"Accomplishments"
In theaters: With The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts the a-literary Bride of Frankenstein, setting it in Chicago the decade the Universal monster film was released, priming Frank and his new bride (Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley) to be the monsterverse's answer to Bonnie and Clyde. Mary Shelly - also a character in 1935's Bride - is here the potty-mouthed spirit that occasionally possesses the Bride to push the story towards a primal feminist scream, and the demented romance is all about loving a man, but not being defined by him (while the man in question has his own issues, defining himself by his father). But it's also a love letter to 1930s films and films about the 1930s - so the 1930s as a cinematic space - where people's names are a play on actors of the day, and Gyllenhaal mixes the genres of the era - gangster films, early horror characters, musicals - into a heady cocktail that perhaps addresses how those films are both great and have paltry sexual politics. It really spoke to me, though it'll likely try to say too much for critics, not be horror enough for horror fans, disrespect Mary Shelley too much for literati, and is too weird for mainstream audiences. Buckley's lopsided smile is perfect for the character, and Bale is good too as Frank, and there's hardly any important character that isn't a recognizable face. Annette Bening, as the mad scientist picking up where Frankenstein left off, is particularly hilarious.
At home: It's a little inside baseball, in a way, but Joachim Trier 's Sentimental Value uses film making as a plot device to examine and expose difficult family dynamics, while also saying something about art. In the first place, we have a one of two sisters an actress struggling with depression (Renate Reinsve, always excellent), and her estranged director father (Stellan Skarsgård, ditto) who has written a part for her in his newest film, if only she'll take it. What the part says about their relationship and how he perceives her unfolds slowly, but surely, and packs a punch without spelling things out. And because of her resistance, we also have Elle Fanning as an American actress who becomes a surrogate daughter during prep, making things more emotionally complex. But it's also a film about making art personal, the value of doing that, but also the difficulties and personal dangers that come with it. At the risk of experiencing catharsis..? Stylistically, Trier sometimes fools his audience by jumping into "performance" without warning, asking whether there is any difference between real and acted emotions, especially if the artist does make things personal (as my favorite show Slings and Arrows often said, "Use it!"), a conceit more successful for me than his other breaks from strict realism. But you know I can't resist a film about catharsis.
Set a "time of mischief" - which seems to mean rampant police corruption and dead bodies turning up all over the place - The Secret Agent is a thing of parts, some might say, of body parts, which isn't entirely unlike other Filho films I've seen, but it also leaves me wanting more (or better closure). I reconcile the feeling by understanding the film's theme to be erasure. In 1977, the protagonist (Wagner Moura and his sympathetic face, who is good in everything, but that I first encountered in the very fun The Man from the Future) is looking for information on his mother who feel through the cracks of society, but his own story has also been forgotten in present-day Brazil. Everywhere we look, people are being disappeared (and in one leggy case, disappeared AGAIN). Sometimes, we wilfully forget the past, sometimes people try to obscure it, sometimes it just happens naturally over time. So leaving plot threads dangling and mysteries unexplained is certainly part of the point. It's just not necessarily satisfying. But I do especially love the opening where everything feels sinister and dangerous, taking us into a character's calm paranoia and letting the story unfold slowly, but entrancingly. That's MY favorite part.
The modern slang term "catfish/catfishing" comes from the film Catfish, which I didn't realize was even a documentary when I started watching. It took me a bit to investigate the genre, taking it initially as a faux documentary that was weaving an interesting, but satirical story about internet relationships. The lead seemed too photogenic, the directors later made fiction films, and the plot details felt like what English speakers call a tall tale, but we French speakers call a "fish story". But no, it's real. It all starts when a New York photographer receives a painting of one of his pics from a little girl in Michigan, and is soon chatting up the entire family as his room mates (including his own brother) document the unusual relationship. Months of care packages, phone calls, and Facebook life later, something happens that doesn't ring true, and the documentary takes a more confrontational tone, but it's what happens after that confrontation that's perhaps the most unusual turn. I love it when docs start as one exploration and become another, the "characters" are engaging, and I don't feel like telling you how things shake out because the tension is worth it.
