wrist. Cohan squabbles with her ex over contact with their daughter. Yet somehow Berg hoped that we'd want to see Wahlberg reprise his role after this film's sequel-begging end-opening swerve makes him look like a fool. Presumably we should be impatient to see him avenge people we barely knew and cared for less. Or else, like good Americans, we should want to see him kick Russian or Indocarian ass. However, a fight between Mark Wahlberg and Iko Uwais that Wahlberg is likely to win is nothing I'd look forward to. After Mile 22, I could only look forward to it less.

Monday, June 17, 2019

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2018)

Back in the 1980s, a TV commercial promoting colorized movies quoted a random woman justifying the project on the ground that "we live in color." Peter Jackson's rationale for his colorization of documentary footage from World War I is basically the same; it could be summed up as "they lived in color." In a making-of short, Jackson makes the valid point that colorization, in this case, violates no one's artistic intentions; the original filmmakers certainly would have worked in color had it been available to them. Jackson has done more than colorize the footage. He used modern software to adjust the speed of the erratically hand-cranked films so that the soldiers filmed a century ago move with virtually the smoothness of people filmed today. His goal was to make the war footage look as if it was filmed yesterday, going so far as to fill in dialogue when lip reading -- or, in one case, some impressive scholarly research -- is possible. The results are inevitably mixed. That's partly due to the varying quality of source film, some of which can only be smoothed out so far. Colorization itself remains imperfect, or else it remains a painstaking process that sometimes requires more time or resources than Jackson could expend while meeting his implicit deadline of last year's Armistice centennial. His colorized footage is sometimes very close to the mark, and sometimes it reminds me of the limited palette of early Technicolor. While Jackson notes that grass was a particular challenge, he could have said the same about hair, with which his team had less success. Sometimes the footage still has the stencil-ish look of bad colorization from the early days of home video, but most of the time the results look better than that.

While Jackson colorizes out of a commitment to retrospective realism, the results can still be jarring on aesthetic grounds to people who identify World War I with the grim monotones of canonical fiction films like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957). Films like those encourage a view of the Great War as a nuclear winter of blasted landscapes and exiled sunshine before the thing itself could be imagined. In a way, Jackson's commitment to restoring the World War I landscape to what it looked like to the soldiers is a kind of corrective to the implicit expressionism of Lewis Milestone, Stanley Kubrick, their cinematographers and others. It's additionally ironic to contrast Jackson's portrayal of the war with the explicit expressionism of the recent J.R.R. Tolkien biopic that portrays the Great War battlefield as an  inspiration for the doom-laden fantasy world so vividly visualized by Peter Jackson.

Given the heritage of World War I on film, the most surprising thing about They Shall Not Grow Old is that it is not an anti-war film. It isn't really a pro-war film, either -- it's almost impossible to imagine any World War I movie as such -- but it's not intended as Jackson's commentary on the war or its horrors. Pointedly, the script consists only of oral-history testimony from veterans collected by the Imperial War Museum. That decision leaves the politics of the war out almost entirely. It also leaves out the usual question of whether the war was worth fighting. Whatever Jackson may think, he doesn't treat this project as his opportunity to editorialize on the subject. That doesn't mean there's no auteurial presence at all, however. There's a degree of showmanship involved as he makes the audience wait for the colorized footage to fill the wide screen. His initial use of the old black and white footage in its original aspect ratio seems inspired by the prologue to This Is Cinerama, building up to an ideally similar ooh-ahh reveal.  In black and white and in color, Jackson tries to reconstruct as generic a soldiering experience as possible, from enlistment to baptism of fire, with strong emphasis on the discomforts and compensating camaraderie of trench warfare. Perhaps tellingly, the generic battle imagined from testimony and rare documentary footage is a victory for British forces, rather than the typical episode of existential futility from canonical fiction films -- among which, it might be observed, British films are relatively rare. Jackson's directorial decision makes some historic sense, since Britain did win the war, but the fact of victory never stopped filmmakers from the winning nations from emphasizing the negative. Perhaps because Jackson's is a commissioned film, it largely eschews the sort of introspection and regret we expect from World War I movies while implicitly claiming to represent an actual consensus of soldierly experience.

By no means, of course, is Jackson hiding the horrors of the Great War. Leave it to him to earn an R rating for a documentary compiled from century-old film precisely because he lingers on luridly colorized footage of corpses. The rating also has something to do with his unique emphasis on soldiers' bodily functions. Some of the still photos of bare-assed soldiers filling open-air privy benches may well have never been seen before by the moviegoing public.  The overall effect is closer to Rabelaisian than tragic, taking the bare bums and gore as a whole, but with no mockery or satire intended. Folkloric might be a better word, since it aspires to convey the experience of the common rather than the uncommonly sensitive soldier. Whatever your word for it, approving or critical, and leaving your aesthetic judgment of the colorization aside, Jackson has succeeded at least at his presumed minimal goal of making World War I look different than our movie-influenced collective memory of it.

Sunday, April 21, 2019

On the Big Screen: PETERLOO (2018)

The Peterloo Massacre is the one moment I know of when journalists tried to make the "-loo" suffix derived from the Battle of Waterloo a thing like "-gate" is in American politics. The killing of approximately a dozen civilians by British troops took place during a mass demonstration at St. Peter's Field in Manchester on August 16, 1819. To some observers, it was like the war (against Napoleon) coming home, with some people involved in both events. Longtime radical filmmaker Mike Leigh uses Waterloo and Peterloo as bookends for his period piece portraying the erratic radicalization of one working-class family. We're introduced to them after Joseph (David Moorst) a bugler and traumatized survivor of the great battle, makes his way home to Manchester, then a cutting-edge industrial town with the inevitable exploitation of labor. Working people's main problem, however, was high food prices, artificially inflated by the protectionist Corn Laws that forbade the importation of foreign grain ("corn" in British English) and other foodstuffs. Employers imposing wage cuts proves the final straw for many, who now form a ready audience for orators local and national advocating for democratization of the parliamentary election process. In short, these people want regular elections on a "one man, one vote" basis in place of the infamous system of rotten boroughs and property qualifications for voting. The local grandees are having none of it, fearing a replay of the French Revolution that they and a European coalition had only just snuffed out. They're looking for any excuse to crack down on radical orators and publishers and intimidate workers into their proper deference to their betters. At St. Peter's Field, despite the best efforts of some organizers, the forces of reaction get their chance, with terrible consequences.

