Universal’s The Mummy, meant to kick off its Avengers-style cinematic universe, tries to be both a horror film in the style of 1932’s Mummy and a lighthearted action-adventure like 1999’s Brendan Fraser-led version. As a result, it fails to be very good at either. The darker aspects, which involve mummy-infected zombies, rely too much on CGI and on the peril of characters that aren’t given enough background for us to care about them, while the moments of action and adventure feel tonally off, particularly as the majority of the script’s jokes fall painfully flat.

The best part of this new version is far and away the mummy herself, played by French-Algerian actress Sofia Boutella. Ahmanet has the regal look and manner of an ancient Egyptian ruler, and her backstory makes her both scary and relatable, rendering Boutella at least as effective as the many actors who have played on-screen mummies before. Those actors, which include Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Tom Tyler, Arnold Vosloo, Jet Li and Dwayne Johnson, have generally played their mummy with wide-eyed rage. This Mummy’s Ahmanet is strong and powerful but also rightly aggrieved after her pharaoh dad sires a son, which in sexist Ancient Egypt robs her of her birthright of becoming pharaoh herself. After selling her soul to the Egyptian god Set, she murders her father, his wife and their baby son, but she’s caught before she is able to sacrifice her own lover and welcome Set into the mortal world to rule alongside her.

Flash forward 5,000 years and roguish smuggler Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) unearths Ahmanet’s tomb after stealing a map from beautiful archaeologist Jenny (Annabelle Wallis) following a night of passion. Morton, played by Cruise as a less intelligent, more irritating version of Indiana Jones, ends up as the object of the resurrected Ahmanet’s affection, and the driving force of the film is her desire to use a ancient bejeweled dagger to turn Morton’s body into a vessel for Set. ¬¬

The film’s portrayal of women stretches beyond tone-deaf and into near-comic implausibility. The audience is asked to believe that two beautiful, smart and powerful women—one a living archaeologist and the other a 5,000 year-old undead queen—would fight over a rude, middle-aged man with an inflated ego and obvious drinking problem. Worse, the “twist” here, which will presumably allow Cruise’s character to take part in future entries of Universal’s proposed “Dark Universe,” results from an act of undead-on-undead sexual assault during a fight that is so obviously comparable to a scene of domestic violence that its inclusion is offensive and in incredibly poor taste. The Mummy’s sexism is particularly noticeable coming on the heels of Patty Jenkins’ excellent Wonder Woman, and is comparable to Ridley Scott’s recent Alien: Covenant in that it takes a brand that previously featured excellent female characters (Rachel Weisz’s spunky Evelyn was a great co-lead in 1999’s The Mummy and its first sequel) and suddenly, inexplicably silences and tortures them.

This poor treatment of women is particularly shocking from director Alex Kurtzman, who served as a writer and producer on the female-led TV series “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Alias” and “Fringe.” And it is especially egregious as it is the women who are doing the best work here. Boutella deserved a much better movie for her character. Her movement is suitably villainous, but her eyes and face are torn between sadness and anger, creating depths in Ahmanet that outshine the script. And the role of Jenny was obviously written to serve as little more than a source of expository mummy info and a love interest for Cruise, but Wallis infuses her underwritten role with such intelligence and physical gravitas that she outshines him in every scene they share.

It looks as if Universal’s Dark Universe will go forward with or without the success of The Mummy, as Johnny Depp is already lined up to play the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem is set as Frankenstein’s monster and Bill Condon is slated to direct a new version of Bride of Frankenstein. And, of course, Russell Crowe plays a large supporting role in this film as Dr. Jekyll. One hopes that as they move forward, the minds behind this shared universe will create films appropriate for our times and not relics, like The Mummy, that feel more out of date than their source material.

The post The Mummy appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Sibling rivalry, especially in love, has been the premise of plenty of romantic comedies, but I Love You Both, written by and starring siblings Doug and Kristin Archibald and directed by Doug, isn’t about a vicious rivalry. The debut is low key, almost to a fault, portraying inseparable twins who want to spend all their time together. When they’re not together, they’re texting or calling each other. The introduction of a potential love interest for one naturally means the duo will now be a trio. But confusion over where exactly that attraction is directed leads to miscommunication, a growing divide between siblings and frustration over potentially losing a best friend.

In a rare moment without her ever-present brother by her side, Krystal (Kristin) meets Andy (Lucas Neff), a charmingly wild-haired elementary school art teacher, at a coworker’s house party. Krystal likes him instantly and introduces him to Donny (Doug). The trio lounge on a bed discussing Krystal and Donny’s website and app ideas, which Andy is impressed by and encourages—even the one where users would just post pictures of fat exes. He invites the twins to an auction-dinner party the following week to meet a guy who works in the industry. Krystal, for her part, recently broke up with her boyfriend/coworker and claims she isn’t looking to get back into a relationship so soon. All three leave the party thinking Krystal and Andy are going to be a thing.

She makes eyes at Andy throughout that auction party but senses a shift when he lets Donny buy his painting of a pig with Monopoly money. So does Donny. Even when Andy invites only Krystal to a wine bar, she interprets his paying the bill early as a sign that he isn’t enjoying himself and wants to leave. Confused by her rebuffed behavior, Andy starts hanging out solely with Donny, going to art shows and bars. Krystal starts telling Donny she’s so happy he has Andy in his life. The twins act as though Donny and Andy are dating—and seriously—despite the fact that they have only kissed cheeks and hugged. Krystal’s loneliness is mostly self-inflicted, but she nonetheless begins to mope jealously and return to thoughts of her ex. An invite on a weekend getaway with Donny and Andy makes her third-wheel status unavoidable.

The piecemeal nature of Andy’s growing relationship with the siblings plays more into shifting emotions rather than simultaneous attraction, the latter seemingly what the Archibalds are going for here. It doesn’t undermine the premise, but Krystal’s frustration with Andy certainly weakens the surprise of the film’s finale. Andy’s actions on the trip shake up everything she thinks she knows about his feelings for Donny and lead her to sever all ties from him, for herself and her brother. In a display of their complete trust, Donny doesn’t ask that many questions about it. The whole film is more quirkily deadpan than dramatic, rendering the love triangle of sorts as a series of stumbling miscommunications and misadventures.

This stretch of time when Krystal and Donny let Andy into their lives is portrayed as a growing period, testing their ability to be apart and to selflessly remove themselves from each other’s day-to-day lives. Some may criticize the film for building romantic drama on a whole lot of nothing, but it’s refreshingly realistic and honest to see characters interpret not only major attraction but commitment from small actions. And Kristin and Doug Archibald cleverly leave it up to the audience to make their own judgments about Andy’s feelings throughout. The romance-free finale surprises, as does the ambiguity given the title of the film, but I Love You Both is a capable debut that offers a different perspective on growth and sibling bonds.

The post I Love You Both appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) has been making Westerns for over 40 years, but now he pays the bills using the low timbre of his unmistakable voice to sell barbecue sauce on the radio. It’s a reasonable enough existence. He calls his agent hoping for new scripts, settling for scraps. When he’s not working, he’s smoking tons of weed with his former co-star/current dealer Jeremy (Nick Offerman). They get blazed, eat Chinese food and watch old Buster Keaton movies.

Through Jeremy, Lee meets Charlotte (Laura Prepon), a hard partying stand-up comic who doesn’t care that he’s older than her father. Their romance has a strained credibility, feeling a little like a protracted fantasy, but it’s sweet and fascinating and far more entertaining than it is mildly creepy. All told, it’s the makings of a fun, quirky little character study. This, it should be noted, is the only film in 2017 where you can see Sam Elliott gone off the molly for an extended sequence.

Except before all of this, Lee discovers he’s dying of cancer. He’s had haunting, beautifully shot dreams playing on the cinematic memories he’s created throughout his career. Now he’s got to reconnect with his estranged daughter Lucy (Krysten Ritter) before he croaks and play out some pretty tired dramatic beats from a handful of other similarly themed films. It’s a shame, too, because this really could have been something special.

Writer-director Brett Haley previously worked with Elliott on I’ll See You in My Dreams and was inspired to create a vehicle for the legendary actor to showcase just how talented he’s always been. In that regard, the film is a rousing success, providing a functional framework for Elliott to flex his chops as a leading man. His weathered, weary Lee is the perfect postmodern cowboy, rolling his own smokes filled with herb instead of tobacco. That husky drawl and those captivating eyes make him own every minute of screen time, and his chemistry with Prepon and Offerman is electric.

