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Showing posts with label All Content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label All Content. Show all posts
Adam
“Asian-American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They don’t have to ‘represent their people.’” These are the words famously yelled by Roger Ebert at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, in response to an audience member’s complaint that Justin’s Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow,” chronicling the illegal behavior of teenagers, was “empty and amoral” for Asian-American audiences. Ebert was offended to see a film featuring minorities both in front of and behind the camera being held to a higher moral standard than any picture made by and about straight white men.
I confess to feeling similar outrage when observing the recent attempts made to boycott films for illuminating facets of the transgender experience that fall outside the boundaries of what allegedly progressive commentators deem acceptable. The “cancel culture” currently torpedoing the reputation and IMDb rating of Rhys Ernst’s “Adam” is tantamount to the silencing of trans voices in media. Diversity must be expanded in all forms, not only in regards to who’s telling the stories that end up on screen, but in the stories they are allowed to tackle. As Jeanette, the mother of trans activist Jazz Jennings, once told me, “If my daughter wants to act, I hope she’s considered for all roles, not only those that are trans.”
“Adam” was formed by the collaboration between Ernst, a transgender filmmaker helming his feature directorial debut, and lesbian writer Ariel Schrag, adapting her own graphic novel of the same name for her first movie screenplay. The titular protagonist of their film is a cisgender male played splendidly by owl-eyed Nicholas Alexander, who resembles Will Poulter’s kid brother. Feeling lost at sea amongst the hyper-masculine peers at his high school, he yearns to spend the summer with his older sister, Casey (Margaret Qualley), in New York City. Schrag sets her tale in 2006, a year etched in squirmy hand-drawn animation during the opening shot, reminding us of how little familiarity the majority of Americans had with trans narratives just over a decade ago.
It’s the year that Felicity Huffman received her Oscar nomination for “Transamerica,” a film that—like “Transparent,” the series Ernst produced—cast a cis actor as the trans lead, a move that would be flatly rejected by the LGBTQIA community today. Adam has no qualms with his sister’s queer orientation, which they laughingly conceal from their homophobic mother (Ana Gasteyer), yet he’s baffled upon arriving in Bushwick to see Casey dating a trans man (Maxton Miles Baeza). With her brother suddenly preoccupied with her boyfriend’s nether regions, Casey affirms, “Trans men are real men! Having a penis has nothing to do with it.”
Cinematographer Shawn Peters finds inventive ways of conveying Adam’s mounting unease, and the film cuts between him and Casey’s roommate, June (Chloë Levine), seated on opposite ends of a couch from which they’re eager to escape. We don’t get a full view of Casey making out with her boyfriend until editor Joe Murphy cuts to a wide shot, forcing us—and Adam—to acknowledge what he’s strained to keep out of sight. Everything shifts once Adam attends a party, and finds himself instantly attracted to a youthful redhead, Gillian (non-binary actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez). His shyness and vulnerability are so unmistakably genuine that Gillian takes a liking to him, even as he fibs about “accidentally” spilling a drink on her in a humiliating attempt at a forced meet-cute.
When Adam discovers that she has mistaken him for a trans man, he chooses not to correct her, initially claiming to be a 20-year-old enrolled at Berkeley. The deeper he falls for Gillian, the more committed he becomes to researching what it means to be transgender, watching endless videos online detailing personal experiences with surgeries and hormone therapy. Adam eventually loses his virginity to Gillian in a sequence that carries echoes of Swedish filmmaker Anette Sidor’s extraordinary short film, “Fuck You,” where a girl’s favoring of a strap-on subverts her boyfriend’s understanding of female pleasure. Though he’s wearing a strap-on over his own concealed genitalia, Adam climaxes all the same, and is left exhilarated by the intimacy he’s shared with Gillian, opening himself up to a form of sex that would’ve caused the bros back home to erupt in gay panic.
After their unforgettable portrayal of Morgan Saylor’s hippie-esque roommate in Elizabeth Wood’s galvanizing “White Girl,” Menuez once again commands the screen with their every appearance, resembling a young Julianne Moore not just in appearance, but in the layers of unspoken nuance that register on their face. We sense the weight of expectation that has fallen on her shoulders, after she and her girlfriend fought to attend prom as a couple in their small-minded Oklahoma town, resulting in a widely publicized legal battle. When Adam riffs on how M. Night Shyamalan’s name often dwarfs the title of his films, Gillian cleverly likens that to how the term “gay” has superseded all others when defining her identity.
Rather than follow the beats of the Idiot Plot, Schrag knows that Gillian is smart enough to connect the dots well before Adam is ready to confess. This lends an additional layer of fascination to their scenes together, as Gillian comes to terms with how living in the illusion that Adam is trans has enabled her to avoid the budding realization that she may be bisexual. My favorite scene in the film occurs in a space called the Vanishing Room, where Adam and Gillian wander through a cloud of mist illuminated by bursts of color. There are numerous metaphorical levels to this environment, expressing the smokescreen both partners have utilized to deceive themselves, as well as how their mutual infatuation is unbound by labels, fueled only by primal feeling.
The film also wisely avoids falling into the rom-com formula where our hero’s success hinges on whether or not he gets the girl. While adapting her novel, Schrag enriched the subplot involving Adam’s growing friendship with Casey’s neighbor, Ethan (trans actor Leo Sheng), and it is ultimately their scenes that form the heart of the film. For the vast majority of the picture, Adam is unaware that Ethan is transmasculine, viewing them as a role model who can impart helpful, sex-positive advice. Ernst and Schrag have a field day poking fun at Ethan’s workplace, the invaluable NYC art house, Film Forum, where the pre-movie trivia rewards those familiar with obscure legends like Gunnar Björnstrand.
Honesty is the crucial element lacking from Adam’s relationship with Gillian, and when he finally comes clean to Ethan, Sheng plays the moment beautifully. Their initial anger dissipates as Adam begins to articulate the transformative impact of his misguided efforts, allowing Ethan to quell their pal’s nerves with the gift of acceptance. The pair’s final, perfectly pitched exchange accentuates Adam’s confused sense of direction, while portraying the healing power of communication between people willing to provide each other clarity free of judgment or condescension. Equally moving is Casey’s epiphany following an impassioned reading of Julia Serano’s “Cocky,” a rebuke to shame that provides her the courage to no longer remain in the closet. Qualley’s uninhibited exuberance has made her one of the most exciting talents of her generation, yet she is every bit as arresting in the quiet moments when the mask falls, and we see the pain lying beneath.