Peterloo left me wondering whether Leigh meant his history play as an implicit commentary on modern politics, or at least one aspect of it. The film is preoccupied with speech, to its detriment in some eyes. At first glance or listen, you might assume that Leigh is simply besotted with 19th century rhetoric in all its pyrotechnic pomposity. But it's important to note that the orators are hardly the heroes of the picture. They are often shown as self-indulgent, self-important and irresponsible. When a working-class woman comments that she can't understand much of what a female orator is saying at one women's meeting, Leigh means, I think, for us to sympathize with the humbler rather than the more progressive female. Elsewhere, a male orator clearly enjoys himself at least as much as his hearers enjoy him threatening the royal family with all manner of classical references. Such displays are inevitable with the stirring of liberty, but whether they further justice effectively is open to debate. The point of all the oratory isn't so much that Leigh is in love with the sounds of speech but that the speechmakers are in love with the sounds of their own voices -- a trait they share with their antagonists, who take much the same pleasure in their jeremiads against the poor, as individuals and a collective. There's an echo, perhaps intended as a premonition, of today's self-indulgent posturing in social media or partisan media in general. Peterloo leaves a cumulative impression that oratory didn't help matters as much as orators and their audiences may have assumed or hoped. Leigh definitely doesn't hold the orators responsible for the carnage -- the ruling-class characters are almost cartoonish in their flamboyant contempt for the poor and are quite capable of manipulating events to get the results they want -- but he does seem to be suggesting that a dependence on such spellbinders as "Orator" Hunt (Rory Kinnear) is more likely to lead to a dead end than other approaches. The fact that we don't get any epilogue title cards telling us when reform was finally achieved adds to that impression.

The climax -- the massacre -- is not as dynamic as movie buffs might want. It's definitely no Battleship Potemkin, for all the sabres slashing at helpless protesters, but it gets better as it goes on and the military charge devolves into a random sequence of individual fights between soldiers and demonstrators. These moments are more to Leigh's artistic scale and nicely illustrate how passions on both sides had been inflamed by the rhetoric of mutual hatred. Viewers should leave as outraged as Leigh wants them to be. It may be a bit heavyhanded to have the poor bugler of Waterloo meet his end at Peterloo, and then have reporters talk about the war coming home, but in our own reactionary age Leigh probably didn't want to be too subtle on his main point, which is the injustice of early industrial England before the emergence of a real labor movement or real labor party. Whatever a viewer may think the appropriate solution was to the situation, everyone watching Peterloo should agree that something had to be done. It's a history lesson worth taking, and if it gets you thinking about the way we do politics today, it'll be even more worthwhile.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

DVR Diary: VENOM (2018)

For some time, Sony Pictures, clinging to the film rights to Spider-Man, has been struggling to create a cinematic universe capable of sustaining feature-film showcases for Spidey's supporting cast. Now that Spider-Man himself has been revived with help from Marvel Studios, the time seemed right to resume the larger project. The challenge presented to director Ruben Fleischer and his writers, however, was to make a movie about one of Spidey's relatively recent antagonists, only without Spider-Man. The challenge wasn't necessarily insurmountable, since Venom is one of those characters who's gone back and forth from villain to antihero since his introduction in the 1980s. Back then, disgraced journalist Eddie Brock sort of inherited the infamous black costume that Spidey acquired back in the equally infamous Secret Wars comic. The costume was, in fact, a malevolent symbiotic alien that Spider-Man, recognizing its malevolent nature, rejected. Brock, meanwhile, welcomed the opportunity to take revenge on Spidey, whom he blamed for his disgrace. The movie retains Brock (Tom Hardy) as disgraced journalist, but makes him a victim rather than an arrogant blunderer, crushed by an evil Elon Musk type (Riz Ahmed) rather than discredited for blaming the wrong man for murder. The corporate villain has acquired some gloppy aliens from one of his spacecraft and hopes to graft them onto humans in the hope of creating a hybrid spacefaring species. Nosy Brock, still sniffing a story, ends up acquiring a symbiote that encases him in an inky muscle suit and endows him with superhuman stength and speed as well as an obnoxious tongue. Much of the time, however, "Venom," as the alien critter calls itself -- is it translating to English or are those the actual syllables of its name? -- is a disembodied voice that taunts and torments Eddie by forcing him to conduct multiple conversations at the same time. Brock naturally resents this intrusion on his person, but he and the symbiote will have to work together to stop the inevitable corporate symbiote from facilitating a full-scale alien invasion of Earth.

Venom may be the ugliest superhero movie I've ever seen. The protagonist, fully costumed, is pretty much a spasmodic black blob whose activities have a certain ejaculatory quality that may help explain his/its long-term appeal. The climactic fight pits him against a slightly more silvery variation on the same basic design, and while the splattery conflict may inspire nostalgia among some for the over-rendered comics of Venom's heyday, it struck me as simply tedious. A character whose face gets covered in glop periodically seems tailor-made for Tom Hardy, who probably thought that going way over the top was only doing justice to the source material. Instead, his performance helped show that Sony, with less input from Marvel this time, lacks Marvel's knack for making its protagonists likable even when they act like jerks. Hardy is hardly helped by the uncinematic reduction of Venom to a mere voice in scenes that require Brock to act like a madman. The results are at least sometimes meant to be funny but usually fall flat. Meanwhile, as Eddie's ex, Michelle Williams collects a paycheck, while Woody Harrelson in a Raggedy Andy fright wig promises much fan service in the sequel this film somehow earned. I'd like to say that Venom's success was improbable, but it was probably the sort of superhero film many longtime comics fans had been waiting for. The best I can say about the thing is that I hope they enjoyed it.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

BUYBUST (2018)

 Under President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines has faced international criticism for its draconian drug war as waged by a thuggish, purportedly authoritarian leader. Filmmaker Erik Matti reportedly is a critic of the Duterte government, but his ambitious action film feels like an attempt to have it both ways about the drug war. Both sides, pro and anti-Duterte, can read what they want into it. One side can point to a gruesome orgy of excessive force and the film's peeling away of layers of police duplicity and corruption. The other may find confirmation in the film of a belief that the slum dwellers among whom the drug dealers flourish are little better than rabid animals. The desired effect may well be to call a plague down on both houses, crooks and cops alike.

 

Basically a cross between The Raid and The Warriors, the film follows an elite police unit into one of the worst slums in an attempt to capture a notorious druglord. New to the team is Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), recently the sole survivor of a bungled earlier raid. In training for her new role she's undisciplined, determined to take the initiative when her instructors insist on her following orders. As you might expect, exactly those qualities the instructors deplore will come in very handy when this raid also falls apart and proves to be a trap set for the cops. Lured into a labyrinthine urban kill-box, the team must undertake a grim anabasis back the way they came, fighting their way through neighborhoods mobilized to kill them. Some of the slum dwellers are clearly drug-crazed; others hope to earn a bounty on the cops; others still simply hate cops for making their communities collateral damage in the drug war. Others yet are plainly terrorized into cooperating, or else too terrified to help the police.


The force is winnowed down to two as we near the climax: Manigan and the hulking, Diesel-esque and almost indestructible Yatco (Brandon Michael Vera). They fight with increasing savagery even when repeated stabs and slashes should have worn or bled them out. However implausibly, Manigan outlasts the valiant Yatco and against all odds manages to capture the druglord. Her confrontation with Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde) leads to a perhaps-predictable all-you-thought-you-knew-was-wrong moment when the gangster informs on Manigan's superiors, who prove all too eager to silence Biggie and possibly Manigan as well. Meanwhile, the news media reports thirteen killed in the raid when audiences might find ten times that number a conservative estimate.