The problem comes from the basic premise of using his mortality to push the story forward. This is the rare instance where a more meandering, “indie” pace and plot style might have resulted in a more meaningful film. It would mean we could skip the rote, impossible to give a shit about storyline with Lee’s daughter. Ritter does the best with what she’s given, which is literally nothing. It feels like a shadow of a similar story from The Wrestler and, you know, a dozen other flicks. Lee’s relationship with his ex-wife is at least aided by her being played by his real life spouse Katharine Ross, but the narrative that’s supposed to be the beating heart of the film is just inert.

But there’s one scene where it works and Ritter is nowhere to be found. Lee is auditioning for a big budget sci-fi flick based on a young adult novel and he’s running through his sides with Jeremy. The scripted dialogue he’s rehearsing perfectly echoes all the pent up frustration he feels for being an embarrassment of a father. It’s the clip they’re sure to play at the Oscars next year should Elliott receive a well-deserved Best Actor nomination for this role.

The problem is it only works because it keeps the focus on Lee and his regrets, not shoehorning in an incomplete, unsatisfying plotline with a female character who may as well be a cardboard stand-in. The Hero is at its best when it drifts through Lee’s pain and rich inner life, regardless of whether mining his foibles or comedy or tragedy. If Haley wanted the film to explore his family so much, he should have made the effort to make them as fully realized as his lead.

The post The Hero appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Despite feeling like an overgrown “Twilight Zone” episode that flies dangerously off the rails, Camera Obscura is the rare horror film that fails with style. Writer/director Aaron Koontz has the fixins for several different kinds of scary movies at his disposal, but never quite settles enough to create something coherent or cohesive. But what it lacks in execution, it mostly makes up for in charm.

The film follows Jack Zeller (Christopher Denham), a former war photographer with PTSD. He lives with his partner Claire (Nadja Bobyleva), a patient woman who does her best to cope with Jack’s slow recovery and unemployment. In an effort to help Jack out of his rut, she gifts him a camera, one that turns Jack’s life upside down. Now, the gist is that Jack uses this camera to take pictures, but when he gets them developed, he sees gruesome deaths that have yet to happen at the same locations. It’s a great hook, especially given that this is a man forever haunted by the horrors he’s captured with a lens since being overseas.

The problem is that Koontz can’t decide where he wants to go with that premise. Instead of following one logical through line, Jack’s journey forks down multiple weird paths. First, Jack, being the lead, attempts to play hero and prevent the deaths the camera foretells, but he’s terrible at it. In pretty short order, Jack is driven mad by what the camera shows him and begins to kill people himself. There’s a procedural aspect and the film flirts with becoming a psychological thriller, but never quite consummates. The movie hops around wildly and riffs down various tones and demeanors, with the only real constant being blood and death and trauma with casual but unexciting photog imagery.

From a writing perspective, the movie is a mess, but its real undoing is the amateurish look and feel of the production, which rests somewhere below glossy porn parody in terms of flash and style. The cast, namely the two romantic leads and Rian Johnson vet Noah Sagan as one of Jack’s friends, deliver serviceable performances that feel like minor miracles given how weak the script they’re working from is. But the film hopscotches from one tired, moody sequence to the next, feeling like a loose approximation of a horror film made by someone who heard about the general idea of horror once without doing much follow up research.

The film’s saving grace is that it doesn’t take itself all that seriously. There’s a lot of quirky, Raimi-esque levity providing a darkly comic edge to the proceedings. These moments provide comforting evidence that with more generous budgetary constraints and perhaps a sharper co-writer, Koontz could be capable of producing something resonant and thrilling. As it stands, Camera Obscura is a film that burns all the potential goodwill afforded it from an interesting set-up, but it ignites so quickly and wildly that it’s hard to look away.

The post Camera Obscura appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Though it lacks his signature penchant for poetic bursts of profanity, 1997’s The Spanish Prisoner is arguably David Mamet’s finest cinematic experiment to date. Even for those largely uninterested in the prolific playwright’s movie output, this genre exercise is one of the sharpest displays of visual storytelling and structure of its time. It’s the living manifestation of every lesson espoused in Mamet’s books on storytelling, On Directing Film and Three Uses of The Knife, a final project that exemplifies his concept of the platonic ideal of film. Echoing the deceptively plain look and feel of his debut House of Games, it finds Mamet once again playing with the tropes of conman-driven crime fiction, but this time out, it’s less street level sleight of hand and more globe-trotting, corporate espionage.

Campbell Scott stars as corporate engineer Joe Ross, an intelligent everyman who has created a MacGuffin called “The Process,” a nebulous but valuable formula that will net his company a considerable windfall so long as it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. At a work retreat on St. Estèphe, Joe meets Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), an eccentric man of wealth with whom he forms a strange bond. Joe grows increasingly paranoid that his company, run by casually sleazy Mr. Klein (Ben Gazzara) is going to ultimately fuck him out of his creation, and he grows closer and closer to Jimmy, who is not who he appears to be.

No image in this film is wasted. Even the first shot, of a sign in the airport asking if you packed your own bag, is a portent of the cons to come, as characters interject perpetual paranoia into even their most innocuous interactions. Mamet only shows images that are essential to tell the story, masterfully exemplified in the initial “pitch” scene for The Process, where Joe writes the dollar amount the project is worth on a chalkboard, out of view of the audience, cutting instead to his bosses’ gluttonous gazes. This lean, propulsive visual style calls to mind the brutal image economy of Alfred Hitchcock. Outside of Brian DePalma, who inherited the melodramatic verve and psychosexual obsessions of the legendary auteur, Mamet is perhaps Hitchcock’s most apt pupil, stripping his wrong man thriller framework down to its barest essentials.

In Mamet’s hands, this spy-fi, conman pot boiler becomes like an ornate math problem. It’s difficult to recall another film with so many intricately laid callbacks. Every throwaway non-sequitur, every lingering close-up, every furtive glance, each comes back in new forms for maximum dramatic impact. The knife used to make a sandwich in one scene may reappear an act later sticking out of a slain friend’s chest. The location of a posh dinner club might be revisited, revealed to be little more than a dive restaurant. The Spanish Prisoner takes the “nothing is what it seems” maxim to absurd levels. Every repeat viewing lays bare a new puzzle piece that was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Mamet’s usual repertory of thespians, including his wife Rebecca Pidgeon as Joe’s primary love interest, a comically naive office worker, and Felicity Huffman as an FBI Agent, all form the solid foundation from which these quirky but effective performances spring forth. But it’s the interplay between Scott, a criminally unsung leading man here channeling Jimmy Stewart (in a role Bradley Cooper might make sing should a remake ever materialize), and Martin, a comedian turning in arguably the sharpest performance of his career as the sly confidence man pulling all the strings. If the film has one flaw, it’s in its game of cat and mouse that seldom bothers with making you afraid for the mouse. Instead, it luxuriates in the ornate arrangement of mousetraps that Mamet stages with a sniper’s focus.

The post Revisit: The Spanish Prisoner appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

In 1978, construction workers digging out a foundation in Dawson City made a surprising discovery, unearthing hundreds of reels of ancient nitrate film stock buried beneath layers of permafrost. Gnarled and water-damaged but otherwise preserved, these were the remains of movies screened at local cinemas during the early 20th century, a time when this Yukon city was remote enough for distributors to not bother paying to have them shipped back. They instead settled for an agreement that the cinemas wouldn’t screen them past the contracted original run, and the highly flammable discards were then housed in an empty swimming pool in a nearby rec center, which was eventually iced over by a hockey rink, then a final layer of asphalt as the center was demolished to make way for a parking lot. Now, roughly a hundred years after much of this material was originally circulated, veteran documentarian, conservator and antique avant-gardist Bill Morrison re-purposes this priceless footage, using it to tell the story of its own entombment and subsequent return to the light.

Located at the far fringes of Canadian territory, just across the Alaskan border, Dawson City is a Klondike outpost remembered mostly as a marginal historical footnote, essential to the development of the 1890s gold rush but largely forgotten afterward. As this film demonstrates, however, that time in the limelight was a significant one, with a parade of famous personages filtering their way through the town, many of them (from future theater tycoon Sid Grauman to Donald Trump’s grandfather Fred) young strivers on their way to untold riches. Such a path toward success is mirrored by the downward descent of the burg itself, which went from boom to bust in rapid succession, now preserved as a kind of sparsely populated living memorial to its fin-de-siècle glory.