I didn’t laugh a whole lot while watching “Adam,” but I was never less than wholly engaged, and by the end, I felt grateful for having seen it. In an excellent defense of the film recently published at Indiewire, transmasculine writer Jude Dry explains how revelatory it felt “to be inside the mind of a cis boy who actively desired to be trans.” Having grown up emulating the cisgender identities that have dominated screens both large and small, Ernst has flipped the narrative by having a cis character emulate “trans-ness,” causing him to learn things about himself that would’ve otherwise been left hidden and repressed. Ernst doesn’t feel a moral obligation to only depict behavior onscreen that he endorses, and neither should any filmmaker, for that matter. Such limitations are the antithesis of art.
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The Angry Birds Movie 2
It's not a ringing defense of artistic quality to say that a movie about pigs and flightless birds that's based on a mobile app game and aimed at small children sometimes gets judged by a different set of standards than other movies—chiefly, "Will they laugh?" The answer, in the case of the original "The Angry Birds" film, was a definite yes, and it's even true for this sequel, even though the mix of Skittles-colored characters, video game-looking graphics, obvious needle-drop music cues, and incessant lowbrow slapstick (butt jokes, groin injuries) might get tiresome for anyone over the age of, say, 12.
The conception of the original project was also odd, though perhaps no odder than that of most of other big-budget animated pictures aimed at families. The main character, Red (Jason Sudeikis), was a belligerent, often physically violent individual, sentenced by a judge to undergo anger management training, a plot line you'd expect to see in a live-action comedy aimed at grownups (like, well, "Anger Management"), and a lot of the social satire, while welcome, surely didn't register on most little ones. The entire thing felt ungainly, and the required emotional catharsis at the end didn't quite feel earned. This sequel is more shenanigans-based. The plot eventually leads to a combination heist movie/band of heroes on a military mission storyline, which is more conducive to kid-oriented slapstick and lets the project feel less ungainly and lighter on its feet (although there's still a fair amount of sexual humor that might be considered in inappropriate if there were a chance small children might get it).
The plot picks up from the end of the last one, with Red being hailed as a hero for rescuing Bird Island from the onslaught of the green pigs, who live on an adjacent island. Now that he's won the admiration of the other birds, Red isn't angry anymore, but the movie fills that particular vacuum by introducing a lanky bird with a feathered mane named Zeta (Leslie Jones), the leader of a third island that begins attacking both the birds and the pigs. Zeta is tired of living in a glorified freezer, and begins the inevitable catapult war by lobbing a gigantic ice-ball. The pigs and flightless birds have to set aside their differences to defeat a common enemy, a classic plot for a sequel to a movie that was itself at least half of a war-movie spoof.
There are a lot of the expected butt jokes and malaprops and sub-"Who's on first?" exchanges, and all of the references to classic Hollywood movies that you'd expect in this sort of project (especially the James Bond and "Mission Impossible" series, "The Life Aquatic," and "The Great Escape," which appropriately starred a character nicknamed The Cooler King). But things move along at such an agreeably fast clip—particularly in the second half, when the mission gets underway—that it'll be a pleasurable experience for kids and adults alike. There's a lot to be said for a movie that finds the heroes sneaking into a supposedly impregnable place dressed in a giant bird costume that suggests a mascot you'd see at an especially shabby minor-league ballpark, setting up a potentially bruising fistfight between them and a huge henchman, and resolving it with a breakdance battle. The goofier and more random the movie is, the better it is, and it certainly gets goofier and more random as it goes.
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The Mountain
In Rick Alverson's "Entertainment," Gregg Turkington plays a standup comedian traveling through the Mojave Desert, doing his bizarre act in small nightclubs. His cousin John (John C. Reilly) attends one of the shows, and in their awkward conversation afterwards, John suggests that if he wants to attract bigger crowds and get a better reaction, then the act should be changed to "appeal to all four quadrants." I thought of this interaction when I watched Alverson's new film, "The Mountain." In what is by far his most "accessible" film, Alverson maintains his rigorous disinterest in mass appeal and even, at times, comprehensibility. "The Mountain," with its long stretches of quiet, bleak subject matter, and Alverson's staunch refusal to let us in, or fill in the blanks, creates a genuinely unnerving mood.
Taking place in the 1950s, in America's bleached-out autumnal heartland, "The Mountain" appears to be loosely based on the life of Walter Jackson Freeman II, a "physician" who specialized in lobotomies. Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy, where the "doctor" inserted an ice pick through the patient's eye socket. It was a much easier procedure than cracking open the skull, and it worked for Freeman since he had no surgical training. Freeman traveled the United States, visiting mental institutions, performing lobotomies on an assembly line, documenting it all with photographs. The majority of his patients were women and/or gay people and—in one case—a four-year-old child. Eventually his services were no longer needed, as lobotomies were phased out, replaced by more humane treatment with drugs and psychotherapy. Alverson's almost glacial approach to this terrible subject is undeniably provocative, and galvanized by Jeff Goldblum's truly creepy mad-scientist performance as Dr. Wallace Fiennes.
This is young Tye Sheridan's second collaboration with Alverson, and he is also listed as an Executive Producer. Here he plays Andy, a young man who works at an ice rink where his father—a forbidding German former figure skater (Udo Kier)—trains young girls. Andy is a silent presence, slouching on the edge of the rink, watching the girls in their grey skirts twirl and jump. He wanders through the bowels of the building, smoking, staring into space. His heavy woolen jacket, baggy trousers, boots, all emanate a kind of working-class 1950s aesthetic, no color brighter than a dull green. (Elizabeth Warn's work as costume designer is brilliant throughout.) Sheridan has barely 20 lines through the whole film. Andy is a teenager, but he is weighed down by anxiety, tormented by the absence of his mother. Long ago, she was put into an institution and Andy never learned her fate. After Andy's father dies, Dr. Wallace Fiennes —who treated Andy's mother for an unnamed illness—steps into the scene, inviting Andy to come along with him on one of his trips: he needs a photographer. Andy has ulterior motives for going along. He hopes to find out what happened to his mother. Turns out, the answer might be more than he can handle.