Whatever critical intent Matti had is probably undermined by his heroine's almost cartoonish resilience and her slightly unconvincing prowess as a killing machine -- Anne Curtis is a pop singer and variety-show hostess in real life, but then again Takeshi Kitano was a game show host once upon a time -- and also by his arbitrary, inconsistent treatment of the slum dwellers. He wants them to be seen as victims as monsters at the same time, but since we presumably want Manigan, who is not corrupt, to survive we presumably root for her to annihilate all the obstacles in her path. The violence goes way over the top at times as Yatco decapitates a female attacker with garden shears after smacking her in the face with a cactus and he and Manigan escape a mob thanks to a mass electrocution. If over-the-top action is all you're looking for then I can recommend BuyBust as a compelling compendium of carnage enhanced by excellent cinematography by Neil Derrick Bion. But as a commentary on the Duterte drug war it's too enthusiastic about its ghoulish work and too easily tempted to dehumanize the actual victims of the story to say anything meaningful beyond the obvious. Something is clearly very wrong in that country, but BuyBust may be more a symptom than a diagnosis.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

AQUAMAN (2018) in SPOILERVISION

It's been a year since the disaster of Justice League and the fact that Aquaman is the only DC Comics movie of 2018 put tremendous pressure on director James Wan and star Jason Momoa to save the DC cinematic universe. Fortunately, Aquaman functions very well under extreme pressure. The new film is the latest stage in an effort to redeem one of the comics company's flagship characters, one of the very few not to disappear in the interval between the so-called Golden and Silver ages of comics and one of the most visible characters in animation thanks to his own show in the 1960s and the Super Friends show of the 1970s. Somewhere along the line Aquaman became a laughingstock because of his ability -- his primary attribute in many eyes -- to talk to fish. To correct that impression, DC Comics has often bent over backwards to portray the character as a badass, most notoriously when he sported a hook in place of one hand in the 1990s. Jason Momoa would seem an obvious choice to portray that sort of Aquaman, but his imposing physical presence allows him to get away with a more humorous take on the character. One of the few things Justice League got right was making the characters it introduced -- Cyborg and Flash as well as Aquaman -- likable in distinctive ways. Aquaman's way, in the movies, is to be the superhero you'd want to have a beer with. Momoa's ethnicity notwithstanding, Aquaman is the nearest thing we have to a white-trash superhero, albeit an amiable, non-alienating one. Some people have argued that Aquaman is little more than a variation on a formula set by Thor -- as if any superhero film set to any extent in a fantasy realm is ripping off that Marvel film. But if anything, Wan's picture is a reversal of the Thor formula. In his film, the hero is a fish out of water, so to speak, in his own kingdom, not in exile among us.

The new film is set some time after the events of Justice League. By now "the Aquaman" is more or less a known quantity, known or assumed to be an Atlantean, but not really a full-fledged public figure. He continues his low-key career of good deeds by rescuing a Russian submarine from some high-tech pirates but makes a long-term enemy of the son (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) of the pirate commander, whom Aquaman leaves to die for his bad choices, but who actually kills himself after tasking his son, soon to be known as Black Manta, with vengeance. Then it's back to hanging out with his dad (Temuera Morrison) who once upon a time had a fling with an Atlantean princess (Nicole Kidman) fleeing from an arranged marriage. This princess eventually was forced to return home, marry and birth a legitimate heir to the Altantean throne. When her affair and her terrestrial son became known, she was condemned to death. Her affair and her fate have embittered King Orm (Patrick Wilson) against the surface world, which has ages of pollution and depredation to answer for as well. Orm is trying to unite a number of undersea realms into a grand alliance that will confirm him as "Ocean Master" and enable him to wage war against the land. A clique of powerful insiders, including Orm's vizier (Willem Dafoe)  and his bride-to-be (Amber Heard, seen briefly in Justice League) hope to avert war and see Aquaman, the man who could be King Arthur, as the answer to all problems. Orm is secretly collaborating with Black Manta to create provocations to drive the kingdoms into his embrace, while Aquaman, resenting Atlantis for killing his mom, rebuffs entreaties from below. Only when Orm launches a tidal-wave attack that nearly kills Arthur's dad does the hero agree to assert his claim against the fanatic king.

The story devolves into a Raiders-style treasure hunt for the sort of artifact that automatically confers legitimacy on he who wields it. The pursuit of this macguffin allows Aquaman to become a globetrotting James Bond style adventure and an all-out CGI explosion at the same time as Arthur and Mera follow clues above and below the surface in prickly partnership. All Atlanteans have superhuman strength and speed on land, so Mera is already a formidable heroine, but on top of that she has a special ability to manipulate water, pulling off stunts from drawing water out of Aquaman's scalp to attacking Atlantean goons with daggers of Sicilian wine. She's one of those longtime comics characters who's been upgraded in recent years from damsel-in-distress to kickass co-star, and whatever you think of Amber Heard's performance, the character certainly gets over. This film doesn't ask to be judged on its acting, however -- and that, given Wilson's vapid villainy, is probably a good thing. Aquaman is above all a pure spectacle, and you can believe while watching it that Justice League looked so cheap so often because most of Warner Bros' money was going into this film. It isn't that impressive at first, but kicks into super high gear in its relentless second half. It overwhelms you with imaginative battles between armies of shark-riding undersea cavalry and giant sentient crustaceans, among other things, filling the screen almost to overflowing with detail, and it also pulls off a tremendous extended parallel chase scene in Sicily as Mera fights off Atlantean pursuers across the rooftops while Aquaman deals with an upgraded Black Manta. There are times when throwing everything but the kitchen sink (though I may have missed that) at the audience is a good thing, and Aquaman is one of those occasions. For all that the future of a movie "universe" was riding on this film, it has an admirable nothing-to-lose recklessness to it, exemplified when at the end of his quest our hero encounters an immense sea monster, half kraken and half kaiju, and it talks to him -- in what must have been meant as a flagant F.U. to Disney, whose Mary Poppins reboot premiered the same week -- in the gravelly tones of Julie Andrews. If Justice League at nearly all points seemed cautious and stunted, Aquaman has the sort of creative insanity that when done right can justify a comic-book movie's existence. At the same time, Momoa clearly has more of a grip on the title character than he's ever had before as an actor, and may be able to take credit for molding Aquaman into his own self-image. If this was a make-or-break moment for the DC movie franchise, then Momoa should be a made man in Hollywood for literally saving a universe.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

On the Big Screen: MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (2018)