It’s also a place that sprung up around the same time as film itself and bears an early history with striking parallels to that of the medium, albeit one that veered off precipitously after their first few years of existence. Perhaps the perfect person to dig into this trove, Morrison uses footage culled from these 500 found films – many of them thought to have been forever lost to time – as archival material, shaping a story about the form’s entwined relationship with economics, ethnicity and social structure and the people involved in determining the function of all three. A long-time revivifier of silent-era media, the director again seeks a renewed connection to this lost world by himself working in a voice-less mode, with only Alex Somers’ stunning soundtrack as accompaniment. Equally enamored with restoration and decay, he lovingly resurrects and recontexualizes these distorted images, many of them warped around the edges or marred with strange, shifting blobs.

Possessing an inherent, inscrutable beauty, these scars also serve as an estranging device, reminding us of the gulf of time between modern viewers and the long-lost people who both participated in and enjoyed these films. This grants a surprising poignancy to often frivolous images, the stately character imparted by death pushed to the artistic extreme Morrison previously exploited in quiet-yet-grandiose works like Decasia and The Miners’ Hymns. The addition of unobtrusive subtitle text, which explains and elucidates these images, establishes the otherwise free-associative flow of images as the baseline for a fascinating historical account, one in which the distance between us and the past is itself converted into a form of vivid emotional currency.

Fusing soberly conveyed fact with frontier fable, Dawson City: Frozen Time stands out as a marvelous metaphorical nesting doll, using its found footage format to anchor a series of dazzling figurative tangents. In spotlighting the story of one abandoned pile of film left to molder in one neglected former boom town, it locates a unique inroad to the larger legend of America itself, its scintillating panorama of hopes and dreams, set against each other in the cold financial crucible of the wide open West. In chronicling the downside of that foundational fairy tale, it presents a supple mixture of information and emotion, charting the flow of people pushed out, shunted aside or left behind as progress marched onward, mechanization and corporatization turning the familiar into the frostily foreign. Alongside these movements glided the steady advance of the cinematic medium itself, a flickering commentary on the world of the men who created and sustained it, always searching for the next big strike.
strike.

The post Dawson City: Frozen Time appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Based on a novel by Tatiana De Rosnay, Moka is a beautifully-photographed genre film that delights in the grit and grime of thriller conventions to build tension and give the viewer a sharp sense of place. It revels in static landscape shots, soapy facial expressions from the main characters and loud European muscle cars to bring its fairly standard plot to life. The film is ultimately a morality play about motherhood, but the way it gets to its well-worn conclusions makes it worthwhile.

Six months after Diane (Emmanuelle Devos) loses her son in a hit-and-run incident, she has compiled eyewitness testimony and a sweeping search of car registrations to narrow down the list of suspects. She knows the car was a powerful ‘70s model, light-brown or mocha in color, and was driven by a blonde. Tracking down similar vehicles in her immediate area—she lives in the singularly gorgeous city of Lausanne, Switzerland, but the film is set mostly in neighboring Evian, France—she comes across Marléne (Nathalie Baye), a blonde with a mocha Mercedes.

Introducing herself as Hélène, Diane ingratiates herself with the driver, who runs a beauty shop, and her husband Michel (David Clavel), who’s trying to sell the car. With access to the instrument used to kill her son, Diane poses as a potential buyer. Director Frédéric Mermoud and editor Sarah Anderson keep a fast pace so that Diane seems like a frenetic ball of energy hyper-focused on ensuring that Marléne was indeed driving the car on that fateful evening. Marléne believes she has made a friend and Michel thinks he has found a lover, but neither anticipate Diane’s real intentions.

The pleasures of a thriller often come from its setting, and the frontier towns of Lausanne and Evian are as important to the script as its characters. The towns straddle a strange international boundary between the European Union and ever-neutral Switzerland. Both are full of tourists and the sort of infrastructure that caters to such a crowd. But the film does a superb job of mining this for intrigue: lake-crossing ferries, Swiss neutrality and dozens of luxury hotels can also buoy illicit trafficking of guns and drugs. Despite majestic views of famous Alpine peaks, there is a seedy underbelly to these locations, and the cinematography by Irina Lubtchansky expertly treads the line between sunny landscapes and noir-ish transgression. There is real atmosphere in this film and a frontier ethos that one would not expect along this particular frontier.

Even with its short run-time, Moka’s final act is saturated with labyrinthine twists and revelations about each of the characters. The way the plot is eventually resolved is true to the pacing and spirit of the film. There is nothing world-shattering in the moral of the story, nor is there anything particularly new about it. But that misses the point: this is entertaining, setting-specific thriller storytelling at its finest and an exemplar of artful genre film-making.

The post Moka appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

When Volker Schlöndorff began turning Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel The Handmaid’s Tale into a film, the German-born filmmaker lived in a divided country under the constant threats of totalitarian despotism and nuclear apocalypse. By the time the film was released in March 1990, the Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse and the “end of History” was being celebrated. This was unfortunate for the fate of the film, as The Handmaid’s Tale was aesthetically, socially and politically molded by the quotidian paranoia of the ‘80s rather than the myopic phantasmagorias of 1990. The shift in mood doomed the film as an anachronism from the moment of its release.

Revisiting the film in light of the popularity of the new television adaptation, it is apparent that Schlöndorff’s effort has been unfairly maligned and forgotten. It is definitely a relic from the past, an artifact that tells audiences a substantial amount about the time and place in which it was created, but so is the novel and the new show. In fact, this ethnographic/archaeological element is one of the best parts of the film. By seeing how two different cinematic storytellers bring the same story to life, the changes in U.S. society from 1990 to 2017 are readily apparent.

Without conducting a close comparison, the 1990 film can be characterized as much more concerned with systemic issues, the fate of humanity as a whole and how a single person’s life is subservient to the common good, while the 2017 show emphasizes individual characters, their identities and how those are performed and the many trials and tribulations they are forced to suffer. In many ways, each, then, is a reflection of the state of the “resistance” in its own period: the doctrinaire pseudo-Marxist systems theorist of the late Cold War versus the nonchalant, self-obsessed multicultural identity crusader of today. The fate of the city is another major difference between the two, as the dingy, high-crime urban spaces of 1990 (and the film) have been literally bulldozed for the glitzy, indulgent and gentrified neighborhoods of today (and the show). But the film can stand on its own, without the need for comparison.

It is within the mise-en-scéne that Schlöndorff’s film shines. Kate/Offred (Natasha Richardson), the protagonist, inhabits the dystopian Gilead, with means she already understands the backstory of the descent of the U.S. into authoritarian fundamentalism. Her interests are in finding her daughter, escaping her concubinage and perhaps trying to help her friends. The viewer, on the other hand, wants to know about Gilead, its origins and the current state of U.S. and world society in this devastated future. The mise-en-scéne and the clever way the cinematography captures the costumes, set design, background visuals and architecture of the film are the mechanism for servicing this curiosity. The camera often stays behind the action or starts photographing a room just before the action starts, to give the viewer a taste of what is going on. This rich means of world-building was later perfected by the singular Emmanuel Lubezki when he worked as the Director of Photography for the dystopian thriller Children of Men. In these prophetic futuristic films, the camera is the viewer’s avatar more so than the actors.

While Kate is plotting how to survive the next horror, the camera may linger on a news broadcast, cut to truckloads of urban blacks being rounded up to work as slaves in the undesirable colonies (a chilling prefiguration of gentrification) or show the military checkpoints that guard suburbia and its domesticized femininity. Blacked out cars allude to peak-Troubles Belfast and the checkpoints to Cold War Berlin, while the ethnic cleansing of the U.S. black population evokes the “long hot summers” of the ‘60s. There are shuttered factories, grimy railways and hundred-year old brick warehouses, the sorts of industrial spaces that hosted the social and political battles of the tumultuous ‘80s. Schlöndorff is clearly positing a thesis: the very real and non-fictional triumph of the Right in the ‘80s was setting society on the path to the Gilead hellscape he was portraying. In a way that was perfectly attuned to 1990 but which would be nonsensical today, the very physical materiality of those struggles is the focus; they worsened economic conditions and living standards. Today, a similar effort would emphasize identity constructions and how harming those would subsequently destroy individuals no longer free to be who they are (this is not to champion either focus of struggle over the other; both are necessary). Furthermore, the visual grammar he used for this claim has lost its rhetorical clarity; the average 2017 viewer does not place into these signifiers—the cars, factories and checkpoints—the full weight of their meaning, just as the average 1990 viewer rejected their somber pessimism.

Even more unfortunately, the continued interest in Atwood’s novel, degradation of the U.S. economy and society, impending environmental catastrophe(s) and persistence of white supremacy and misogyny suggest that Schlöndorff’s despondent thesis may in fact be correct—we are all well and truly fucked, particularly if we have lady parts or non-white skin.