An alien plot to turn people into mindless killers using a video cassette? Sounds like an old B-movie plot, alright. Except for the video cassette part. But when a video store starts renting an old 50s sci-fi B-movie - for which there is an absurdly high marketing push and audience demand - people start turning up dead. The film is Remote Control, and the film inside the film is Remote Control, and not only is the plot of the latter imposed on the world of the former, but director Jeff Lieberman also pays tribute to those hokey old movies by giving the entire production a sci-fi sheen with a New Wave rock aesthetic. The clothes, the hair, the locations... they all look like they came out of an older sci-fi flick, as if the movies predicated, rather than inspired, the present. Take any given screengrab from Remote Control and it might look like an episode of Buck Rogers. Completely ridiculous and pretty fun as a result.
Even at its brief 65 minutes, Re-Wind (originally, illogically named Celluloid Nightmares) is padded to the brim with sex scenes. Scene 1: An upsetting snuff film. Scene 2: A raw and rather explicit sex scene (within the bounds of Japanese law, so no unhidden privates). Scene 3: We're off to the local wanking booths. Scene 4: Another realistic sex scene (too much tongue stuff!). And so it goes. But if "pinku cinema" has a point here, it's that lurid sex and violence, when deployed as entertainment, is participatory. Whether we are attracted or repulsed by what we see, we keep watching, and so are we any different from the characters obsessed with the initial snuff film? Aren't we also wondering how much of what we see is real? I found Re-Wind quite off-putting, but it wants to put me off. Somewhere in there is a detective story with a mystery that isn't too hard to figure out, as it's all about style. Even when characters are just eating or taking a phone call, the film making makes it sexual or gory. I respect it, but weird and ugly.
Elmore Leonard himself worked on the adaptation of his 52 Pick-Up, a sleazy thriller that, for a Cannon Film, has some impressive credentials beside - Frankenheimer directing Roy Scheider and Ann-Margaret. The lurid tale has a trio of pornographers blackmail Scheider with a video tape of his illicit affair, made more complicated because Ann-Margaret, as his wife, is running for political office (though honestly, this doesn't feature as much as I thought it would). Scheider is a cool cucumber who can't let them get away with their crimes in a role that, barely ten years later, would have been tailor-made for Michael Douglas, and he's helped by this being an Elmore Leonard story, which means the criminals, though very dangerous, aren't as smart as they think they are. John Glover's weird, variable accent aside, my own complaint is that Ann-Margaret's character is sorely abused by the script. I like it when she's more or less an equal partner in protecting herself and her husband, but beyond the fact that she'll have to forgive the affair, she's visited by terrible things she didn't deserve, and yet we're supposed to understand the ending as a victory.
I'm a fan of Nicolas Winding Refn's 90s work, and Bleeder, while it's a little less focused than the Pusher trilogy, still has the juice. I absolutely love the opening(s), from the introduction of the cast, to the camera flying over video tape shelves, and the listing of the video store categories. But though we're dealing with a single friend group, there are really two stories. Most of the attention is given to Pusher's Kim Bodnia, as a guy who stops liking movies after he sees a real-life shooting, his trauma leading him to ruin several lives. The other is a sweet, but incredibly awkward would-be romance between Mads Mikkelsen's video store clerk, obsessed with films, but interested in a girl who doesn't really watch them. The first story is pure Refn, just watching people self-destruct and take a city block with them. The second - unusually - offers light at the end of the tunnel, even if it means coming out of one's protective bunker to see it. Refn navigates his camera through various claustrophobic spaces - every room seems to be a built in a corridor - replacing their anxiety with security, but reinforcing the idea that they are prisons of the mind. Certainly, this has one of the most savage revenges in cinema. Imagine dedicating this to your mom.