The road trip that follows is filled with a quiet menace difficult to describe, but Alverson's control over the images is total. The scenes operate almost like tableaux, people frozen in space, in time, but frozen in anguished mental states, similar to the photos Andy takes of Fiennes' patients, before and after the "procedure." People are traumatized beyond language, and Alverson—along with cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman, who also shot "Entertainment"—captures frozen trauma in the silences, colors, vistas. Nothing is welcoming, there's no "give" anywhere.
America looks emptied out of people. Even the motels Andy and Wallace hole up in seem to have no other occupants, and the silence buzzes down the empty dark hallways. This is a movie dominated by long hallways, hallways where people wait passively, all fight drained out of them. Moving from one isolated institution to the next, Fiennes' car drives along lonely roads, bordered by ranks of trees, highlighting the fact that the people in these institutions have been removed from society. Anything can be done to them and nobody would know. Fiennes truly believes he is helping his patients, but this belief manifests in a God complex. Goldblum taps into something truly terrifying here. He doesn't beg for sympathy for his character. There's a zealous gleam in his eye, but he's also a world-class manipulator, able to justify the most monstrous behavior.
People come and go in this world, like automatons. And if they're not automatons, they're on their way to being so. This is not a comforting view of America. Lobotomies were supposed to help suffering people, but of course they were used indiscriminately on people who didn't "fit in" to what was supposed to be mainstream American life, particularly oppressive in the conformist Eisenhower era. The 1950s in "The Mountain" is not just conformist, but frozen, atomized, dead. Warmth doesn't even seem to be a possibility. When Jack (Denis Lavant) enters the scene late in the game, his volatility and expressiveness seem to come not just from France but from another planet. He asks Dr. Fiennes to perform the procedure on his daughter Susan (Hannah Gross). Andy and Susan forge a fragile connection, but there doesn't seem to be any way for it to survive, not in this icy atmosphere. Susan is frighteningly passive. "The Mountain" doesn't seem built to contain Denis Lavant, and the ending comes down like an all-too-obvious hammer.
Production designer Jacqueline Abrahams creates interiors completely lacking in warmth and personalization. Composer Dan Lopatin and sound designer Gene Park underscore the action with low whining moans, persistent buzzes like an eternal headache, and reverberating echoes. In one scene, Andy slumps in a corner, watching Perry Como sing "Home on the Range" on the "Ed Sullivan Show," and the feeling of alienation is so total it's as if Andy was an astronaut, circling the earth, far away from anything connected to anything else.
In films like "New Jerusalem," "The Comedy," "Entertainment" and now "The Mountain," Alverson is aggressively un-commercial in his approach. His work is confrontational and polarizing. I appreciate his refusal to make a film that "appeals to all four quadrants."
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Midsommar
One thing is certain: writer/director Ari Aster comprehends stifling dread in the most profound sense. Via a grief-soaked story of ancestral vulnerability (you can’t pick your relatives, can you?), his terrifying and startlingly confident debut “Hereditary” proved as much. Sure, the film’s demonic mythology, skillfully gory images and creepy miniature models cinematographer Pawel Pogoszelski’s camera fiendishly navigated were all stuff of nightmares. But equally frightening in “Hereditary” was the grudge-filled and deeply claustrophobic domestic helplessness Aster infused into every shot and line of dialogue.
The filmmaker fidgets with that peculiar breathlessness once again throughout “Midsommar,” a terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same. In the midst of wide-open pastoral surroundings we may be, but Aster still wants us to crave and kick for oxygen, perhaps in a less claustrophobic and more agoraphobic fashion. The tangible dread in “Midsommar”—oftentimes alleviated by welcome flashes of comedy, always charged by tight choreography and Pogorzelski’s atmospheric compositions—is so recognizably out of “Hereditary” that you'll immediately distinguish the connective headspace responsible for both tales.
And yet, this superb psychedelic thriller sowed somewhere amid an outdoorsy “mother!,” a blindingly lit “Dogville” and fine, a contemporary “The Wicker Man,” is different by way of Aster’s loosened thematic restraint. You won’t exactly feel lost while disemboweling Aster’s inviting beast, but you can certainly argue that the sun never sets on the film’s cosmically vast subject matter: reaping notions of (white) male privilege, American entitlement (that literally pisses on what’s not theirs) and most prominently, female empowerment. And this is also a fitting way to describe the location where most of the story unfolds, under nearly 24-hour sun. We are in a remote, hidden-from-view Swedish village nested somewhere in Hälsingland, among tranquilly dressed Hårga folk who celebrate summer through initially quaint, but increasingly bizarre and downright petrifying rituals. There is only a slack sense of yesterday and tomorrow in Aster’s locale of choice where an endless string of hallucinatory traditions are exercised in broad daylight.
The folkloric practices start off appealingly enough—a misleading gust of peace (superbly countered by The Haxan Cloak’s skin-crawling score) breezes in the air while heady drugs dissolve in tempting cups of tea. But how did we even get here and find ourselves among these hippy-dippy proceedings cloaked in white linen? Well, we followed Florence Pugh, Aster’s second fearless female lead after Toni Collette, playing a grieving character marked by something unspeakable. In a deeply scarred, emotionally unrestricted performance—you might hear her screams in your nightmares—Pugh plays Dani, a graduate student aiming to put some distance between herself and an extreme case of trauma involving her bipolar sister. (A stunning prologue unravels the details of the tragic ordeal with top-shelf narrative economy.) And Dani isn’t on her own. In fact, she embarks upon the picturesque Scandinavian adventure as an outsider at first, tagging along some fellow scholars of academia, a group that includes her self-absorbed longtime boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor, convincingly egotistical). Also in the clan are Christian’s buddies Josh (William Jackson Harper)—headed to the festivities for academic research—the blabber-mouthed Mark (Will Poulter, so hysterically douchey that he earns the jester’s cap he’d wear later on), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), the brainchild of the operation as well as a member of the makeshift family that would host the group.