The post Criminally Underrated: The Handmaid’s Tale appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

“It’s the first time in 17 years I haven’t been alone on my birthday. I feel like I have a family again.”

This bittersweet line in a mostly cheap period-crime movie shows the kind of human touch that director Jonathan Demme gave to even the most throwaway material. Crazy Mama, his second feature for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, doesn’t quite transcend its genre limitations, but it paved the way for better road movies to come.

Demme’s low-budget first feature, Caged Heat, benefited from a few behind-the-scenes luminaries. It was shot by Tak Fujimoto, who lensed Terrence Malick’s debut Badlands and would work with Demme on and off throughout their careers. It also featured a score by Velvet Underground alumni John Cale, who mixed a blues pastiche with strange strings for an unusual sonic stew.

Crazy Mama did not have such bona fides. Incidental music was provided by an outfit called Snotty Scotty and the Hankies. Demme was only assigned the film 10 days before shooting began, taking over after Corman parted ways with director Shirley Clarke, an independent filmmaker (The Connection) who never broke out of the underground. Still, this hybrid of American Graffiti and Bonnie and Clyde, although it clearly looks like the product of a cheapo exploitation house, still has the air of the alienated American cinema of the ‘70s.

In a prelude, we see the Stokes family in Jerusalem, Arkansas, where in the ‘20s the family farm was taken away by the government. More than 30 years later, the relocated family, now in California, again find themselves with their livelihood about to be taken away, this time a beauty shop. Melba Stokes (Cloris Leachman), her daughter Cheryl (Linda Purl) and her mother Sheba (Ann Sothern) soon set off on a multi-state crime spree to raise money to buy back the family farm in Arkansas.

As in Caged Heat, Demme is again charged with romanticizing the lives of outlaws, this time through the added gauze of nostalgia. The movie’s soundtrack is peppered with the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll oldies that were in vogue at the time. But from the beginning of his career, Demme’s musical cues refused to stay obvious for long. Benign hits like the Chordettes’ “Lollipop” move over for the film’s apt recurring theme, the Bell Notes’ “I’ve Had It,” whose out-of-tune guitar and world-weary vocals echo the characters’ out-of-tune weariness. Even Nervous Norvus’ “Transfusion,” an old novelty song, evokes a ‘50s America that isn’t safe and simple, but uncertain and dangerous.

This was a cynical look at America indeed. On their way back to reclaim the family farm, the Stokes stop in Las Vegas where they meet Bertha (Merie Earle), the lonely elderly woman whose quote opens this piece. Sheba and Bertha both win a handful of nickels at the slot machines, and following Bertha’s lead of invoking God and country before every pull of the one-armed bandit, they run through a litany of slogans such as, “Only you can stop forest fires” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” as they proceed to lose all their meager winnings. America has screwed them over again.

Demme’s satire of the corrupted American dream extends to kitschy roadside attractions, such as a motel made up of teepee-shaped bungalows with TV antennae jutting out from their peaks. The Stokes family travels back to Jerusalem like pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, but what they find is of course a different town, now run by the Muddes (suggesting a corruption of the very earth?) the same family that killed the Stokes patriarch many years ago. There’s even a fake kidnaping scheme where, after Melba marries supposed millionaire Jim Bob (Stuart Whitman) in Vegas, the Stokes try to get money out of his ex-wife.

With frequent shootouts and unlikely escapes, Crazy Mama comes off like a free-wheeling B-movie on the fringes of American independent cinema, which isn’t far removed from the Stokes’ entrepreneurial spirit in the first place. They somehow land on their feet, and if Demme’s career wasn’t exactly helped by this somewhat endearing mess, he had much greener pastures ahead.

The post Oeuvre: Demme: Crazy Mama appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Like last month’s Wonder Woman, the raunchy new comedy Rough Night is directed by a woman and the resulting film offers a new spin on a familiar formula, one that is female-forward but entertaining for everyone. Unlike many male-helmed, female-led comedies, Rough Night is more focused on outlandish escapades and genuine laughs than on bickering between the ladies. In fact, when the expected girl-on-girl sniping does occur, it is in service of the bonkers, dead-stripper storyline rather than milking its characters for unnecessary drama. Rough Night is straight up comedy, and though it maintains a very loose grounding in reality, it keeps its foot on the gas pedal rather than taking breaks for emotional asides.

Scarlett Johansson stars as politician Jess, a Leslie Knope-esque do-gooder, who is running a squeaky clean state senate campaign while planning her wedding to milquetoast fiancé Peter (Paul W. Downs, who co-wrote with director Lucia Aniello). Jess reluctantly heads to Miami for a bachelorette weekend with her college friends Alice (Jillian Bell of TV’s “Workaholics”), Blair (Zoë Kravitz, recently of TV’s “Big Little Lies”) and Frankie (Illana Glazer of TV’s “Broad City”). They meet up with Jess’s Australian friend Pippa (Kate McKinnon of “Saturday Night Live”) and starting behaving badly, mixing cocktails with marijuana and cocaine, which inevitably leads to a stripper being called. By this point, each of the characters has been established. At first, they all appear to be archetypes: the rich whiner, the sex-crazed one, the kooky free spirit, the militant lesbian and the uptight goodie-two-shoes. However, as the plot progresses, each develops in surprising and entertaining fashion, and the audience will come to realize that the stereotypes we have placed on them are our own. Any of the characters could be real women, and Rough Night’s insane scenarios bring out their secret qualities.

Things kick into high gear after the stripper’s arrival, and the pacing is fast and funny, barely allowing for time between gags. Aniello wisely offsets the women’s crazy antics with scenes of Peter’s corresponding bachelor party, and the comparison makes for even more laughs. Throughout, each of the lead actresses is given time to shine, another of Rough Night’s more refreshing qualities. McKinnon is reliably wonderful in her role, giving Pippa just the right mixture of insanity and warmth. Kravitz has one of the movies more memorable moments as Blair is forced into a ménage-a-trois with creepy neighbors Pietro and Lea (Ty Burrell and Demi Moore, both magnificently sleazy in cameos). Glazer uses her expressive eyes and varied vocal intonations to maximum effect, making Frankie the group’s most lovable weirdo. Johansson’s straight-laced character forces her to play it straight for long stretches, but this leads to many of the film’s best gags. And Bell’s Alice blends raunchiness and desperation in perfect combination. The men have their moments as well, particularly Downs, whose character arc from doormat to hero is the film’s most satisfying.

Though many elements of Rough Night are familiar, it never stops feeling fresh and surprising, which probably speaks more to the lack of female voices in film than it does anything else. There is a distinct femininity to Rough Night, and that doesn’t mean that it’s inherently sweet or warm. Instead, it’s a film that consistently gives its female characters goals and agency. Even when they’re figuring out how to hide a dead body, they are talking to one another, often about something other than men. Rough Night aces the Bechdel Test yet still allows its characters to be sexy and sexual on their own terms.

Given the bachelorette party theme, comparisons will obviously be made to Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, and it will probably be called a “female Hangover.” But those comparisons are a disservice, as Rough Night is a better, funnier film than either of those. It’s humor is reflective of our times, which may mean that it won’t completely register with older viewers, and it features plenty of near-naked men and vagina talk, which may put off some insecure men, but it’s a comedy that deserves everyone’s attention. Rough Night is an excellent, refreshing and raunchy comedy that marks Lucia Aniello as a director to watch.

The post Rough Night appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Harmonium, Japanese director Kôji Fukada’s new domestic thriller, is essentially two films stitched together. Transitions are conspicuously absent for most of Harmonium’s runtime, but just around the hour mark, we get a jarring fade to black that could be easily followed by the production credits. This unofficial divider slices Fukada’s bleak, arresting story of smothered secrets and buried resentments into two episodes with radically different tones, set eight years apart. It’s hardly the patchwork it might’ve been; Fukada keeps the pace even, allowing the odd explosion only when absolutely necessary, and Harmonium holds together as one unshakable two-hour experience. What could easily be a huge detriment ends up one of the film’s smartest devices.

The first section has distinct echoes of Philippe Claudel’s excellent 2008 Kristin Scott Thomas vehicle I’ve Loved You So Long. It’s essentially a chamber piece about a family man named Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) who invites an old colleague named Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano) to work for him and stay with his family. Toshio’s wife Akié (an outstanding Mariko Tsutsui) is initially hesitant, but as Yasaka begins teaching the couple’s daughter to play the titular instrument, she warms up to him and begins distancing herself from the more stoic Toshio.