Jason took a break in the fifth Friday the 13th, so in Part VI, Jason Lives, he's of course resurrected as a Frankenstein's monster/zombie that movie makers won't be able to get rid of so easily (certainly, we have to tell the kids they can't swim in Crystal Lake anymore). He's back and mowing through camp counselors, cops and paintball enthusiasts (that was already a thing in '86?!), and a ratings crackdown means we're often denied money shots, cutting away too quickly from the gore, or having the hit take place off-screen, though that perhaps pushes the film makers to create more clever kills. The saving grace, perhaps, is that the flick doesn't take itself very seriously, and it invites you to mock the characters before they meet their fates. In no way does it dispel my basic ambivalence about Jason as a movie monster - despite the iconic look, he's a rather boring killing machine - so we're left with a cast of victims and survivors who are fairly basic in this case - dumb kids and terrible cops. The one girl who did all the work at the camp and who presented as naive/innocent/virginal sure didn't deserve what she got according to slasher rules, I'll say that. The "Kevin Bacon" in this one is Tony Goldwyn, not a household name, but certainly a household face (lately in Oppenheimer and One Battle After Another), who makes his screen acting debut at an early kill.
[1936] Reefer Madness: Originally titled Tell Your Children, this piece of propaganda is famous for hilariously misrepresenting the effects of marijuana in an extended "scared straight" PSA, rediscovered and rereleased in the 70s for your mocking pleasure. Its makers did themselves no favors by lying to their public, its thirtysomething teenagers never realizing joints aren't cigarettes by smell, and every drug effect you can think of being ascribed to reefer - it's here a combination of pot, coke, acid, heroin, and taking a long look at a Lovecraftian Elder God. At its core, Reefer Madness wants you to believe marijuana will turn you into a psychotic killer (something the same kind of people will reverse when WWII hits and pot will turn you into an unpatriotic pacifist). But it's even worse. The lie that reefer has these effects is actually what makes the central kid not defend himself when he's framed for murder, just assuming he blacked out and killed someone. The makers don't realize they're undoing their own argument and worse, that the argument is dangerous. This is not good, obviously, but it's still of sociological interest.
[1937] A Star Is Born: The original is the only one that's not a musical, but then there are many musicals in Old Hollywood where someone is discovered and becomes a star of the stage. So instead, we have Janet Gaynor - presenting as a kind of farm girl Myrna Loy - hoping to become an actress, being discovered by Fredric March's leading man on the wane, falling in love with him, and so on. Where musical versions would normally "prove" the character's stardom by showing song and dance, this one withholds such proof. Gaynor is definitely a good actress, and in the end does get to me with her wet eyes, but we never really see her character show her talent, always cutting away. To me, this is a weakness. But it does walk the tightrope between inviting aspiring performers to try their luck in Hollywood and warning them about the cost of both failure and success. Similarly, there are comic performances and romantic banter, but also a tragic loss of privacy and a toxic central relationship. This latter element is where the film feels most dated, because Gaynor is willing to give everything up for her man (who she owes the career to, but this seems a constant in these films) even if he's hard (for us) to love. It's not unrealistic for its era, of course, but modern audiences might frown at it.
Books: I like Frank Miller's Ronin more for its archaeological value than the story or art, honestly. On the one hand, its crazy story about a Japanese ronin who possesses a powerful psionic in a cyberpunk future to fight a terrifying demon across the ages is one of Genndy Tartakovsky's major inspirations for Samurai Jack, which I didn't realize when I started reading, but became instantly apparent. On the other, we're seeing Miller define and refine his style before our very eyes. Instead of the deep pools of shadow used on The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City and 300, he uses furious hatching to achieve a similar, but far sketchier, effect. Then in what was the 3rd issue of the series, he starts using those shadowy effects, and more and more, until he comes out of it as the artist of those later works. Before that, there seems to be a heavy Mobius influence, a future of thin-lined circuitry. So it's formally interesting. Judging Ronin on its own merits, the art is often too obtuse I don't get why letterer John Workman doesn't center the speech bubbles/diamonds, and I could certainly do with fewer racial slurs. But it's certainly got energy, and a great twist at the end.
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