Has long-form television rendered the traditional biopic obsolete? The life of Mary Stuart recently was treated over 78 hours on an American TV series, and while no one to my knowledge makes any great claims for Reign, someone familiar with that program might see Josie Rourke's film as little more than a digest of the show's final season. Feature-film history must aspire to something other than the immersive effect much of "platinum age" or "peak" TV aspires to. It must justify its brevity on artistic grounds or by offering an interpretation of a life or event that makes relatively few incidents decisive. In the case of Mary Stuart a common approach is to imagine a fictional event: a meeting between Mary and her southern counterpart Elizabeth Tudor that apparently never happened in reality. The need for such an encounter itself testifies to the significance of Elizabeth to Mary's story, or the significance of Mary's story to the history of England. Beau Willimon's screenplay follows this tradition, while Rourke, a stage director making her first movie, treats it like the buildup to the climactic fight in a martial-arts movie. Mary (Saoirse Ronan) must make her way through a barn infested with curtains and veils in order finally to get a glimpse of her "sister" queen (Margot Robbie) as they chant like taunting villain and dauntless hero.The queens must meet so that Mary can experience her final, fatal betrayal. The story here is of sisterly solidarity denied. Soon after Mary, the widowed former queen of France, returns to her Scots homeland, she writes Elizabeth proposing mutual support in the face, more plainly in Scotland than in England, of entrenched misogyny. Elizabeth remains aloof, probably because Mary insists that she acknowledge her as heir to the English throne. Her hope may be that this will reinforce her position at home, where she faces a brother accustomed to rule, a skeptical nobility, and that Scots Rasputin, John Knox (David Tennant), the conservative media of his time. In parallel narratives both queens are pressured to marry and reproduce. Mary, more of a sensualist, gives in while Elizabeth resists to the point of recommending one of her own paramours as a husband to Mary. Remaining a Virgin Queen allows Elizabeth to retain her autonomy, at the price, by her own admission, of her femininity, while Mary grows only more vulnerable to powerful men even as Knox convinces the masses that she's a murderous whore on top of being an idolatrous papist. We see that she's been smeared and many will rage at her helplessness as a queen reduced to men's plaything, finally raped, for all intents and purposes, by a husband forced on her by the nobles. Finally she asks Elizabeth for military intervention, and when the queen sadly explains that she can't give aid to a Catholic monarch Mary snaps, sealing her own fate with a rant declaring herself Elizabeth's own sovereign and denouncing her as a traitor. We don't need to see anymore at this point, so we return to the fashionable flashforward of Mary's execution that opened the film.

A film adaptation of John Guy's biography has been in the works for more than a decade, but I could see people seeing the finished product, English-made as it is, as some kind of allegory for progressives refusing to support Hillary Clinton. The film flaunts its own progressiveness with aggressive inclusive casting, making the English ambassador to Scotland (Adrian Lester) and a member of Elizabeth's privy council black men and by adding a degree of homophobia to the sins of the Scots establishment given the relationship between Lord Danley (Jack Lowden) and Mary's minstrel-scribe David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova). The Brits are probably more used to inclusive casting by now thanks to Shakespearean theater giving worthy actors of color opportunities to play the great roles, but it seems harder to justify when some of the performers are little more than well-dressed extras. But by now I've reconciled myself to this violation of realism on film -- the "meta" quality of the stage may make inclusive casting less jarring -- by reminding myself that for generations Hollywood cast gentiles as semites in Bible stories with almost no one protesting. In any event, only two performers really count here -- and of the others Tennant is particularly bad in a one-dimensional heavily bearded role written with little understanding of how someone like Knox could be a successful demagogue. The real battle for supremacy on screen is between Ronan, who gets all the sympathy from the screenplay, and Robbie, whose past experience playing a she-devil in clown makeup no doubt recommended her for the role of Elizabeth I as envisioned here. To be fair, Elizabeth is portrayed as a tragic figure, no less compromised by refusing to mate than Mary is by taking husbands. She proves incapable of showing the solidarity with another woman that the film demands because her solution to the dilemma of a woman claiming power is l'etat, c'est moi, only with the opposite effect of the egoism we associate with that motto. Elizabeth must become the state at the expense of her femininity, her persistent and increasingly delusional vanity notwithstanding, and ultimately at the expense of effective empathy. Whether there was ever any chance of the two queens forming a matriarchal alliance given the inherent threat Mary presented to Elizabeth and the realities of Reformation geopolitics is less important to this version of the Mary story than Elizabeth's more timeless failure. But if this all sounds dismissive, let me close with praise for Saoirse Ronan. With the whole deck stacked in her character's favor, she does a great job portraying Mary as a three-dimensional, fallible heroine instead of a flawless martyr. Her effort alone just about justifies this enterprise.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

On the Big Screen: THE MULE (2018)

If any recent film has opened under an omen, it's this one. On Opening Day, December 14, it was reported that Sondra Locke had died. Going in, I had to wonder how Clint Eastwood felt at hearing that news. Coming out, I really had to wonder, for life, or its opposite, now seemed to imitate art. I now understand that Locke died last month, so on top of everything else you have to wonder whether her family waited for that day. Did they know what was in the film? To spoil things, a major turning point in the story comes when the Eastwood character learns that his former wife (Dianne Wiest) is terminally ill. At tremendous personal risk, he diverges from his assigned course to be with her, to apologize if not atone for being a lousy husband and father. He receives her forgiveness and is reassured of her love in her dying moments. The family subplot has probably the worst of The Mule's writing but it may have been what appealed most to Eastwood about the screenplay, apart from the core story's basis in fact. Clint Eastwood has been making "last films" for at least a quarter century now, beginning with Unforgiven. His most recent "last film" was Gran Torino -- written, like The Mule, by Nick Schenk -- but while the earlier film was a final statement of sorts on Eastwood's film persona, the new film aspires, seemingly, to say something about Clint Eastwood the man, particularly his poor record as a family man, implicitly including his treatment of Sondra Locke, through a fictionalized version of the criminal career of Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran, horticulturalist and excellent driver who, when down on his luck, hired out as a drug mule for a Mexican drug cartel.  Eastwood and Schenk change the name to Earl Stone but keep the vocation the same while elaborating imaginatively on the mule's motivation. Here, Earl wants to make money to make up for disappointing his family so often, but his apparent indifferent to how he makes the money, even after he verifies what must have been obvious from the start, suggests that he's changed less than he claims. The problem with Earl Stone, we're told, is that he prefers to live "in the moment" outside the sphere of home and family. Work, whether it's growing prize flowers or running drugs, is life to him more than home and family ever were. When he was home, he says, he wanted to get back out in the world, and one can't help suspecting that making movies means something similar to Clint Eastwood, which is why he's made two films this year at the age of 88. The Mule may be his confession, not necessarily that he has no life outside of movies, but that he didn't have as much of a life as he could have or, arguably, should have.

Yet The Mule is as much a vanity project as a confessional, though the two aren't necessarily contradictory. Split the difference and call it one of Eastwood's most narcissistic pictures. He's reached a point at last when he's undeniably frail, though apparently healthy; any fantasy of Eastwood overcoming younger antagonists is no longer plausible. Nevertheless, and regardless of whatever Leo Sharp felt during his misadventures, Eastwood's Earl Stone never shows fear, veers between stoic and smartass except when dealing with family, and gets to cavort, so to speak, shirtless with topless women as a guest of honor at a cartel party. Perhaps because he's so plainly frail now, Eastwood seems to feel a greater need to reaffirm his virility than we've seen in past films. The main thing he wants to reaffirm, or perhaps prove once and for all to skeptics, is that he can act. The Mule is Oscar bait, its primary goal, apart from getting the bad taste of The 15:17 to Paris out of people's mouths, is to give Eastwood one more chance at a vindicating Best Actor award. Unfortunately, while he's loosened up a lot and is often quite natural and funny, he still can't do much with Schenk's bluntly on-the-nose dialogue in the family scenes. Overall, his performance may contribute to uncertainty about the tone of the picture. People, I think, were prepared to see this as some sort of tragic commentary on socioeconomic modernity -- look what this war hero was reduced to! -- but it plays more like a mildly black comedy because Earl Stone doesn't take his situation very seriously and seemingly would rather take nothing too seriously. When he feels guilty, it's all about his family and not in the least about running drugs. Eastwood probably would rather not have his character seen as a victim of anything other than changing times, and in its own way the film is very much about personal responsibility in the conservative sense of the term. Within his thespian limits, he gives a subtle performance that easily could be seen as a shallow one.