A few secrets flare up and plenty of passion lurks beneath the surface, but for the most part, Harmonium’s first hour is stately and restrained. Cinematographer Ken’ichi Negishi builds tension with unsettlingly long tracking shots and Fukada keeps us on our toes by cutting abruptly between key moments, but the overall effect is haunting rather than thrilling. Any foreboding comes from the threat that something terrible could happen, but at every opportunity, mundanity prevails. Each red herring has a school of other red herrings at its back, so much so that eventually we’re more or less battered into relaxation.

I won’t spoil what happens in the second part, but suffice it to say that “restrained” quickly flies, flaming, out the window. Harmonium is more rewarding the less you know about its sinister twists and turns, but what saves it from becoming a pulpy slice of shock-and-awe is Fukada’s success in keeping the foundational hour in rearview at all times. His two-act structure doesn’t shrug at the first act as if it were a lengthy misdirecting taunt: the action from that hour permeates and informs the second, which scans more like Oldboy than I’ve Loved You So Long. Fukada fleshes out his ideas about marriage and loyalty, justice and regret, but he shifts his end goal from raised eyebrows to white knuckles with thrilling effect.

At a point, the whole enterprise threatens to tip into melodrama. Plot conveniences begin to stack up and Tsutsui’s role starts sliding into a sort of an inverse-Lady Macbeth. We’re handed perhaps one too many Major Gasp moments in a 20-or-so-minute span, and questions of emotional porn start swirling in our heads. What saves the day every time are the sterling performances. Tsutsui resists the opportunity for histrionics, remaining decidedly this side of Raving Lunatic and showing flashes of the warm timidity that endeared us to her from the very first scene. Furutachi, whose only job in the first hour is to look upset, reveals a man bound by his past choices who has no means to escape from a self-constructed emotional prison. Their skill, often breathtaking, combined with some truly expert camerawork, manages to tether the script’s more ridiculous developments back to Earth.

By the time Harmonium arrives at its pitch-black conclusion, we’ve been through the ringer. Fukada has at least a half-dozen thematic balls in the air, and he makes the wise decision to leave several avenues unexplored. In a twisted way, the film ends in a remarkably intimate fashion. Fukada spares us lengthy explanations or deus ex machina, and the only arc he attempts to fully close is Toshio’s. It’s not disappointing, though, because the whole film warns against personally exacted justice. Not every action requires a reaction.

Harmonium advocates for truth, transparency and acceptance of circumstance in the first act of our lives so the second act doesn’t get messy. Good advice, to be sure, but it’s Fukada’s gift to us that his characters don’t take it.

The post Harmonium appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Much like its antagonistic megacorporation, Kill Switch’s filmmakers take an innovative concept and use it to create a world that is ultimately unsustainable. In keeping with the best sci-fi, Kill Switch taps into a pressing global anxiety—in this case both the environmental imperative of sustainable energy and the destructive impact of monolithic corporations run amok—and takes it to fantastic lengths. The directorial debut of Tim Smit hinges on the idea of an Amsterdam-based energy giant, Alterplex, generating a renewable source of power by creating and mining a parallel world. The concept is sound, the visual effects are compelling, and yet, hammy dialogue amongst shallowly-developed characters and an overreliance on a cinematographic gimmick derails the whole project by the time we reach its heavily telegraphed conclusion.

Despite using the threadbare trope of a protagonist waking up confused by his surroundings, Kill Switch manages to generate some genuine mystery in its opening scenes. After we’re introduced to the allegedly brilliant (and, naturally, blonde and blue-eyed) NASA pilot Will Porter (Dan Stevens), the viewer is thrust into his POV, complete with the pop-up alerts and analysis he sees through a futuristic wearable smartphone that connects directly to his brain. He emerges in a heavily damaged lab setting and finds that the building and surrounding area are littered with corpses. He’s in possession of a mysterious black cube and, in the distance, he can see Alterplex’s twin towers emitting a glowing blue stream of energy up into the clouds. When all the informational signs he comes across appear written backwards, this mirrored view leads him to believe he’s awoken in “the Echo,” a parallel universe that Alterplex has created and sent him to in order to install technology crucial to balancing the two worlds.

The problem is that the Echo wasn’t supposed to have people in it. In flashbacks, we see the dark, smoky-eyed Alterplex exec Abby (former Bond girl Bérénice Marlohe) recruit Will and inform him that the Echo will be an energy-rich world bereft of carbon-based lifeforms, making its exploitation for resources completely ethical. That doesn’t stop militant environmental activists, who blandly call themselves “the Rebels,” from threatening Alterplex at every turn in retaliation for messing with the fabric of the universe.

We’re also given maudlin flashbacks of Will playing the surrogate father role to his nephew (Kasper van Groesen), as Will relocates his widowed sister Mia (Charity Wakefield) and the young boy to Amsterdam with him, only to nearly resign his world-changing gig when the pair get homesick. As hackneyed as these attempts at character development are, however, they do come as a welcome respite from the first-person-shooter-style action sequences. The POV scenes come off like a video came we can’t play, and with the frequently blurred vision, muffled hearing, and endless losses of consciousness (it’s rare to experience a character get knocked out so frequently in a single film), it can become nauseating to the viewer in the same way as shakiest of found-footage flicks.

The visual effects deserve acclaim, especially as electromagnetic disturbances drop train cars, boats and other large objects from the swirling clouds or pull the debris from explosions into odd directions. However, the menacing Alterplex drones that chase Will at every turn, though visually striking, hew far too closely to the sentinels from The Matrix—in spirit if not in specific design—for the film’s own good. What starts as an interesting immersion into parallel-world scenario with a touch of social commentary devolves into a standard race-against-time featuring dimensionless characters who have little to say beyond expository info dumps, melodramatic platitudes or repetitive variations of “Oh my god, what is that?!” The parallel world created in Kill Switch may not be devoid of life, but it might as well be.

The post Kill Switch appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Bruce Willis stopped giving a fuck. In recent years, we’ve had to watch poor Bruno push himself to heretofore unplumbed depths of apathy. Once Upon a Time in Venice, though not without its charms, is less a movie and more an hour and a half of Bruce Willis staring into a camera, begging with his eyes for some merciful viewer to end his misery.

Willis plays Steve Ford, the kind of beach bum, man-child private eye character you would never, ever cast Bruce Willis to play. Ford is an old man trying to live a youth’s life, hanging out with skaters and surfers in between porking women young enough to be his progeny. Not 10 minutes into the movie, Ford skateboards down the street stark naked while on the run from a pair of Samoans who hired him to find their missing sister–who, once he found her, Ford immediately had sex with. When a cop stops him on his board, he hides his revolver in his clenched butt cheeks.

This is meant to be funny.

To Robb and Mark Cullen, the brothers who wrote Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, it’s probably hilarious. These cats have a very specific sense of humor that doesn’t translate well, so some of the goofier elements of their narratives are hard to swallow. But the duo comes from TV and has a passable hand for characterization and plotting. Venice, on paper, probably wasn’t quite the mess it is on screen. The script is one of those shaggy dog, Cali noirs that are notoriously hard to execute well without devolving into parody, but it’s not a total waste.

Ford’s primary issue is getting his dog back from a gangster named Spyder, played by Jason Mamoa pretending to be Hispanic but sporting Hulk Hogan’s facial hair. Spyder is a weirdly reasonable antagonist and is willing to get Ford’s dog Buddy back if he finds Spyder’s girl and the cocaine she stole from him. Along the way, Ford also gets caught up in a series of somewhat connected mini-cases, all related to his sense of obligation to friends and acquaintances, but never quite congealing into one master plot that changes the protagonist.

This is particularly frustrating for two reasons. One, the movie’s marketing is heavy on the man and his dog narrative, obviously aping the far superior John Wick, except Buddy doesn’t go missing until well into the film’s second act, by which time we’ve met a murderer’s row of supporting cast members but seem little evidence of Ford’s connection to his dog. John Goodman is a welcome delight as Ford’s best friend and Adam Goldberg is funny enough as a real estate asshole that needs his help, but the movie wastes a lot of time and effort on John (Thomas Middleditch), an assistant pulling double duty as the film’s unnecessary narrator. The creative energy blown on establishing John should have been spent on Ford.

He’s supposed to be this lovable, surf culture Peter Pan type who keeps digging himself into deeper holes, but he ultimately doesn’t come to grips with his foibles, nor does he really learn anything. The Cullens just have him hopscotch from thread to thread. This would work fine in an ongoing series where Ford has a case of the week, but in a ninety minute movie it just seems muddled and weird.