When the clique arrives in Sweden and joins others alongside Connie and Simon, a couple played by Ellora Torchia and Archie Madekwe respectively, Aster forgoes the aforesaid narrative economy for something sinister. Aided by production designer Henrik Svensson’s deceptively simple work and Andrea Flesch’s distressingly repetitive, angelically Nordic-embroidered costumes, he establishes a creepy sense of being stuck amid compartmentalized fields of boxy sleeping huts, triangular temples and elaborate dining settings. Soon enough (but never hurriedly), the flower-power euphoria thins out in “Midsommar.” Victimized people vanish one after the other and giggles assume an even more uncomfortable dimension—you will reach the climax of your sniggers during a truly hilarious ceremony that puts the last nail in the coffin of Dani’s doomed relationship with Christian. It all sounds crazy, but you can barely blame the clueless tourists for not making a more concerted effort to escape, or at least to decipher the cult’s ulterior motives. The sneaky hex Aster casts has that tight a grip, on both the characters and the audience.
Some will be troubled by the excess in “Midsommar.” The unburdened surplus of lengthy customs does overshadow some of the film’s potentially ripe avenues of interest, such as the scholarly rivalry between Christian and Josh, as well as racial dynamics that are only briefly hinted at. But the invigorating reward here is the ultimate sovereignty you will find in Dani, a surrogate for any woman who ever excused an inconsiderate male, rationalized his unkind words or thoughtless non-apologies. She experiences a liberation that might just feel like therapy.
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The Unloved, Part 67: Mortal Engines
It would have been fun to talk about how Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" movies are a beautifully artificial fantasy, a tinkerer's homemade storybook, a larger-than-life tribute to silent cinema and a return to the obsessive world in which Jackson can't help but live. But those movies are loved by more people than just me! People love to see stories they know already, ideas and aesthetics with which they're already familiar.
The reason "Mortal Engines" failed despite superficial similarities to Peter Jackson's adventure yarns and his name in the credits is that this was not a world most moviegoers had visited, and though it's filled with the kind of action most people would recognize from "Star Wars," it isn't "Star Wars." That's how it goes now. You can get close, it seems, but without the names you've got nothing but a potential future cult movie. I always have high hopes for movies like this because I want desperately for competition to edge out established names and stories. It's only movies like this, with personality to spare and cockeyed intrusions in established formulae, that offer any credible competition now. I wanted better for "Mortal Engines," but I'm not surprised America let it down.
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Batman Films on 4K Offer Interesting Contrast to Modern Superhero Movies
Long before a new superhero movie came out every quarter, Warner Bros. and Tim Burton redefined the genre forever with 1989’s “Batman.” Three decades after that blockbuster shaped pop culture, WB has released it and its three sequels in 4K Blu-ray form, allowing young viewers a chance to see how superhero movies have changed since the ‘80s and ‘90s, and those who remember this unusual franchise the opportunity to revisit it.
The 4K releases have been controversial in the way some of them, particularly Burton’s first film, have been color timed in a way that arguably doesn’t reflect their original theatrical release. A slight change in hue can really alter any film, but especially one that relies so heavily on dark shades like black and blue. And “Batman” does look a little “off” to me, although it’s been 30 years since I saw it three days in a row as a young teenager on opening weekend. The other three look better, especially “Returns,” and all of them have strong sound mixes.
As for the movies themselves, what’s striking first about “Batman” is how tactile it feels compared to the modern superhero movie. Actual set design, detailed costume/make-up work, and practical effects make it feel less like a cartoon than the CGI-heavy affairs that make millions now. It’s funny that a movie that probably felt like garish overload in 1989 looks downright tame now in how it allows its plot time to breathe, and actors a chance to build characters. What’s most noticeable is how simple it is when compared to modern blockbusters that incorporate dozens of characters, most played by household names. “Batman” is a four-person show: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, and Tim Burton (with honorary mentions to Danny Elfman and Robert Wuhl). It feels almost small compared to the MCU and DCEU, allowing Keaton and Nicholson to construct their characters off each other—Keaton’s Batman being the straight man to the insanity of Nicholson’s Joker. On that note, Nicholson is truly inspired here, giving the kind of bonkers performance that's too rarely allowed in blockbusters of any era.
Speaking of bonkers, it is still hard to believe that “Batman Returns” got made. Controversial at the time and relatively unsuccessful, it is now viewed by many as the best of this era of Batman films and one of Burton’s best. But from the very beginning, Burton’s vision feels more daring and confident than in the first film, and he gets more than he could have dreamed of getting out of Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny DeVito as The Penguin. Watching it now reminds one how few auteur-driven films we get in the modern superhero era. This is undeniably a Tim Burton movie, full of his influences and vision in every frame. With the occasional exception (“Black Panther,” “Wonder Woman”), superhero movies today feel like the product of a committee more than an artist. What scared people about “Batman Returns” in 1992 is what makes it so revelatory today. It’s one of the best and strangest movies of its kind ever made.
But "Batman Returns" earned $100 million less than the film that came before, and so there was upheaval. Everyone was replaced, including Burton and Keaton, although the former does get a producer credit on 1995’s “Batman Forever,” a movie that was designed to bring fun back into the Bat-verse. Val Kilmer replaced Keaton, Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey filled the villain roles of Two-Face and The Riddler, and Nicole Kidman was the love interest. What could go wrong?
Watching it today, it seems obvious that new director Joel Schumacher was trying to do something that felt like Burton’s films (at least the first one) but he didn't have the vision or passion to do it. “Batman Forever” starts promisingly enough—the casting is strong and early scenes with Jones and Carrey are effective—but it gets weaker as it goes along. If the Burton Batman films shows us something we miss in today’s movies about men in tights, the Schumacher ones show us how far we’ve come. This is a hollow, clunky film.
Although it’s masterful compared to “Batman and Robin,” one of the truly worst blockbusters ever made. Everything that’s wrong about “Forever” is amplified in “Robin,” a movie that's shockingly incompetent at times. It’s crystal clear that Schumacher and everyone else behind the camera was just taking a job for the money. That’s what happened over the course of these films—a passion project became a cash grab. Everyone who makes a superhero movie should consider on which side of that spectrum history will place them.
