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Good Fortune

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John Paul DeJoria is a good guy. In the brisk documentary Good Fortune, a charming look at the life of the billionaire philanthropist, we’re presented a likable yarn about a man who proves that being rich and being compassionate aren’t mutually exclusive traits. It’s such a friendly and inspiring tale that you may spend its entire running time fighting an uncomfortable sense of dread. When shown the story of a guy this pleasant and this good-natured, especially one so affluent, it’s natural to wait for the other shoe to drop, wondering when we’re going to be told how much of a secret piece of shit he really is. While that loafer never thuds, there’s still something troubling at the heart of this feel-good movie.

DeJoria’s rags-to-riches story is a straightforward one. He grew up from meager beginnings in Echo Park, was in a street gang as a youth and was homeless twice in his adult life before revolutionizing the hair care product industry with Paul Mitchell and later innovating the luxury tequila market with ‎Patrón. Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell smartly dole out the important dramatic beats of DeJoria’s saga in nonlinear fashion to keep things interesting, intercutting testimonials from famous friends with slice-of-life interactions in his current billionaire lifestyle. The setup is designed to get you used to the idea of this uber-rich hero before we’re told how he got there.

The effort largely works, if only to make DeJoria seem oddly intriguing to the uninitiated. Honestly, any guy who can count Arianna Huffington, Ron White and Danny Trejo as friends is probably a good subject for a documentary, regardless of net worth or cultural impact. But that’s just JP, as the film repeatedly shows us. He’s a cool guy, a forward thinker, restlessly caring and generous in a way we’re just not accustomed to imagining the 1% even being capable. DeJoria says that success unshared is failure and that dedication to giving back is rampant throughout the doc. Its closing credits, in addition to throwaway quotes from Pierce Brosnan and Roger Daltrey, is a long crawl of charities DeJoria supports. The maxim and how it motivates his movements seems to situate him as the anti-Trump in the pantheon of famous American entrepreneurs.

The film is book-ended by interactions with kindly farmer Johnny Georges, the creator of Tree-T-Pee irrigation system. Good Fortune begins with Georges getting ridiculed by every judge on “Shark Tank” for not thinking enough about profit before DeJoria decides to invest with him. The film then ends with Georges getting a call from DeJoria checking in on the business. “I love talking to JP,” he says with a mile-wide grin on his face. This is a guy who, in real life, behaves the way the monied secret identities of comic book superheroes do, a guy who is more Tony Stark than Lex Luthor.
Narrated by Trading Places star (and JP buddy) Dan Aykroyd, the documentary feels designed to instill some much-needed confidence into the dated concept of the American Dream. JP is worth north $3 billion because he persevered, was resourceful and didn’t get bogged down by blaming others for his early misfortunes, so of course he still believes in the aspirational myth of America, but so many little details of his tale remind you that the American Dream has always been about luck and not a one-size-fits-all game plan for success.

Trejo, in one of his interviews, talks about how DeJoria was able to get out of a gang as a youth and rededicate himself to work, something a lot of young people in gangs in other cities in America can’t do for a variety of systemic reasons. DeJoria’s story is an entertaining one and his inspirational disposition is genuine, but Good Fortune is more concerned with leveraging his unique success as a defense of capitalism in an age where we could all stand to question its toxic strictures more openly. Some folks are going to see this movie in a tough time in their lives and get that extra push to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and pursue their dreams, but countless others won’t be able to, because they’re held back by the same system that helped DeJoria make it in the first place.

It’s laudable that DeJoria is so sincere about giving back and paying it forward, but it’s a damn shame this film didn’t offer even the slightest counterpoint to his idyllic take on the nature of success.

The post Good Fortune appeared first on Spectrum Culture.


From the Ashes

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Do you remember the plot of Erin Brockovich? A down and out single mom/legal assistant discovers that Pacific Gas and Electric has secretly poisoned the water of the small town of Hinkley, CA and works to bring justice to its residents. Well, in National Geographic’s new documentary From the Ashes, the American people are the residents of Hinkley, the coal industry is PG&E and, metaphorically speaking, there is no Erin Brockovich. In fact, the interests lining up to preserve coal’s part in America’s energy cocktail are so powerful that the Sierra Club would need an incalculable amount of voluptuous, iconoclastic Brockovichs to forestall the deregulation that will lead this country to climate ruin.

Directed by Michael Bonfiglio, the documentary spans the history of the coal industry from the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution to a zombie consortium that refuses to be shot in the head while being the greatest source of pollution in the world. Carbon dioxide, cyanide, mercury and sulfur dioxide are just a few of the toxic greatest hits that come from burning coal. Coal power is so destructive that China and India – the boogeymen the coal companies and politicians like to trot out when the topic of phasing out this awful fuel source is brought up – are heavily invested in solar and wind. Both countries are, in fact, leading the way on renewable energy while the United States has decided to sever its ties with the Paris Climate Agreement and undo the Environmental Protection Agency. The boney hands of the nineteenth and twentieth century refuse to let go of the present and the future. To extend the many ghoulish metaphors, we are whistling through our own graveyard.