Social commentary is inescapable, however. Earl Stone's flower business is ruined, so he thinks, by the internet, and his downward spiral is accelerated by the logic of the bottom line. This becomes most obvious on the cartel side of the story. Earl is initially an object of amusement if not contempt by the cartel gangbangers, but his easygoing zero-fucks-given attitude and some quick thinking in a pinch eventually earns the criminals' admiration, to the point when the big boss (Andy Garcia) invites him to his big decadent party. Soon enough, however, a new regime takes over, eliminating the old boss because he'd become too "lenient." What the new boss demands, above all, is efficiency and the strictest time management, with the slightest deviance punishable by death. It's just a slightly exaggerated metaphor for the modern job market, or will seem that way to some viewers. Earl's success as a mule is a commentary unto itself.  He's recruited not only for his perfect driving record, but because he, as an elderly white man, is one of the least likely people to be profiled as he drives around the country. The wisdom of his recruitment is demonstrated in scenes when plodding DEA agents (played with deceptive efficiency by Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena) reflexively profile after getting tipped off about a mule driving a black pickup. In one awkward scene, they pull over a hispanic-looking man who speaks no Spanish and frets loudly about the danger he's in. Later, staking out a motel where Earl is staying overnight, they see virtually everyone else there as their likely suspect. It all appears to prove a point against profiling; organized crime will respond to it by recruiting contrary to the profile. It's the same logic that makes the earlier cartel bosses indulgent toward Earl's eccentricities; his unpredictability will make him more difficult to track down. As Earl falls through the cracks in society, he can slip through some as well. In the end, though, The Mule is only superficially a crime film. It's more a character study than social commentary, though the latter often can reinforce the former. Good as it often is, it's not top-tier Eastwood but it'll be of lasting interest to auteurists for what it seems to try to say about the ultimate actor-turned-auteur of our time.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

Through the title character, aka the San Saba Songbird, the West Texas Twit (or Tit) and, most troubling to himself, "The Misanthrope," Joel and Ethan Coen address some of their critics.

'Misanthrope?'  I don't hate my fellow man, even when he's tiresome and sulky and tries to cheat at poker. I figure that's just a human material, and him that finds it cause for anger and dismay is just a fool for expecting better.


Perhaps feeling less capable of telling a feature-length story lately, the Coens reportedly contemplated embarking on series television. It was announced that they were creating a western anthology series for Netflix, but instead, apparently quitting while they were ahead, they delivered a feature-length collection of six stories: five of their own and an adaptation of Jack London's "All Gold Canyon." There's a variety of tone to the anthology that belies any stereotype of the Coens' character or philosophy and makes it truly reminiscent of the Twilight Zone of western anthology TV, Zane Grey Theater. It opens with a trolling provocation featuring Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), a seemingly invincible and suprisingly lethal singing cowboy who ultimately yields, in the most cartoonish fashion, to a harmonica-playing stranger presumably representing a later era of westerns. It's a combination of what some may enjoy most and what others despise in the Coens' work, but as the film moves from episode to episode it grows less predictable, veering from the fateful absurdity of "Near Algodones," in which James Franco's hapless bank robber escapes one hanging only to be doomed to another, to the utter nihilism of "Meal Ticket," in which Liam Neeson exploits a limbless savant who performs recitations and murders him when he fails to draw crowds anymore, before following London in a more hopeful direction.


The longest episode -- or so it seemed, though not in a bad way -- is both the most romantic and the most tragic. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is a wagon-train story of the deliberate courtship of a suddenly penniless pioneer woman (Zoe Kazan -- a veteran of Meek's Cutoff, by the way) and a wagonmaster's lieutenant (Bill Heck), as much motivated by monetary concerns as by feelings of ardor. There are elements in the story -- a dog with a maddening bark, a bankroll left in a corpse's clothes -- that lead you to suspect an absurdly happy ending until the story takes a twist out of nowhere when the girl and the wagonmaster (Grainger Hines) are caught alone by an Indian attack. The Coens have set up an archetypal frontier scenario of the sort that might get them scolded for their portrayal of Native Americans, down to the wagonmaster giving the girl a gun so she can kill herself if the Indians get him, in order to spare herself the fate worse than death, which here gets described in some detail. In a brilliantly swervy climax, it looks like he's driven the war band back only to get tricked by a seemingly riderless horse. The Coens keep our eyes on this scene, as the Indian moves in to take a scalp, only to get killed by the possum-playing wagonmaster. Hooray! -- except that the girl was just as fooled as the Indian was, and the finish could be considered an indictment of the mortal terror of Indians the old tales induced. This is a great piece of filmmaking on its own, but it could only happen in an anthology format, since it's too short to be a feature and a standalone story won't go on series TV nowadays.

The film ends on an eerie note with a story that's part Stagecoach, part Samuel Beckett, with a typical Coen cast of eccentrics and grotesques sharing a ride with two men who may be bounty hunters or may be far more sinister than that. On paper it's little more than an opportunity for a lot of newcomers to the Coens' world to tuck into their meaty flights of rhetoric, especially Chelcie Ross as an interminible trapper. One thing you can depend on, no matter what the content or tone of the tale, is that these westerners won't sound just like the people next door today; it's of a piece with their True Grit in many ways, and maybe meant to show that they weren't just mimicking Charles Portis's prose. While they portray The Ballad of Buster Scruggs onscreen as an old hardcover book with color illustrations, it reminded me more of the western pulp magazines I've come to enjoy reading in its simultaneous variety and consistency. The finished product may or may not count as a salvage job, but it still plays to the Coens' strengths while minimizing their weaknesses in a way that makes it a vast improvement over the tedious Hail Ceasar! The brothers may well have found the right medium in Netflix for this point in their career. Had it been packaged as a series, that would only have made it more clear, as it was clear a century ago, that great filmmaking isn't restricted to feature-length storytelling.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

OUTLAW KING (2018)

Most people's primary reference for the career of Robert the Bruce is Mel Gibson's Braveheart, in which the Scots hero is shown as a well-meaning but vacillating young man increasingly ashamed of his leprous father's cynical realpolitik until, finally his own man in more than one sense, he avenges William Wallace at the decisive battle of Bannockburn. Whatever else you say about the Gibson film, it gives the Bruce a great character arc, the absence of which is felt throughout the new film by Scots director David Mackenzie, in which Robert (Chris Pine) is the main character. Inescapably, Wallace haunts the film, literally and gruesomely in one scene as a quarter of him is displayed in a public square. This is shown to be just about the last straw that pushes Robert into rebellion, after humiliating treatment by Edward I (never called "Longshanks" here, and played by Stephen Dillane) in the opening scenes. With Wallace at bay at that point, Robert is made to watch the English attack Stirling Castle with a massive trebuchet hurling a fiery payload, and made to marry the Irish noblewoman Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh). A widower, Robert slowly warms to Elizabeth as she warms to the Scots cause, but cools toward Scotland's subjugation to England. His Rubicon is the killing of a pro-England Scots rival in a church. The Scots clergy are willing to forgive this (though the Pope, unmentioned, wasn't) and crown Robert King of Scots in return for a vague promise of support for them. The uprising is nearly aborted by a treacherous night attack, but Robert survives to take up guerrilla warfare with the archetypal ragtag band, while Elizabeth flees from castle to castle until the English catch her and cage her outside a grim castle.