Get your Batman Blu-rays here.
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Annabelle Comes Home
“It scares us just thinking about it.”
Before calling upon its own time-spanning cinematic universe of cursed objects and malevolent spirits, James Wan’s “The Conjuring”—among the most terrifying horror films of the 21st Century—opened with these words back in 2013. They were spoken by a pair of young nurses haunted by Annabelle, a bizarrely compelling collector’s item doll seized by a sinister presence aiming to eventually possess a human spirit. The 1968 case of Annabelle served as our isolated introduction to Ed and Lorraine Warren (played throughout the series by the dedicated duo Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga with spiritual conviction); a pair of religious paranormal researchers who contained the evil in their room of ominous conduits before “The Conjuring” launched into its own story. As Ed Warren put it, it was just better to keep the genie in the bottle instead of destroying the doll.
I realize this context reads a bit like homework as most “something-something universe” summaries often do. Nevertheless, it is an important set up for the latest and only sufficiently creepy franchise spinoff “Annabelle Comes Home,” which takes that same genie out of the bottle some years after the nurses got rid of it. In a way, this is the chronological “Annabelle” movie we all secretly wanted while watching “The Conjuring” years ago; it is actually surprising that it took nearly half a dozen sequels and underwhelming byproducts like “The Curse of La Llorona” or “The Nun” to show us what happened when the Warrens added another item into their growing family of locked-away demons. If only the half-baked story could also meet our expectations, or at least match the logic of the previous two “Annabelle” films.
In this installment by debut director Gary Dauberman (the scribe for the earlier two Annabelle movies), we pick up exactly where the opening scene of “The Conjuring” left off. After an eventful car ride that announces the severity of Annabelle’s menace, the Warrens decide to contain the doll in a blessed glass case in their residence, away from the eyes and ears of their precocious 10-year-old daughter Judy, played by the soulful “Gifted” actress Mckenna Grace with astuteness beyond her years. A totally normal kid considering the circumstances—who amongst us would have turned out okay if we were raised in a haunted house by demonologist parents constantly making the headlines?—Judy gets bullied in school all the same, having trouble even recruiting enough friends to come to her birthday celebration.
While most of the kids are mean to her, Judy seems to have lucked out with her affable babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman)—the charming teenager happily signs on for the task to look after the troubled kid while the Warrens take off on an overnight trip. A gifted clairvoyant like her mother—she even gets her own “I see dead people” scene—Judy appears to be unusually mature about her views on death and afterlife, at least enough to advise Mary Ellen’s firebrand of a friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) who still harbors wounds about her deceased father. If only that were adequate for Daniela—her pain proves to be so deep that she ends up being the one to sneak into the forbidden room of artifacts to communicate with her father, only to involuntarily awaken whatever’s inside Annabelle.
Along with his cinematographer Michael Burgess, Dauberman swiftly utilizes every nook and cranny of the Warren house for maximum spookiness—predictably, the well-choreographed scenes in the artifact room are the film’s strongest. And yet, while it’s fun to be in the company of an all-girls squad who have to survive a sleepover fright fest, the scares of “Annabelle Comes Home” don’t push the envelope much further than creaky floorboards and teased horrors hidden from camera’s view only to be revealed seconds later for generic jump scares.
But the real problem here is the lack of a sincere story. Daniela’s initial and completely implausible break into the prohibited room—clearly marked with various warning signs—followed by her opening of Annabelle’s case labeled with a massive “Positively Do Not Open” notice, makes very little sense. We only vaguely comprehend how a curious teen could be that fearless, and only mildly sympathize with her reasons to stubbornly put everyone in danger’s way. Meanwhile the script (also by Dauberman, from a story by Wan) doesn’t grant Daniela the generosity of smarts. For the most part, her actions and bravery seem senselessly obtuse, begging the question, why can’t she just ask the Warrens to safely initiate a connection with her father, if it could be done at all?
Still, “Annabelle Comes Home” isn’t entirely without its guilty pleasures. “The Conjuring” universe has always sported top-notch period costuming, and the latest chapter follows suit with Leah Butler’s skillful designs that tiptoe around the transitional looks of the early ‘70s. Dauberman also does right by the wacky humor of the franchise, which he delivers through a character named Bob, so adorably smitten with Mary Ellen that he pledges to survive his own little corner of horrors. Eventually, Dauberman hits an unexpectedly sweet note with the accumulation of various female coming-of-age stories. But “Annabelle Comes Home” proves it’s perhaps time to put the genie back in its bottle and bring this particular creepy doll series to a decisive close.
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Cinepocalypse 2019: Into the Dark: Culture Shock
Last night's festivities at the Music Box Theater's Cinepocalypse festival included a special presentation of “Into the Dark: Culture Shock,” the next film in Hulu and Blumhouse’s monthly holiday horror series, which also had its trailer release today. This July 4th-based installment, directed by rising filmmaker Gigi Saul Guerrero, feels very much like it came from Blumhouse—it could easily take place in the worlds of “The Purge” or “Get Out,” while telling of a Mexican immigrant who comes to America and encounters disturbing artifice. But "Culture Shock" has an anger, mystery, and unflinching perspective that makes it stand out, serving up the type of socio-political horror that is both compelling to watch and primed to start some debates.
The movie starts with an opening credit sequence that flashes news clips and shocking, foreshadowing imagery, accompanied by “America the Beautiful”—very “Purge”-like down to the song, and maybe an opening credit sequence worth skipping. But then "Culture Shock" throws you right into the life of Marisol (Martha Higareda in a very strong performance) a pregnant Mexican woman (the result of a traumatic rape) who wants to get to America, a place that the men around her call “super nice.” There are so many factors that say Marisol shouldn't do the journey—including that she's due to give birth any day now, she's already been ripped off trying to migrate before—but she persists. Guerrero has a very lean approach to her storytelling in this part of the story, showing matter-of-factly the unpredictable process of how a woman like Marisol would get from small village to the American border—including all of the people who would rip her and others off along the way. It’s telling within the big picture of "Culture Shock" that this part has a horror element of its own, showing the vulnerability that she and others have when venturing through darkness to an uncertain destination.