That this movie exists not as a document extoling the death of coal but as a warning of its potential rise like the mythic phoenix is enraging. That any resurrection of coal mining would extend to a resurrection of employment levels in coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia is a cruel fallacy. Automation has ended the need for mass employment at the mines, yet mining families hold out hope, clinging to the campaign promises of the man in the White House. Bonfiglio introduces us to such a family, the Lillys of Lincoln County. We see the squalor in which they live and hear their stories first hand. Their local mine has closed and there’s a new child to feed. Regina Lilly and her husband tearfully recount their fears of poverty and that of their neighbors. Your heart will go out, but you might also find your blood boiling when you ask yourself “Why does this industry still exist?” An even better question would be why are the people whose family histories are littered with deaths in the coalmines so loyal to this industry?

Mine companies used to have a saying: The mule is more important than the man. In case of an emergency, save the animal before the human. It has more value. Furthermore, the history of coal mining is replete with labor abuses and the abandonment of communities that service the mining companies. Mines close and communities crumble. Some of the causes for closures have been lawsuits. Another pervasive trend is closing a mine due to some environmental regulation and opening a new one in a more industry friendly state. The acid rain issue of the early ‘80s is an excellent example of coalmines shuttering and abandoning workers in West Virginia to open mines in Wyoming where burning coal produced less sulfur dioxide. Yet the miners interviewed spoke with pride about their role in powering America, displaying a generational Stockholm syndrome while blaming Obama and the government for the “War on Coal.” The truth is no such war exists. Cheaper alternatives have lessened the need for coal and the fact that the rest of the world is moving away from coal as a fuel source makes it non-exportable. But the mining companies will not be deterred.

The documentary is rife with heroes, battling against the environmental and health crises caused by burning coal. Bonfiglio follows the typical model of trying to humanize everybody and avoiding condemnation, at least on the human level. The images of small children on respirators in Dallas, TX, a city downwind of several coal burning power plants, speaks to the amorality of this industry and Rick Perry, who sued the federal government for demanding that those plants meet decades old emissions standards. We meet people who we later discover have died from their respiratory illnesses shortly after their interviews. These were not people who worked for the coal industry but people who had the inconvenient habit of breathing.

Earlier this year I reviewed a French documentary pertaining to climate change called Demain and it filled me with hope by the end credits. From the Ashes filled me with rage. If you think you’ve maxed out on that particular emotion spend 82 minutes awash in the cruel, craven stupidity of the coal industry and their allies to find out how hot you can burn. To quote Deborah Graham of Salisbury, North Carolina, victim of the Duke Energy toxic waste dump of 2014:

“We live in constant fear every day. Who fears their water? We don’t live in a third world country. I mean, this is the United States of America here! And we’re fearing our water.”

Welcome to the third world. Living in the United States doesn’t mean what it used to.

The post From the Ashes appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Revisit: Deep Red

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A profoundly influential film, Dario Argento’s 1975 giallo thriller Deep Red still manages to fly relatively under the radar with regards to the general film-going public. This is a film that was directly mimicked or referenced in films including Halloween, Scanners, Evil Dead II, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Saw and that influenced countless others. In revisiting Deep Red, it is immediately clear that much of it holds up today, 42 years after its release, particularly its excellent score by the Italian synth-rock band Goblin and composer Giorgio Gaslini, its cinematography by Luigi Kuveiller and its editing by Franco Fraticelli. However, one of the more subtle facets of the film, one that shows it to be ahead of many movies released today, is how it deals with female agency. Even though it features a male protagonist, Deep Red’s women drive the plot forward and make all of the important decisions. Argento, a champion of women throughout his career, does the admirable job of presenting women as good and bad and in-between, something many legendary filmmakers today (looking at you, Spielberg and Scorsese) neglect to do.

Deep Red (released in Italy as Profondo Rosso) gives women their own power right from the very beginning. The first major character we meet is Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril), a psychic presenting at a parapsychology conference in Rome. While discussing her psychic abilities, she accidentally taps into the mind of someone in the audience—someone who has committed a terrible murder. While Helga possesses a special gift, she is also multifaceted: she is beautiful and physically weak, even delicate. This is a theme that Argento plays with in many of his films: he allows for all permutations of women. A strong woman doesn’t have to be beautiful and physically able, an evil one need not be ugly, a smart one can be sexy, yet a sexy one can also act stupid. It’s particularly progressive to see such a realistic view of women in a genre like giallo, which stresses the supernatural and the gothic.