The first time I ever heard of Robert the Bruce was in a school reading textbook that had the legend of his encounter with a spider. Outlaw King (or Outlaw/King as it appears onscreen) invokes that legend by making Robert the spider at the center of a marshy web in the climactic battle of Loudon Hill. One must assume that the English learned their lesson from this catastrophe, presuming that it played out in history as it plays here, as they subsequently dealt with the French more or less the same way during the Hundred Years War. This film's big battle scene inevitably must be compared with the Stirling battle in Braveheart, but each aims for a different effect. Gibson expresses furious exhilaration -- I still remember a woman behind me starting to laugh like a madwoman at the peak of the action when I first saw it -- while Mackenzie adds a note of horror to whatever satisfaction audiences may feel on seeing the English get their comeuppance. At first glance, Outlaw King strikes me as a more gory film than the massively violent Braveheart because of the more overtly horrific presentation. Mackenzie doesn't show it in a particularly lurid way, but in a matter-of-fact fashion that makes such moments as the casual disembowling of a man all the more horrifying. While Braveheart could be accused of glorifying war, Outlaw King is less vulnerable to that charge, though it goes too far to equate it to the alleged antiwar aesthetics of the superficially similar marshy combat in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, to which Mackenzie's battle scene has been compared. There's no denying, after all, that in the context of this film that fight was necessary.


I wonder how self-consciously Mackenzie and his co-writers strove to make their film "Not Braveheart." Not having William Wallace as a character is probably the most obvious way to make clear that this is going to be a different kind of story. More interesting is their attempt to make the Prince of Wales, later Edward II (Billy Howle) as the main antagonist, with his dad remaining in the background until he dies, ahistorically, en route to Loudon Hill. Outlaw King reimagines Edward II as a Messala-type character who once was Robert's buddy but becomes his most dogged enemy for reasons of state. Ironically, in light of what Gore Vidal often said about his conception of the Messala character in Ben-Hur, the new film goes out of its way to avoid anything that could be interpreted as homophobic (as in Braveheart) in its presentation of Edward II, to the point that the casual viewer would have no idea that he was reputedly homosexual. On the other hand, Edward's sexuality has nothing to do with his or his father's policy toward Scotland, so there really isn't any need to address it here, and it's arguably a fair hit on Braveheart that it's treatment of the character was gratuitous. Both films take huge liberties with history, including Outlaw King's placement of Edward II, king before his actual time, in command of the English troops at Loudon Hill and engaged in single combat with Robert at its close. That scene really hurts the film, since the writers take too many and not enough liberties at the same time. If you're going to have the English king fight the Scots king on the field of battle, and have Robert disarm and decisively defeat Edward -- which obviously didn't happen -- why not go all the way and have Robert take Edward prisoner and force the liberation of Scotland ahead of schedule. It looks stupid to just let him go, especially if the writers' excuse is "well, he wasn't captured historically." That aside, Outlaw King is a decent historical drama, though lacking much of Braveheart's primal passion, especially in Pine's relatively dispassionate but conventionally stalwart performance. I'll give him and the film credit for one thing, though. The standard before-the-battle speech is quite nicely done here because it boils down to: I don't care why you're fighting with me as long as we win. Whether you find it better or worse than Braveheart, or don't believe in comparisons, at least it's a legitimate change of pace.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

APOSTLE (2018)

Gareth Evans, the director of the Raid movies, arguably the best martial-arts films of the 21st century so far, returned to his native Wales to make an action-horror period piece set in Edwardian England. It starts slow, introducing us to former missionary Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), who infiltrates a Welsh island that's been taken over by a religious cult. The cult, which has scriptures of its own and a putatively charismatic leader in Malcolm (Michael Sheen), has kidnapped Richardson's sister and is holding her for ransom. They've been reduced to that because a once-flourishing community has seen harvests fail, but some cult members believe that even more extreme measures are necessary to revive the crops.


Probably because Evans is more interested in the fantastic horrors to be revealed later, Apostle makes it hard to believe that Malcolm's cult could attract as many people as it seems to. As Malcolm, Sheen simply isn't that charismatic, and we see pretty much nothing to explain the cult's appeal. Evans himself seems to realize the limitations of the Malcolm character, since about midway through he builds up Malcolm's second-in-command, Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) into the real villain of the piece. Quinn disapproves beyond all reason of his daughter's romance with the son of another cult leader, finally killing the girl, framing the boy for the crime and executing him with a gruesome machine that bores a hole through the back of his head. By this point Quinn has gone over the edge entirely, determined to overthrow Malcolm and take the leader's daughter Andrea (Lucy Boynton) -- as well as Thomas's sister (Elen Rhys) -- as a broodmare sex slave.


While Malcolm is at best a half-baked conception of a cult leader, Quinn proves a villain worthy of an Edwardian horror story. By this point in the picture we've learned that the cult leaders had some time before captured a sort of earth goddess (Sharon Morgan) who subsists on human blood. By sacrificing to her, the cultists initially enjoyed good harvests. But just as she seemed ready to die when they found her, so she seems reluctant to go on living on the diet they offer her. It's bad enough that Malcolm sheds his own blood to force-feed her and has others do the same. Quinn quite explicitly wants to treat the goddess like a machine, hoping to jump-start her power by gorging her with full-scale human sacrifice. That rings true as a particularly 19th century (or so) form of villainy or industrial-strength hubris combined with control-freak patriarchal insanity. Jones runs with the idea and his over-the-top villainy pretty much saves the picture.