Marisol does make it to the border—in a tense scene that involves being chased by murderous cartel members—and suddenly wakes up in a hyper dreamy, cream-colored world. She’s in a town called Cape Joy, and it’s scary as hell: Everyone is indeed super nice, including her host Betty (Barbara Crampton, her piercing gaze and smile working overtime) and the other pastel-wearing, smile-plastered residents, who are working to build a 4th of July display at a gazebo. It’s not long before Marisol starts to notice the artifice of this world—just as Marisol is shown to be heroically stubborn in the previous chapters, she's incredibly conscious of what’s around her. Soon, she starts to unravel the truth about the America before her eyes.
Written by James Benson, Efren Hernandez and Gigi Saul Guerrero, “Culture Shock” has characters who are straight-forward enough (like a man who migrates with her and is then transformed, named Santo [Richard Cabral]) and an ultimate horror scheme that comes with equal shock and obviousness. Whether you more or less agree with the movie and its critique on the United States—which does not present America as place that anyone, citizen or immigrant, should simply accept as is—you get what the movie wants to say.
Yet while those factors might sink some other movies, “Culture Shock” boasts Guerrero's assured, scrappy direction, which is divided into three very different looking thirds, each with their own visual edge. And when it wants to be gross (like listening to and watching the robotic citizens of Cape Joy stuff food into their mouths) or wants to be in-your-face with violence (as in a third-act explosion of gore) it works. The world of “Culture Shock” always feels like a tangible B-movie nightmare, and it can be as visceral as it is thoroughly American.
Guerrero was in attendance for the screening, and spoke a little bit afterward about the process of making “Culture Shock.” She talked about coming into the project, when it was only a script, and with an infectious smile shared that she told the people at Blumshouse that she was going to make it “so Mexican.” Throughout “Culture Shock,” there are important cultural flourishes—even the way that it flashes Spanish credits in its opening credits, or along with its fully subtitled first third. It feels specific, yet inclusive. The film welcomes all to see America through the eyes of a migrant, and it’s not a vision of horror you'll soon forget.
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Anna
If “Anna” were made by any other filmmaker, it could be dismissed as little more than a shameless attempt to copy the offbeat and visually stylish action epics of French filmmaker Luc Besson that goes disastrously wrong right from the start and only gets worse as things progress. In fact, “Anna” was written and directed by Besson himself and it still feels like a misfired rehash of his greatest hits. In the wake of the enormous box-office failure of his previous film, the wildly ambitious sci-fi saga “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," it makes a certain amount of sense that he might want to retreat to something a little more familiar as a way of reestablishing his commercial standing, but even long-standing fans of his will find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for this startlingly lazy bit of by-the-numbers hackwork.
As the film opens in 1990, Anna (Sasha Luss), a beautiful young Russian, is selling nesting dolls in a Moscow market when she is spotted by a scout for a French modeling agency and sent off to Paris to work. Before long, she catches the eye of a fellow countryman, a wealthy businessman who is one of the investors in the firm, using the money that he makes illegally selling weapons to the enemies of the world. After a couple of months of flirtation, it seems as she is about to go to bed with him until she puts an end to the whole thing by cooly putting a bullet in his head.
Three years earlier, the brilliant-but-downtrodden Anna was living on the fringes of society with an abusive criminal boyfriend and a desperate need to escape her horrible circumstances. This escape comes in the form of Alex ((Luke Evans), a KGB agent who recognizes the usefulness of her combination of beauty, brains and ambition and offers her a chance to join the organization and work with him and his boss, the imperious Olga (Helen Mirren, evidently using this film as an audition reel for the role of Edna in the inevitable live-action remake of “The Incredibles.”), with the promise that she will be free to go after five years of service.
Back in 1990, Anna is maintaining her cover as an up-and-coming model, even going so far as to establish a romance with fellow model named Maud (Lera Abova) while knocking off the occasional target—generally while wearing something of a fetishy nature—and carrying on a clandestine romance with Alex in her spare time. Eventually, Anna’s cover is blown by Lenny Miller (Cillian Murphy), an American CIA agent who wants to put her to use for his own particular ends to settle a gruesome score depicted in an otherwise mystifying prologue. With no other alternative, Anna agrees and even begins sleeping with him as well. Before long, however, Anna just wants to be rid of all entanglements and deploys her cunning, sexuality and ability to kill many people while wearing what appears to be the entire Victoria’s Secret spring line.
At this point, some of you with longer memories may be thinking that this description of “Anna” makes it sound quite similar to “La Femme Nikita,” the 1990 action hit that marked Besson’s major international breakthrough. In fact, it is so similar in so many ways that it feels as if Besson dug up an early draft of that screenplay and simply shot that after changing the character names and some of the locations. (This might explain why the story insists on taking place around 1990 even though the technology employed by the characters throughout is almost distractingly anachronistic.) Now if Besson had chosen to rework such familiar material as a way of exploring the change in gender attitudes in genre filmmaking since the release of “La Femme Nikita,” that might have been an interesting approach (especially considering how the film’s release comes on the heels of several allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape, that have been leveled against Besson over the last year or so), but the only significant addition here is a distractingly fragmented time structure in which a shocking revelation is made and then the story rewinds to spend a chunk of time explaining the backstory behind the new development. This approach adds nothing of value or interest to the proceedings and has clearly been deployed in an attempt to distract viewers from recognizing just how predictable everything really is.