A scene where Ford beats the shit out of irritating rapper Tyga, playing a Banksy-like figure, almost justifies the existence of this movie. But it’s sad to see Willis stoop so low. The actor is too damn ornery and laconic to have any credibility as a skateboarder, so maybe the Cullens just thought that would be a funny image and Willis didn’t remember they wrote Cop Out until he’d already signed a contract. Based on the fun work being done by most of the cast, this could have been an entertaining little genre exercise with the right leading man. Instead, it’s a sad reminder that Looper may be the last good movie Bruce Willis will ever make.

The post Once Upon a Time in Venice appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Puerile comedies with gay panic jokes and Braveheart aside, homosexuality in most modern cinema is often portrayed with sensitivity, or, at the very least in hushed tones. It was only 20 years ago or so that Tom Hanks took a risk playing a gay, albeit chaste, character in Philadelphia, something uncommon in big budget Hollywood pictures at the time. With movies such as Brokeback Mountain and Dallas Buyers Club busting down boundaries, gay characters are now more or less commonplace in mainstream cinema.

Although homosexuality has long been a staple in the art house for decades, openly bisexual German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder actually found himself under attack for his portrayal of gays in his 1975 Fox and His Friends. In the film, a working-class carnival employee, Franz (played by Fassbinder himself), wins the lottery and soon finds himself exploited by a high society lover and his coterie. A stinging indictment of the rich, the film slowly strips Franz of everything, including his dignity. It’s a painful journey, one that is reminiscent of the misery and degradation Fassbinder put many of his other characters through in his brief, but prolific career.

However, opponents of Fox and His Friends found Fassbinder’s depiction of homosexuals to be spiteful and materialistic, a community of vampires willing to suck poor Franz dry and leave him for dead. Upon its release, one critic complained that the film’s, “version of homosexuality degrades us all and should roundly be denounced.” It’s true, many of the film’s characters are simply awful people – especially Franz’s lover Eugen (Peter Chatel), who drains his money, steals his apartment and constantly chastises his ignorance and lower-class predilections – but that doesn’t mean the movie is necessarily homophobic.

Just because a film features some unsavory gay characters doesn’t mean it’s making a sweeping denunciation of homosexuals. According to Fassbinder, he was making a statement that all humans are nasty and vile, regardless of their sexual orientation. He claimed, “Here, homosexuality is shown as completely normal, and the problem is something quite different. It’s a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and it’s really the story I always tell.” And that’s true; there is no stigma around being gay in his film, it’s a way just of life.

Far more interesting is the film’s overarching pessimism, especially in Fassbinder’s implication that Franz himself is complicit in his own undoing. Although his friends warn him that he will “draw the short straw” and he is well aware that Eugen is abusive, Franz continues to stay with and express his love for his chilly boyfriend. It makes sense as we are conditioned to worship wealth and refinement. Franz knows that he can never truly infiltrate Eugen’s world of tailored clothes, menus in French and turtle soup. Yet, he deludes himself into thinking there is no other alternative.

A homophobic denouncement of Fox and His Friends is erroneous, especially since the film is more a commentary on society and the power struggle within a relationship than anything else. Fassbinder dedicated the film to Armin Meier, his proletariat boyfriend who eventually committed suicide on the director’s birthday a few years after they broke up. Though Fassbinder died young, he had a reputation for demoniac relationships, ones where his partners felt derided and taken advantage of. Casting himself as the unfortunate Franz could have been Fassbinder’s way of doing penance, showing that he is complicit in the same dynamic that he is decrying time and again on the screen.

The post Revisit: Fox and His Friends appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

We’re all complicit in a world where Michael Bay has now made five fucking Transformers movies. Five. The first one was surprisingly fun in an anti-matter universe, Spielberg kinda way. The third one was arguably the most harrowing war movie to feature robots disguised as cars drawing and quartering one another. Now, with Transformers: The Last Knight, the Akiva Goldsman-run screenwriting think tank is running out of ideas. Well, no, that’s not fair. They’ve got plenty of ideas. They’re all just unspeakably dumb.

This is a franchise that for five successive films has tried to retcon the previous film’s understanding of Earth history and its relationship with the inhabitants of Cybertron. One wouldn’t imagine a mega blockbuster about robots disguised as cars would have a ton of stylistic overlap with The Da Vinci Code, but alas. This film opens with a huge prologue about how the Transformers were on Earth during the dark ages and how Merlin was just a drunk dude given a sci-fi staff from an alien machine. It’s ostensibly to set up this staff as the film’s primary MacGuffin, but it only exists so Bay can get his Game of Thrones on and film a cybernetic dragon taking out a bunch of dudes in armor.

From there, it’s two and a half hours of solid looking set pieces interspersed with a lot of questionable exposition and a cast of characters it’s impossible to care about. The Transformers themselves are compelling, sure, but Mark Wahlberg as the human lead, alongside returning cast members like Josh Duhamel’s ill-defined soldier dude or John Turturro as a scenery chewing spook, just feels like a diversion. This is a franchise that’s never quite figured out how to weave a relatable narrative with its regular folk in with the complex space opera of its robotic brethren. The resulting experience is a jarring one in which epic speeches and revelations are stitched together with bantering interludes written about one notch more maturely than an episode of Family Guy.

It would be unfair to imply the movie is entirely without merit. For one, it’s hard to beat for pure spectacle, as Bay is still the world’s most accomplished arranger of explosions and barbarism. Perhaps his greatest achievement in this otherwise middling film series is in how accurately he’s able to capture robotic pain. On a large scale, his approach to action is so brash and over the top that destruction feels completely cartoonish. But he’s strangely adept at depicting genuine anguish when one of the Transformers is hurt or injured, particularly with the melodramatic usage of human reaction shots to robotic pain. In movies that cost $300 million and skirt around meaningful metaphors for refugees and ongoing, intercultural conflict, it’s odd as hell that Bay seems so interested in finding pathos in the mortal wounds of aliens pretending to be Ford products.

Outside of those disquieting moments of drama, the film’s joys mostly come from the absurd, including John Goodman’s entertaining voice work as Hound, a Transformer we would all gladly follow for a feature length spin-off if anyone at Paramount is reading this. The movie’s “Ancient Aliens” approach to alternate history is pretty cloying, but it also gives us a scene of Bumblebee mowing down Nazis, so it’s like, how can you be mad at that? Anthony Hopkins seems to delight in turning in a hilarious performance as a British guy who knows every plot detail the audience needs in order to keep up, and Peter Cullen continues doing the Lord’s work as Optimus Prime, but even the film’s considerable fun bits never come together to form a functioning whole.

We’re probably going to keep getting more of these movies, so rather than argue against their continued production, may we just ask for them to be a mite more coherent and keep them around the 100-minute mark for run time? Big robots that double as car commercials is too pure an idea for Hollywood to abandon entirely. Let’s just pray they can fine tune the approach a little. Anything based on a Hasbro toy should last closer to Run, Lola Run than Lawrence of Arabia.

The post Transformers: The Last Knight appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Train to Busan, director/co-writer Sang-ho Yeon’s tale of railway zombie terror, is an example of movie that got major buzz internationally (even snagging an out-of-competition screening at Cannes), but in the US it has been hidden behind mediocre branding in the Netflix horror listings. The film was a huge hit in its native South Korea and other Asian countries, but watching its trailer will lead the casual observer to assume it’s just a zombified version of Unstoppable. If skeptics are willing to look beyond the bland marketing, they will find a smart, scary and socially relevant fright flick lurking beneath.

In terms of comparisons, Train to Busan would best be described as a blend of Snowpiercer, The Poseidon Adventure and World War Z. The Snowpiercer comparison isn’t just about the train setting but also the commentary on tension between social classes. Like The Poseidon Adventure, Train to Busan concerns itself with a group of disparate survivors fighting towards safety, and the film mimics World War Z’s speedy-zombie pile-up CGI effect.

Train to Busan begins with a truck driver venturing into a quarantined area of the South Korean countryside and subsequently colliding with a deer. After the trucker drives off, the deer slowly rises, snapping its joints back into place, its eyes pale. Premise established, the action shifts to Seoul, where Yeon and co-writer Joo-Suk Park provide some exposition about why businessman Seok-woo (Yoo Gong) is a bad father, abandoning his daughter, Soo-an (Soo-an Kim), to the care of her grandmother during long workdays. When Soo-an demands to go to Busan to stay with her mother instead, Seok-woo reluctantly agrees and they board one of South Korea’s beautiful bullet trains. The action begins shortly after they board the train and continues relentlessly until the end of the film.