It helps, too, that the latter half of the film has more action, allowing Evans to show off his real strengths as a filmmaker. The two big scenes are Thomas's fight with a "Gimp"-like henchman who operates a human-sized meat grinder for Quinn and his final battle, assisted by his sister and Andrea, with a nearly indestructible Quinn. Jones has been such a despicable villain that Quinn's gruesome demise is the picture's indisputable highlight. Unfortunately, Apostle still has to resolve Thomas's character arc. He lost his faith, you see, when his church was burned and friends were killed in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Were this a different sort of film, you might expect his struggle against real evil to revive his faith, but faith doesn't come into it, since he instead encounters, for all intents and purposes, a real god. Better still, he gets to become a real god by the end of the picture as the old goddess passes her mojo on to him. Is this a good thing? Much of the cult village has been burnt down by this point, but Malcom is still wandering around and gets to see Thomas's transfiguration. Does that mean the cult gets to start over again, only better this time? It's probably better not to ask. Apostle adds up to less than the sum of its parts, but there is genuine horror in it, just enough to justify its presence on Netflix over the past Halloween season, and maybe enough to justify a look at other times of the year.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (1970 - 2018)

Updated on November 5 after watching the accompanying Netflix documentary,  
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead. 
Orson Welles and Netflix might have been a perfect match. There wouldn't have been any worries about how many paid admissions each project of his could draw, and they wouldn't have depended on him overmuch to attract new subscribers. All that would have mattered, presumably, was how much money he spent and when he delivered the product. Of course, what sort of product he proposed to deliver would make a lot of difference. Batting out something like F for Fake on a relatively regular basis might not have been much of a problem. A narrative film, alas, would have been a different story.

It's interesting that Welles brings up Hemingway in this picture, since it reminded me of some things Hemingway said. Hemingway said of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon that the it was no masterpiece in the making, but that it showed that Fitzgerald had just enough skill to keep publishers interested enough to advance him more money. Of a Norman Mailer novel -- The Deer Park, if I recall right -- Hemingway said that the author had blown the whistle on himself. In The Other Side of the Wind, Welles portrays his director protagonist (John Huston) as a Hemingway type, if not more obviously a darker version of himself. Wind, however, is an attempt at what Hemingway, describing his own efforts, called a bank shot, touching several thematic bases at once. It's a work of self-criticism to an extent but also a satire of the whole cult of the director, almost as contemptuous toward "cineastes" (a repeated sneer-word here) as those filmmakers of the generation before Welles who hated (or affected to hate) analyzing their careers. It could be seen equally as an indictment of the creative bankruptcy of auteurism or a confession of Welles's own creative bankruptcy.

The way he tells the story clearly interests Welles more than the story he tells. That story, based on what Frank Marshall, Peter Bogdanovich and others have salvaged from the surviving footage, attempts to account for the creative exhaustion of the Huston character, Jake Hannaford, who's showing excerpts of his in-progress production "The Other Side of the Wind" at a birthday party in the hope of raising the funds needed to finish the project -- much as Welles himself screened scenes at his AFI lifetime achievement award ceremony. The film within the film is both to some extent a parody of Zabriskie Point and a way for Welles to show what he can do visually in color and widescreen. A man stalks and courts a mysterious woman (who may be a terrorist) who goes about naked a lot (Oja Kodar) and torments the man in many ways. They wander through an old move backlot before she meets such fate as she has in the desert. As a commercial project it seems hopeless, but what's specifically stalled it is Hannaford's falling out with his neophyte star, Johnny Dale (Bob  Random). The director made a project of the young man, apparently a drifter, after rescuing him from an apparent suicide attempt, but became suspicious of his authenticity. Dale turned out to be a boarding-school dropout involved in some sort of homosexual scandal. Hannaford tormented him on the set of the movie until Dale stormed off, buck naked, after a scene that teased his castration. His departure, and a failure of funding, has let the film a confused jumble, and it's unclear that any amount of money, in the absence of the original inspiration, can solve its problems.

The film proper is kaleidoscopic, showing Hannaford surrounded by fans, sycophants, critics and parasites, many of whom are shooting their own documentary or home-movie footage of the film party. The fatal flaw of the film as a whole is Welles's belief that diversity of film stocks could substitute for diversity of character. None of the characters feels genuinely fleshed-out; you get the sense that Welles knows more about them than the footage used here actually shows, but you also get the suspicion that he knew more about them than he could or cared to show. Many are probably analogues for cronies of Welles himself, and Bogdanovich definitely and almost masochistically -- taking over for an absconding Rich Little -- plays a version of himself as a pushy superfan with ambitions of surpassing the master. The mock-festive setting reminds me of a truly amateur movie of the same period, Norman Mailer's Maidstone -- and Welles' raving about improvisational filmmaking, captured in the accompanying documentary, suggests at minimum a coincidence of his thinking and Mailer's -- while the flailing experimentation anticipates a similar work of what we could call neo-amateurism, Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again. Unfortunately, Wind lacks any sense of spontaneity, mainly because of Welles's late-career choppy style of editing together shots taken months or possibly years apart, and probably because his control-freak auterism had overcome his interest in improvisation at some point in the production. You get one shot of a character talking, and then we cut to a shot of the next character talking, when what's arguably needed is the more naturalistic overlapping dialogue of Robert Altmann's films. To be fair, Welles may have meant to mix the sound differently -- and for that matter I think I would rather have seen the film without a music score in the absence of any Wellsian input on the selections --  but there's no way to know that for certain.  What seems inescapable is a sense of exhaustion with storytelling even as Welles remains fascinated by the possibilities of editing and composition. In simplest terms, the ultimate subject of this film may be not the death of cinema, but the inevitable if not necessary demise of a certain kind of filmmaking, with the far more lively F for Fake showing the way ahead. The really sad thing about Wind is that, as the documentary makes clear, much of it was filmed after Fake, as if Welles hadn't realized, or wouldn't admit, that the project was a creative dead end.

Demoralizing as it may be, The Other Side of the Wind probably should be mandatory viewing for movie fans, if only for the unexpected encores it provides for so many long-gone character actors, from Mercedes McCambridge to Cameron Mitchell, from Edmond O'Brien -- bloated and roughened to the point that he resembles Lon Chaney Jr. -- to Angelo Rossitto. One would have liked the film to have proved a buried masterpiece, but contrary to what the film itself may suggest, even the ambitious failures of an auteur like Welles can reward watching, as cautionary tales or tragic hints of what could have been. As a work of art it isn't much, but like any Welles film it has many memorable moments of pictorial power. As a historical document, I highly recommend it.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

Too Much TV: THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018)

As a warning to those who haven't watched any or all of the series yet, this review contains spoilers.
  
To turn most novels into ten-part TV shows, liberties must be taken. Extraordinary liberties have been taken to turn Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House into Mike Flanagan's Netflix series, but the results for the most part worked on their own terms, though one of the greatest strengths of Flanagan's adaptation proved ultimately a weakness. People who binged their way through it quicker than I did have already noted its structural resemblance to This Is Us, a critically-acclaimed multigenerational non-linear family drama. Hill House travels back and forth in time from the present to 1992, reimagining the paranormal investigators of Jackson's novel as a family unit, and the house itself as a fixer-upper that the parents (Carla Gugino and Henry Thomas, with Timothy Hutton taking over for the present-day scenes) hope to renovate for a huge profit. We see each of the five damaged children as a troubled adult, and we see how the ordeal of Hill House contributed to their individual and collective dysfunctions. Steven Crain (Michiel Huisman) turned his experience into a dubious best-seller, earning the ire of most of his siblings. Despite making himself a specialist in haunted-house tales, he doesn't really believe in the supernatural. Blaming the family tragedy on hereditary madness, he had a vasectomy to keep from having insane kids, compromising his marriage in the process by keeping that detail secret from his wife. Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is an obsessive-compulsive mortician who especially resents Steven's book and sees any family who took the royalties he offered as a traitor. Theo (Kate Siegel), the show's obligatory lesbian, is a child psychologist whose tactile sensitivity to the paranormal leaves her abrasively reluctant to maintain emotional connections with people. The fraternal twins Nelly (Victoria Pedretti) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are the youngest and most traumatized by the Hill House experience, Luke becoming a heroin addict, while further tragedies in her life drive Nelly to kill herself at the old house. Her death reunites the family and opens old wounds as the legacy of Hill House threatens to draw them all back so the house can finish what it started long ago.