I have been a passionate fan of Besson’s films for years and have embraced his films—yes, even “Valerian”—for their impeccable and distinctive style, the intricately choreographed action sequences, the cheerfully oddball narratives often studded with moments of welcome wacko humor and the charismatic performances from the actresses who have been the central figures of most of his stories over the years. Amazingly, virtually none of these elements are on display here. Instead of the infectious and almost gleeful energy that usually drives his films, Besson just seems to be going through the motions, and his work, despite the contributions of such regular collaborators as cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, editor Julien Rey and composer Eric Serra, is as bland as can be. Aside from two admittedly standout sequences—Anna’s debut as an assassin in a crowded restaurant, in which she ends up using broken plates as lethal weapons, and a montage that juxtaposes her modeling and murdering gigs—the actions beats are ho-hum and the entire thing is lacking any real sense of humor. (The film has one ingenious idea—the conceit of a cutthroat killer going undercover in the equally cutthroat world of modelling—but does nothing with it other than the aforementioned montage and an off-putting bit where Anna gets revenge on a creepy photographer seemingly inspired by Terry Richardson.) As for Sasha Luss, she is undeniably gorgeous but does not bring much of anything else to the table here—she certainly demonstrates none of the undeniable screen charisma displayed by the likes of Anne Parillaud, Natalie Portman, Milla Jovovich and Cara Delevingne in their various screen collaborations with Besson.
Of course, Besson has made bad movies in the past but even in clunkers like “The Family” and “The Lady,” he was at least making some kind of discernible effort. “Anna,” on the other hand, is so aimless and listless that you can hardly believe that he was even on the set for the majority of its production. All he has to offer here is the aforementioned two decent action scenes, some interesting underwear and a Helen Mirren performance that is mildly amusing, though it will not take up too much time in any future Lifetime Achievement highlight reels. Of course, there will be some who will decry that someone under the kind of cloud of suspicion that Besson is still facing should not be allowed to make and release any film in this current climate. Ironicaly, if this had actually happened to “Anna,” though, it would have only been doing Besson a favor.
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Wild Rose
It’s the stuff of classic country tunes, this tale of heartache, honky-tonkin’ and hard-won redemption. It’s also the stuff of every movie about an underdog who dreams of music stardom, with its hardscrabble origins, a raw talent, inner demons and a final triumph upon a glittering stage.
But “Wild Rose” trashes those tropes and repeatedly upends your expectations of how a film like this is supposed to play out -- how it should look, how it should sound. It also has the benefit of an electrifying, star-making performance in Irish actress Jessie Buckley. As the title character, she is truly wild in all the best and worst possible ways: unfiltered and unpredictable, manic and magnetic, a charmer and a child. But while director Tom Harper gives Buckley the opportunity to take over the screen and mesmerize us, he also knows well enough to sit back and watch and listen during the quiet moments. When Buckley’s Rose allows herself to be vulnerable, to expose herself to the uncomfortable revelations that come with introspection, it can be as powerful as when she’s belting out a song from the heart.
From the start, “Wild Rose” has an unexpected premise: It’s about a young Scottish woman who aspires to be a country singer. (In an amusing running bit, she rolls her eyes and exasperatedly corrects anyone who refers to the genre as “Country & Western.”) Rose was raised in a working-class section of Glasgow, the only child of a longtime bakery attendant (a subtly no-nonsense Julie Walters, providing tough love). But she believes she should have been born in America, and that she belongs in Nashville.
When we first see Rose, she’s getting out of prison after a year behind bars on a drug charge, strutting away in a white-fringed leather jacket and matching cowboy boots that provide a stark contrast amid the gray Scottish skies and reflect her isolation. It’s telling that the first stop she makes is for a quick romp with her boyfriend (to whom she sings Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” instead of ringing the doorbell) rather than to her mother’s house, where her two young children await. They carry the country legend names of Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) and Lyle (Adam Mitchell). They are 8 and 5. They barely know her -- and she has no clue how to get to know them. As compelling as the flashy musical numbers can be in “Wild Rose,” seeing Rose struggle awkwardly to connect with her children during more intimate moments packs an even greater punch.
Despite being a single mother of two in her early 20s, Rose is still totally selfish at this point. A brash loner who says whatever’s on her mind -- usually in the most profane way possible, which is both shocking and adorable -- she has a tendency to undermine whatever progress she makes toward becoming responsible and reliable. She’s got swagger for days, but she can’t help getting in her own way. The great tension of “Wild Rose” comes not from wondering whether she’ll ever make it to Nashville to live her Grand Ole Opry dreams but rather whether she and her children will ever share a hug.
And yet for all her failures and frustrations, Rose comes alive when she sings. This is true both on stage at the local bar where they offer country line dancing lessons and in her own bubble of blissful oblivion, vacuuming with her ever-present headphones on while working as a housekeeper for a wealthy family. Sophie Okonedo brings a welcome sense of warmth and a different kind of maternal energy as the posh wife and mom who starts out as Rose’s employer but becomes a fan and maybe even a friend.
But just when you think you know where that relationship -- and Rose’s trajectory -- are headed, “Wild Rose” switches things up on you, the screenplay from Nicole Taylor offering consistent surprises. Something else that sets the film apart: its soundtrack of country music tunes from a who’s-who of powerhouse female artists, from Wynonna Judd to Bonnie Raitt to Trisha Yearwood to Kacey Musgraves in the quickest of cameos for those who are paying attention. “Wild Rose” may sound like a familiar tune, but you’ve never heard it performed quite like this.
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Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
Within minutes of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s new documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” it’s obvious that the distinguished author is a born storyteller. Her words are precious, perfectly placed in her melodic speech. Even her childhood memories come off as tiny epics, revealing some part of her, and by extension, some part of us in the process. Her reverence and awe at the power of the written word are as strong as ever. With a knowing smile, she revisits her memories in one-on-one style interviews, looking directly at the camera—at us—to tell her story. A chorus of scholars, critics and friends join her to sing praises for her work that she’s too modest to bring up herself.
Today, we know Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winner, a staple on high school reading lists, and the occasional target of a book ban. But even as a child, she noticed the world around her differently. In the documentary, she remembers her grandfather bragging about having read the Bible five times. She thought it odd, but later, she would recognize that in his time, it was illegal for Black people to read, so his accomplishment was an act of subversion and instilled in her the feeling that the written word mattered. Morrison also recalled the childhood memory of a Black girl her age who prayed for blue eyes. She realized that the pain the girl was in was caused by generations of racism. That memory would become the basis for her first book, The Bluest Eye.