The zombie genre is so overcrowded that it’s hard for any film to stake out a claim on original territory. And even if it achieves originality, that on its own doesn’t mean it will be a satisfying experience (see Zombeavers). Train to Busan’s originality lies in its bullet-train setting, which allows for a potent mix of claustrophobic terror and social commentary. The satisfaction, however, comes from the interesting blend of characters and their relationships with one another, a characteristic that also defined zombie classics like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later. Yeon’s true success comes from using the action to build character, often placing hordes of bloodthirsty zombies between significant characters and wringing tension from their fight to reach each other. This setup allows him to keep the action steady without neglecting the film’s central relationships.

Though the special effects are a mixed bag, the visual style of the film is attractive, with the metal-and-glass trains and stations serving as a perfect canvas for streaks of bright red blood. There’s also a very clever gimmick involving how Train to Busan’s zombies deal with the train’s frequent passage through tunnels that adds both tension and visual variety.

Train to Busan isn’t perfect, and it succeeds more as an action showcase than a horror film, which is a shame given how creepy these zombies are. The film also struggles when it comes to its female characters, who are almost always in the position of being saved by a male character. This is particularly disappointing, as the two most interesting characters are the grumpy, dryly funny mother-to-be Seong-kyeong (Yu-mi Jung) and the precocious Soo-an.

Still, it’s hard to ask for a much better streaming-horror find than Train to Busan, which is superior or equivalent to many of the films that inspired it. In addition to making American viewers feel better about not having access to high-speed rail, it is also a refreshingly deep, character-driven action thriller.

The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Train to Busan appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

It all began (along with other aspects of modern filmmaking) with King Kong in 1933. Worried the groundbreaking special effects wouldn’t stop audiences from finding their movie a bit cornball, the producers tasked composer Max Steiner with creating a pounding score to augment the emotional heft of their monster movie. Using a full orchestra, the resulting score drove the film, heightening the horror and quickening the pace from Skull Island to the top of the Empire State Building. Disbelief was suspended and the modern film score was born.

Composers of film music are usually the last players to join the storytelling team. The film has been shot and edited by the time they make their vital contribution. Writer/director Matt Schrader’s Score: A Film Music Documentary is devoted to revealing the process and personalities that create the music that drives the emotions of the movies we love. Listening to Hans Zimmer pontificate is reason enough to make it your new favorite show business documentary, but joining Zimmer to discuss film history, collaboration, aspiring to greatness and crippling insecurity are luminaries like James Cameron, Howard Shore, Leonard Maltin, Danny Elfman and a host of names you will recognize from the opening credits of some of your favorite blockbusters.

Writing a film score means turning emotion into music. In an interview in the film, Moby calls music the invisible art form. While musical instruments, turntables and MP3 players are all tangible objects, music itself is not. Technically, music is the restructuring of air molecules to produce a desired effect. It can add weight to the images on screen or subvert what is shown. Music establishes character through the use of motifs; we know the hobbits are good in Lord of the Rings by the music that underscores Frodo’s introduction and that Darth Vader is looming when the “Imperial March” begins to play in The Empire Strikes Back. Music can also direct the eye to different parts of the screen, controlling the audience’s gaze. This knowledge seems innate, but the deliberate nature of the work is rarely highlighted.

Film music composers are mad scientists. They seek goosebumps with every new project. To a person, they state to the camera that the presence of goosebumps serves as their barometer. If they achieve it on themselves then chances are audiences will respond in kind. With each new project the composer hunts for a new alchemy to achieve this effect. This is of great interest to scientists like Dr. Siu-Lan Tan who try to understand the effects music has on the body and neural transmitters. Interviews with Dr. Tan are placed between the film clips and the interviews with the artists. She explains how those structured air molecules stimulate the body and manipulate an audience’s attention. She is an expert in the science of goosebumps.

Each decade of film history has its star composer. First there was Steiner, then Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw less orchestration in film scores and more of a reliance on popular music, the Simon and Garfunkel songs in The Graduate being the greatest example of the trend. Ironically, it took another monster movie to usher in the next great era of film scores, one that we’re still enjoying today.

In 1975, Jaws brought John Williams to prominence. His score for Steven Spielberg’s killer shark movie functioned in much the same way Steiner’s did for King Kong decades earlier. The many shark’s-eye shots underwater were made suspenseful by Williams’ simple theme. The music as much as anything drove the marketing campaign that kept people away from beaches for the summer.

The career of John Williams forms the heart of the documentary. The comments of other composers underscore Williams’ most famous compositions and the film clips that feature them. This montage is there not only as an ode to his greatness, but as proof of the hypothesis that composers are storytellers who turn emotion into music. The themes from Jaws, the Star Wars films, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park and Superman the Movie swell one after another, transporting you back to childhood and the emotions you felt the first time you experienced each. Williams stands with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as the triumvirate that redefined the modern blockbuster and every new superhero movie and summer fantasy thrill ride is an extension of their collective legacy.

Because of his work on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, we are now living in the Hans Zimmer era, according to the documentary. Due to his previous life in pop music, Zimmer has changed how an orchestra is utilized to wonderful effect – not unlike a previous Batman composer, Danny Elfman. Schrader doesn’t focus on the composers alone. The engineers, orchestrators, sound designers, mixers, musicians and famous studios like Abbey Road get their due in Score. It is a film so in-depth that Brian Tyler, composer of Avengers: Age of Ultron, is comfortable confessing his habit of hanging out in a men’s room stall, waiting to hear if anyone is humming his music after a screening. Take that as a warning after your next trip to the movies. You never know if the composer is nearby, lurking.

The post Score: A Film Music Documentary appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Fomented within the demented laboratory of Roger Corman’s New International Pictures, Jonathan Demme’s first four features are all responsive works, hatched with the express purpose of riding the coattails of some larger trend or fad. Quickie B-movie cash-ins, to put it bluntly. Yet while so many films of this stripe merely coast by on a perverse willingness to push boundaries, rejiggering their borrowed concepts into bold, shameless new configurations, Demme used the platform to achieve something more delicate, which may explain why so many of these early efforts were box-office disappointments. This may be no truer than in the case of Fighting Mad, the oddball result of a script the director developed from an idea conceived by Corman, intended to feed the weird early ‘70s taste for hillbilly revenge flicks. Examining movies like Billy Jack, Walking Tall and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, the producer determined that the basic recipe for success in the genre was a matter of formula: an unusual mode of transport, an interesting weapon and an off-beat sidekick.

In some sense, Fighting Mad is the sum of these very basic parts, a Rambo-esque action potboiler that finds Tom Hunter (Peter Fonda) returning to his family’s Arkansas horse ranch, only to stumble upon the havoc wreaked by a greedy local developer. Yet it’s also completely removed from the usual scuzzy trappings of these types of movies, more concerned with outlining the rhythms and textures of rural life than delivering pure guts, gore and glory. If Caged Heat found the director experimenting with crafty ways around the standard exploitation beats and Crazy Mama amping up the joy of a crime spree to delirious levels, Fighting Mad is the further expression of such soft-toned subversion, hitting all the obligatory high notes while still managing to blaze a different trail toward its requisite conclusion.

It also picks up on the ending of Crazy Mama, in which a bid to regain wrongly taken Arkansas farmland was defeated by the unflinching tight-fistedness of local bigwigs. Fighting Mad tells a similar tale of rampant injustice, this time in a minor key – a mood matched by drab color palette and a sombre tone, albeit one inflected with ample wit and humor. After his wife leaves him for another man, Tom heads back from the West Coast with his young son, seeking the warm embrace of his family and their ancestral property. He instead finds them hemmed in by an insidiously expanding strip mining operation, which intends to scrub the land clean of its coal reserves and then shove in a shopping mall and housing development. The symbolism is clear, and while the film isn’t subtle, it is serious, treating Tom’s struggle as an Odyssean saga of hubris and honor.

That said, it’s also the rare outlaw movie that puts some trust in governmental process. After being pushed to his limits, Tom takes up guerrilla tactics as a means of fighting back. It’s a move that’s seen as justified, but also a bit rash, with the insistent sense that, provided a bit of patience, the local courts would eventually rule on the family’s side. Yet even as his father repeatedly warns him to bide his time, Tom can’t help but fight back, a choice which eventually dooms his entire family to mutually assured destruction.