Soon after the conference, Helga is brutally murdered while writing down an account of the visions she experienced during the conference. Her upstairs neighbor, pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings, a favorite of Michelangelo Antonioni), witnesses the murder from the street below their apartment building and runs up to help. Though he doesn’t arrive in time to save Helga, he notices a striking painting that is no longer there when he returns to the apartment to speak to police investigators. He also meets the crime journalist Gianna Brezzi (played by Argento’s favorite leading lady Daria Nicolodi).

Marc is a rather bland character who basically serves as the eyes for the audience as he investigates Helga’s murder and stumbles upon a deeper mystery. Gianna, on the other hand, is vibrant, kooky and independent. While Nicolodi is undeniably beautiful, she is not a classic Italian ‘70s beauty, and her conservative attire and sassy attitude emphasize her brain rather than her beauty. She proposes that she and Marc team up to solve the crime, which will offer him resolution and will aid her career. In the scenes that follow, we see Gianna in various moments of independent action: she drags Marc along as she investigates in her tiny Italian car, she works furiously in a crazy Italian newsroom, she pulls an unconscious Marc from a burning building and she goes to check out strange noises in the dark while she and Marc are investigating some archives. She even challenges Marc to a round of arm-wrestling and promptly wallops him.

Where Gianna is strong, independent and ambitious, two other minor characters exhibit agency in their short screen-time. One is Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), the author of a book of local folklore that appears to be linked to Helga’s murder. Though Amanda is murdered in a boiling bathtub (a scene mimicked by John Carpenter in Halloween 2), she uses the steam from the tub to reveal the name of the murderer before she dies. The fact that Amanda holds the knowledge of the murderer’s identity, and that she circumvents the murderer’s intentions by revealing that identity, gives Amanda power. Another character, Olga (Nicoletta Elmi), is a cruel little girl who likes to spear lizards with hairpins. As punishment for misbehavior, Olga is tasked with cleaning her school’s archives. There she discovers the horrible drawings of a disturbed child, and those paintings lead Marc and Gianna closer to the killer. Olga isn’t the typical cute, innocent little girl often seen in film; she is violent, disobedient and cruel, and she makes her own choices.

Deep Red’s ultimate feminist statement comes when the murderer is revealed to be Marta, the senior citizen mother of Marc’s homosexual, alcoholic friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia). When we first meet Marta, she seems confused and harmless, babbling to Marc that her career as an actress had been ruined by her husband’s demands. In the big reveal, we learn that these demands (and a healthy dash of psychosis) led Marta to stab her husband with a butcher knife in front of a young Carlo. In the film’s final confrontation, she gains the upper hand over Marc, only to be beheaded when her necklace becomes lodged in the bars of an elevator door. Her necklace is so ostentatious that Argento appears to be making the point that Marta is killed by her vanity. Even though she loses in the end, she is still largely in control of her own fate.

Dario Argento has created a number of compelling roles for women over the years, and those in this film are no exception. Rather than simply being good or evil, the women of Deep Red act out their own respective wills within a complex moral spectrum, something film could use a lot more of today.

The post Revisit: Deep Red appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

Baby Driver

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Though Baby Driver is writer/director Edgar Wright’s fifth feature film (sixth if you count 1995’s A Fistful of Fingers), in some ways it feels like a debut. The Cornetto Trilogy was a unique collaboration with Simon Pegg, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World was a graphic novel adaptation with co-writer Michael Bacall. But this is the first purely Edgar Wright movie ever made. Above its obvious value as a piece of rip roaring entertainment, it’s also an amazing showcase for one of modern cinema’s most fascinating visual stylists.

The film follows Baby, a young getaway driver played by Ansel Elgort. Baby has tinnitus and has to constantly play music to drown out the pain. It’s the result of a traumatic car accident from his childhood, yes, but it’s also a brilliant diegetic excuse for the film to be flooded with wall to wall needle drops. Baby’s got an adorably twee collection of iPods, each loaded with playlists for every job. Baby also likes to record interactions with Doc (Kevin Spacey) and each of his criminal cohorts, among them heavies like Bats (Jamie Foxx), Griff (Jon Bernthal) and Buddy (Jon Hamm). These little audio clips get sampled in the lo-fi mixes Baby makes in his spare time.

On the surface, Baby Driver presents a stylized take on crime fiction that’s well in line with what cinephiles love about the genre. It’s dripping with cool in the way Tarantino’s ‘90s work always did, but it feels distinctly Edgar Wright. In the film’s first half, the heists and interplay feel decidedly movie-like, as Baby is able to fool himself into thinking what he does isn’t as wrong as his collaborators because he’s just a driver. There’s something lovable and childlike in the way his obsession with music distances himself from the dirty work he’s instrumental in carrying out. But as the film progresses, more and more of reality seeps in, and though the film never loses a sleek step, this fantasy land Baby lives in begins to dissipate like fog, leaving him to grapple with the life of crime he’s lived since childhood.