Throughout the documentary, its subjects explain the impossible barriers Morrison faced in her career, including the literary establishment who undervalued her abilities and the financial challenges as a single mother. White critics lamented her insistence on centering the Black experience, like when the New York Times declared Morrison too talented a writer to “remain a recorder of black provincial life” in its review of her second book, Sula. Morrison is later shown batting away similarly ignorant questions about her work in older interviews. Almost immediately in the documentary, she addresses the white gaze and explains with the patience of a teacher why whiteness was assumed to be the norm and why her work was so threatening to those assumptions. She touches on craft, her writing routine and how she writes about the Black experience for an audience that doesn’t need it spelled out for them.
Among the voices of admirers are fans and friends Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, and Sonia Sanchez. It’s an incredible array of testimonies, but I wish it went beyond unbridled platitudes. These are deeply sharp women, and I know they have more to say about Morrison’s work, like Oprah, who not only championed her books on her TV show, she produced the film of Morrison’s unflinchingly raw novel “Beloved,” but these moments pass by quickly in the film. Davis mentions how Morrison brought up other Black writers at Random House, where she worked as an editor, but her interview stops short of what it meant that not only did she succeed in this field but also opened doors for others. There is not a word of criticism of Morrison’s work that isn’t meant to be scorned at for its shallow, racist conclusions, which gives the documentary a very positive tone but feels like an incomplete portrait of a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history and its present.
Greenfield-Sanders, a documentarian known for working on the HBO anthology series like “The Latino List,” “The Out List” and “The Trans List,” is used to compiling different strands of stories into one greater tapestry. One issue with this approach is its stop-and-go nature of jumping from archival photos and television interviews to those taken in a present-day photo studio. Interspersed throughout the interviews are examples of Black art that illustrate things mentioned in Morrison’s books or in others’ anecdotes. The collection is impressive and thoroughly researched, but the extra additions slow the rhythm of this story just enough to lose some momentum.
Still, the documentary has the power to introduce Toni Morrison to a new generation of readers and share new stories with longtime fans. We get an empowering impression of the woman behind those words. We get a deeper appreciation of what it means for her to have published books and have them resonate with audiences. And we get a better sense of the behind-the-scenes struggles Morrison won against pay inequality and discrimination. Morrison’s legacy is more than just the titles on a reading list, and this documentary will likely help many viewers see just how monumental her accomplishments remain.
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A Bigger Splash
In spite of the seeming preponderance of contemporary celebrity artists, it’s relatively rare for a great painter to be successful in his or her own lifetime. That’s useful to bear in mind while watching “A Bigger Splash,” a 1973 film directed by Jack Hazan focusing on several years in the life of the British painter David Hockney.
This unusual and sometimes unsettling film is a kind of staged documentary that could not have been made without the cooperation of people who were going though genuine challenges in their life at the time. Its theme is encapsulated by something Hockney says early on: “When love goes wrong, there’s more than two people that suffer.” In “Splash” (and yes, Luca Guadagnino, for reasons of his own that are probably pretty indefensible, lifted this movie’s title for his own not-bad 2015 remake of the 1969 French thriller “La Piscine”), the love that goes wrong is between Hockney and Peter Schlesinger, who figures as a model in many of Hockney’s famous “pool paintings” of the early 1970s, many of which were painted in California.
But “A Bigger Splash” doesn’t have much water or sun, except in paintings or staged dream sequences. After the pouty Schlesinger leaves Hockney, the painter, whose platinum blonde hair and oversize black-rimmed spectacles made him an iconic pop art figure even as his painting split the difference between Warhol (the pop feel), Matisse (the color) and Francis Bacon (the anxiety, more understated here of course), falls into paralysis. He consults with friends, including the designer Celia Birtwill. He puts off gallery owners and managers. The critic and curator Henry Geldzahler comes to visit, bearing flowers.
Cheerfully pompous, Geldzahler discourages Hockney from going to New York for too long. “You’ll be competing with Milton Avery and Edward Hopper…the great New York painters. Southern California…you have already established yourself as the great Southern California painter.” Hockney absorbs all this but does not react.
Instead he torments himself with imagined scenes of Schlesinger making love with another man. And dreams of Schlesinger in white briefs, entering the scenes of past paintings. In his studio he takes a knife to a near-completed canvas, destroying it utterly.
He is then hit by inspiration. Two images, one of a semi-nude male figure seemingly at the bottom of a pool, the other of a fully dressed man at pool’s edge, peering down.
He conducts photographic studies of what he wants. These are shot at the pool of director Tony Richardson, at his house in the south of France. Nevertheless, this painting will conclude Hockney’s Los Angeles series. The manager who poses at Richardson’s pool doesn’t have the “right hair.”
The “right hair” belongs to Schlesinger. So Hockney goes to a tatty drag show where Schlesinger is working lights and screws up the courage to ask him to model one last time.
The resultant painting, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” had up until recently held the record for the highest price paid for a work of art at an auction — it sold for a little over $90 million in 2018. It’s still the highest-priced painting, as the piece that nudged it out of the artwork record was Jeff Koons’ sculpture “Rabbit,” which got $91 million.
This information is not appended to the restoration of this movie that premiered in June. The process as Hazan depicts it and, as it seems, Hockney lived it, has nothing to do with money. Yes, Hockney in the film is clearly well-off enough that he can piss off and mourn his lost love without the wolf approaching the door. Although the concerns shown by some people who live in close proximity to if not reliance on the Hockney machine of the time do reflect various levels of economic anxiety.
That Hockney’s arguable self-indulgence eventually led to the creation of a landmark of 20th century modern art is not given much weight here either, as the film is a contemporary portrait of the artist. What the movie, with its combinations of staged conversations and encounters and intimate documentary glimpses, is finally about is how a certain artist has to work. Hockney doesn’t theorize or make grand pronouncements or whine about how lonely he is. He marks time until something within him moves, and he’s compelled to paint. Martin Scorsese has praised this film, and given that he sometimes used to say, “If I could explain the impetus behind my films in words, I wouldn’t have to make the film” (or words to that effect), it’s easy to see why. Hockney gets his feelings out, justifies them to himself, though painting. And it’s revealing that the film is framed by scenes staged very late in the process of making the film, in which Hockney is seen to have pretty much all but forgotten Schlesinger.
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