The character’s proud over-zealousness is prefigured by an early scene in which Tom backs up a local rancher against a drunken hard-hat who’s nearly taken off the door of his car. It’s an admirable defense, but one also fueled by anger at the same construction worker nearly running him off the road a few minutes earlier, and which quickly escalates to him brandishing a tire iron and doling out car-thwacking blows with gusto. He’s arrested, and while the gesture is in itself heroic, Demme’s thoughtful, compassionate direction instead chooses to spotlight the forlorn look of his young son, watching from a diner window as his father is hauled away by cops.

This shot comes to mind in the film’s final image, a soundless shot of father and son walking the land, which seems like pure fantasy considering the blood-soaked final reckoning that’s preceded it. Here the mandatory mayhem demanded by the trashy B format is satisfied, with Tom riding his motorcycle into a battle he wages solely with a bow and arrow, a skillful, stripped-down hunting raid that reclaims his right to the land in spirit if not entirely in act. Instead of letting this concluding showdown culminate with a victory, Demme instead reminds us that by attempting to save his family with violence, Tom also dooms them to suffer its consequences, preserving his own dignity but taking out the last supporting pegs of his family structure. In doing so, a film like Fighting Mad manages to demonstrate real affection and sadness for a fading way of life, while also sits squarely at its root.

The post Oeuvre: Demme: Fighting Mad appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Sofia Coppola’s six films to date have all considered deprivation from a roundabout perspective, swaddled in the lap of luxury, detailing how acute instances of isolation and dislocation can fester even within the embrace of otherwise all-encompassing privilege. This career-long examination has largely played out in a female-focused context, surveying the changes which occur within small clusters of sheltered girlhood, the already-fraught passage from innocence to maturity further complicated by pressing external concerns. Reaching back to the dreamy melancholia of The Virgin Suicides, The Beguiled returns this scenario to a setting with one foot in the real world, the other poised on a mystical fairy-tale plane, once again charting the cracks which form after the appearance of a male gaze inside a formerly cloistered world of women. This occurs within a rich, Civil War-set slice of Southern Gothic, detailing the fallout that follows a hunk of damaged manhood being deposited within the secluded world of a rural Virginia girls’ school.

The film opens with the pronounced patter of feet, the sound of a young girl’s shoes on gravel forming a rough rhythm with cannon booms ringing out in the near distance. The scene has an air of Red Riding Hood-esque menace, which persists as the child flits about the forest gathering stands of suspiciously phallic-looking mushrooms, before stumbling upon a man’s frame slung out amid the underbrush. This is Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) a wounded Union deserter with a leg full of shrapnel, whose presence here functions as a kind of Mephistophelean manifestation of the alluring menace of natural world, imposing itself upon a figure of unwitting innocence. Carried back to the school, its inhabitants whittled down to a skeleton crew of teachers and students due to the war’s proximity just outside the gates, he triggers a variety of different reactions, provoking the suspicion of wary headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) while piquing the interest of many of the younger students.

Laid up in the music room, the soldier at first seems like a placid, life-giving presence, adding a spark of wit and some much needed variety to the strained wartime atmosphere. In time, however, he’ll function as his own form of fungus, spreading out spores of jealousy and distrust. Desperate to prevent himself from being sent to a Confederate prison, he engages in a sly charm offensive, attempting to enrapture the ladies by playing on their individual insecurities. Befitting the fantastical realm in which the story is set – a mist-swathed plantation house ringed with Spanish moss and weeping willows – this process provokes a harsh movement from reverie to reality, one that never entirely robs the film of its fantastical edge.

Bathed, shaved and clad in white cotton, McBurney becomes the model of the perfect gentleman, dispensing gracious good humor from the comfort of a converted fainting couch. He promises devotion to the timid, circumspect Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), draws in the animal-loving Amy (Oona Laurence) who originally found him in the woods, and throws sparks on the hormonal kindling of 17-year-old Alicia (Elle Fanning). Yet the sweet-talking Irishman’s decorum is merely ornamental drapery over a greater will to survive, a desire that, when challenged, quickly reveals the brutish dark side lurking beneath the veneer of male chivalry.

As constructed by Coppola, this compressed chamber drama stands in sharp contrast to the macho ill temper found in Don Siegel’s 1971 version of Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel, where a half-hearted attempt to manifest the looming threat of toxic masculinity is undercut by a dark streak of spiteful misogyny. There, a crow cruelly chained to a railing, and the ridiculous sight of Clint Eastwood in a floor-length nightshirt, asserted domesticity as a prison endured by men for the sake of comfort, one which denied their natural free-roaming impulses and could easily lead to total self-erasure. Shifted to a female perspective, this telling transforms the story into a bracing parable of power and deception, mirroring the tumultuous passage from adolescence into adulthood via the increasingly malevolent presence of a sharp-tongued serpent.

Like much of Coppola’s previous work, The Beguiled uses a familiar structure and setting to access new aspects of old stories, playing off demure plantation stereotypes to both explore and challenge an idea of delicate female fragility. Contrary to the strutting, rakish aggression of Siegel’s version, where McBurney’s appearance inspires formerly barren hens to start hatching again, here fecundity is inextricably tied to femininity. Instead of a somewhat deserving victim, the interloping man becomes the snake in the garden, one who proposes to trim the weeds but transforms into something far more beastly once a part of him is culled. Through a mix of natural and theatrical lighting, soft fabrics and hard wood, placid birdsong and thudding violence, the film achieves something remarkable, spinning out a story of war, desperation and murder without ever cracking its genteel, perfectly polished exterior.

The post The Beguiled appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

In opening with a shot of a confused older man stumbling down the side of the highway, Pop Aye begins almost identically to Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, except that Pop Aye’s senior citizen is accompanied by an elephant. This simply and beautifully establishes the film’s central conceit, which is buddies on the road, in the grand tradition of films such as Thelma and Louise, Easy Rider and Y Tu Mamá También. It’s also, like Nebraska, a story about finding your purpose in the later years of life.

In flashback, we learn that the older man, Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh), is a successful Thai architect whose career and marriage have seen better days. While driving down a busy Bangkok street, he spots an elephant performing tricks for a beer company. He thinks he recognizes the elephant, Pop Aye, from his youth and proceeds to buy him and take him home. When he sees Pop Aye’s injuries from years of cruel treatment, Thana tells his elephant, “Fuck everyone else. From now on, it’s just you and me.”

Though they kick off the duo’s adventure, Thana’s words are far from true. Thana and Pop Aye meet a variety of interesting characters along their way, from a spiritual vagrant to two bumbling police officers to a transgender prostitute, and while the characters themselves may veer towards the stereotypical, Thana and Pop Aye’s interactions with them are not. These little meetings are often transformative for the characters they encounter, and it establishes writer-director Kirsten Tan’s apparent thesis, which is that Thana and Pop Aye’s relationship is something spiritual. Little occurrences that aid their journey, such as a truck of melons overturning just as Pop Aye is getting thirsty, further this point as well.

Though this spiritual angle may seem a bit airy, what Tan (who won a special screenwriting prize at Sundance for this film) does particularly well is keep things focused on the central duo of man and elephant. Thana is a consistently interesting character, one who is slowly discovering his inner child as the film progresses. And Pop Aye is charming but rarely humanized. The smartest element of this film is that it allows Pop Aye the elephant to be an elephant. He’s affectionate towards Thana but also wanders off to find tasty treats, veers off course to pursue water in filthy ponds and refuses to listen to commands if he’s tired.

Though the film gets many things right, one aspect that doesn’t quite gel is the relationship between Thana and his wife Bo (Penpak Sirikul). Pop Aye wants us to believe that Thana and Bo are each suffering because of their separation from one another, but none of their interactions are anything but antagonistic. This wouldn’t be so egregious if the film’s abrupt end didn’t hinge so heavily on their marriage.

Pop Aye’s languid pacing is also an issue. Such a slow pace could work, perhaps, if the idea was for the audience to fall into a meditative state as Thana and Pop Aye traverse Thailand’s beautiful countryside. However, the slow pace has more to do with long gaps between character’s answering each another. And while their journey is beautiful in an agrarian sort of way, the landscape the characters travel through is not calming. Rather, like Thailand itself, it is beautiful and chaotic, filled with characters on motorbikes, large herds of loud, dirty cows and groups of small children.

While it isn’t perfect, Pop Aye is a beautiful, thoughtful road movie. It’s a journey of faith and friendship, but it also embraces a quirky but wonderfully simple story about a man and his elephant. It is a film about rediscovering childhood, and it’s filled with an abundance of unique, satisfying scenes. Watching a man share a pitcher of beer with his best elephant friend will warm even the coldest of hearts.

The post Pop Aye appeared first on Spectrum Culture.