Hill House enhances the non-linear formula by adding a layer of premonition that ties present and past even closer together. In the most horrific instance, Nelly has been haunted since her time at Hill House by visions of  "the bent-neck lady." When she hangs herself, more driven by the house to do so than willing her own demise, she realizes in her final moments of life that she was the bent-neck lady. At Hill House, the mother, Olivia, is terrified by premonitions of the terrible fates awaiting her youngest children, though it takes her a little bit to recognize the actors we know as grown-up Luke and Nelly as her babies. The moment when Nelly, done up mortuary style for her wake in the present, tears the stitches from her mouth and cries out, "Mommy!' is probably the next most horrific moment. Overall, the show is more horrific than scary, though there are plenty of jumpy moments for scare fans. The family drama underscores the long-term horror of Hill House, and the effort given to flesh out the Crain family pays off thanks to terrific ensemble acting. At the end, however, the series becomes too much about family for its own good.

In Flanagan's imagining, Hill House seems less evil than monstrously overprotective. It wants to keep the people it acquires and seduces the most overprotective member of the family, the mother, with a promise to protect her children, the twins especially, by "waking" them from the "nightmare" that will be their adult lives. To wake them, Olivia tries to kill the twins by feeding them tea laced with rat poison, and ends up actually murdering the caretakers' daughter who just happened to tag along. Conveniently, the caretakers were homeschoolers who had hidden their girl from the outside world. Traumatized by the tragedy but consoled by the appearance of their little girl as a ghost, they agree to cover up Olivia's murder of the girl as long as her husband backs off from his plan to burn the house down. The show ultimately goes too far in portraying the house as an actual comfort, albeit one most people should reject. Olivia and then Nelly seem not to be extensions of the house but autonomous spirits that can feud with earlier generations of spirits or fight off its attempts to claim the rest of the family. Finally, present-day Hugh makes a deal with Olivia and/or the house, sacrificing himself while the rest of the children go free. In an unconvincing epilogue, this final ordeal appears to have cured the surviving Crains of their hang-ups. Steven reconciles with his wife, Shirley with her husband, whom she'd accused of an affair with Theo; Theo commits to a steady girlfriend and Luke is clean for two years and counting at the very end. This seems like a betrayal of the tragic complexity of the lives shown us earlier, unless you really believe, as Flanagan seems to, that all of it was Hill House's fault. Family ends up being not just the real subject of Hill House but its feel-good rallying point, yet any horror project that seeks to make audiences feel good at the end, for the sake of "family" or any reason, is suspect. I'm not saying I wanted Hill House to wipe out the Crain family, but I'd like to think that any viewer will find its conclusion too neat in a way that undermines a project that until then was working fine as both a spook show and a psychological horror. I'll still recommend it, since at it's best it's nearly great, but unless "family" gives you the unconditional "feels" you may share my disappointment at something so good failing to stick the landing.

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

FUTURE WORLD (2018)



My guess is that James Franco saw The Bad Batch one day last year and said, "Psssh! I can do better than that." For all I know, he'd seen Mad Max:Fury Road some time before and had the same reaction. If you really want to speculate on his influences, you might find Future World reminiscent of the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg. On the DVD, Franco drily explains that he wanted to experiment with the postapocalypse genre, as if it were his ambition -- it might well be -- to direct in every genre known to man. He shares the directorial credit here with his frequent cinematographer Bruce Thierry Cheung, and while Cheung is also one of the credited writers Franco makes it clear on the disc that he was involved in putting the story together. Not that that took much effort, as Future World is more a collection of tropes and an exercise in style than anything else. There's been an apocalypse, and while bullets have become extremely rare there's fuel enough to keep motorcycling marauders on the road, massacring most everyone they find and partying at Big Daddy Love Lord's (Snoop Dogg) poontang oasis. There's a real oasis somewhere nearby that the marauders, led by a horned-helmeted Franco, somehow have never stumbled upon, but it's benevolent ruler (a supine Lucy Liu) is ill with the dreaded Red Fever, the cure for which reportedly can be had at the legendary Paradise Beach. It's there that Prince -- it seems to be both his title and his name (Jeffrey Wahlberg) -- is bound with a precious handful of bullets that are promptly taken from him by Franco's gang after the naive hero makes the mistake of stopping at the big whorehouse. A more impressive acquisition of Franco's is the android Ash (Suki Waterhouse, late of The Bad Batch), a killing machine of the bad old days who apparently shut herself down in an act of protest against mankind's wars. Unfortunately for her -- and she's not only very female but also, as a matter of cliche by now, lesbian -- once she's awakened Franco can control her by yelling into a little control box. Collaborating with Big Daddy, he sends Ash to roll the hapless Prince. The poor youth is allowed to live only because Franco needs someone to lead him to the oasis, but in the course of an escape attempt Ash ends up out of range of the remote control gizmo and becomes Prince's staunch ally.

Alas, since the days of postcards Paradise Beach has become Drug Town, presided over by a coked-up Milla Jovovich, and while she does have a cure for the Red Fever, it has a high price. First, she intends to take custody of Ash, intending her either as a sex toy or an object of worship, or both. Then, she insists that Prince shoot up some heavy drugs and battle her champion in a gladiatorial combat which our questionably experienced hero, malnourished, injured and drug-addled, somehow wins when Ash tosses him a machete. That spoils Jovovich's fun a little, but what really ticks her off is that her captive techie Lei (Margarita Levieva) scores with Ash before she gets a chance. Worse yet, the Franco gang, having little sense of direction, mistakes Drug Town for the oasis and attacks. There's a great goofy moment here when Jovovich shoots herself up with two syringes of something to inspire a  battle frenzy befitting the impending clash of titans, but however you rate the relative prowess of action movie stars, Franco puts himself over in the fateful encounter. In the end, though, Ash rebels against his control when he orders her to execute Prince and Lei and, as women everywhere presumably cheer, she puts the fiend down once and for all. After delivering the chaste Prince back home in time to save his mom, Ash and Lei ride off, theoretically in search of other androids and further adventures, as if this were a pilot for some series. Given its ghost of a release and its atrocious score on Rotten Tomatoes, it's safe to say we won't see more of these heroines. But while I concede every failing of this project, especially its absolute lack of originality, I couldn't help liking it for its earnestness, its impressive outdoor cinematography by Werner Herzog's latter-day cameraman, Pieter Zeitlinger, and the very throwback spirit that most likely provoked others' contempt. I still enjoy a bit of postapocalyptic cheese every so often, and if you can't have a Mad Max every couple of years a James Franco pastiche will do for a little while.