The impetus for all of this is, of course, Baby meeting a girl. Lily James plays the girl who gets Baby to see a world beyond driving fast. Debora (spelled just like the T. Rex song, natch), merely by existing in his presence, shows Baby a different kind of life he never quite realized he was longing for in all those great pop songs he loves so much. But while the romance with Debora is a driving force, it’s Baby’s relationship with surrogate father Joseph (CJ Jones) that truly helps him to see the light. Black, deaf and in a wheelchair, Joseph is instantly the most iconic patriarch in recent cinematic history, outdoing every iteration of Uncle Ben’s “with great power” speech from Spider-Man without ever saying a word. Joseph just wants Baby to use his considerable gift for driving fast to deliver pizza and care for his girl with money he didn’t steal from a bank.

Of course, this being a movie about career criminals, One Last Job gets Baby hemmed up with Doc’s crew. The film’s first half drips with hipster cool, but once the shit hits the fan, Wright’s DePalma-esque flair for pushing the boundaries of cinematic language goes to work playing a visceral game of catch-up, hitting Baby with brutal doses of reality that his cleverly curated soundtracks have kept him insulated from.

That soundtrack is going to be an obvious smash and will be gushed about at length in every other review you read about this film, and for good reason. It’s a smart, infectious assemblage of songs that gives the film its propulsive energy. In Baby Driver, Wright has continued the formalism he played with so effectively in Scott Pilgrim. Both films are ostensibly musicals, but his latest gets to play with brilliantly orchestrated action and car chases leagues beyond the admittedly wonderful work of his last effort. The way the film careens from a balletic sense of grace into the gravity of its car crash entropy final act is maybe the most over the top way to dramatize a young man coming to grips with the consequences of his action in ages.

Between the dope songs and all the cleverer-than-thou references to obvious influences like Walter Hill’s The Driver, Baby Driver is going to be an easy slam dunk for a certain kind of filmgoer, but hopefully no one overlooks how fantastic the cast is. CJ Jones easily steals the picture as Joseph, but Elgort’s turn in the lead role feels like a throwback that could propel his growing star into future supernova status. He’s always come off so milquetoast, but, in Baby, Elgort channels Elvis and Jean Pierre Leaud in equal measure, contrasting so well with guys like Hamm and Foxx, each wielding their gravitas like a cudgel over Baby’s neophyte naivete.

At times, the film may grate audience members who like their crime flicks with fewer cartoonish flourishes, but for those with a hint of patience, Baby Driver’s early preciousness pays dividends, creating the rare caper film that glamorizes breaking the law just as much as it demonizes it.

The post Baby Driver appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

The Bad Batch

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As evidenced by A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour is a master of casting hypnotic spells with little dialogue and heaps of ambiguity. Outwardly, The Bad Batch looks like Amirpour’s bid to direct a sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, but the near 30-minute dialogue-free opening act boldly announces that this dystopian desert epic goes deeper. Set in a lawless prison state across a border wall from Texas, the film sees Amirpour stretch her metaphorical writing chops and delve into the purely atmospheric and trippy side of filmmaking. The result is very much a George Miller-meets-David Lynch experience at times, but those beats in the story – survivalist chases and wordless, brooding set pieces – not only keep the pace interesting but illustrate Amirpour’s knack for balancing action and existentialism.

Some have criticized The Bad Batch for lacking substance and aping other films, but whereas the Mad Max genre of desert post-apocalyptic films focuses on warring factions and toppling hierarchies, The Bad Batch is less about conflict and more about the nature of surviving in less than ideal conditions, with all the seemingly contradictory moral decisions that entails. The film feeds on the notion that we are all good and bad and everything in between. Amirpour shoots her characters dramatically isolated in this vast desert. The loneliness compiles the ostracism for every member of the Bad Batch. She accomplishes an incredible amount without even needing her still-negligible dialogue.

There’s a very Western redemption vibe at work in the first half of Arlen’s story, but her arc brings her from that state of anguish and vengeance to a place of acceptance and belonging. When we first meet Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), she is being kidnapped by what look like savage desert dwellers. Savage is apt when they turn out to be cannibals, surviving in the desert by capturing strays and cutting limbs off one by one. Minus an arm and a leg, Arlen sees no civilized behavior in them and spares no one in her escape. From one extreme to the other, though, she finds safety in a camp ironically called Comfort, governed by a Jonestown-esque leader known as The Dream (Keanu Reeves).

Amirpour’s script focuses on the nature of good and evil, or rather the ambiguity therein. Arlen is not purely a victim. Given that she’s landed herself in the desert, she’s also a criminal – and one intent on bloody revenge. Heading out to a giant trash pile, gun in hand, she finds a cannibal scavenging for items with a young girl (Jayda Fink). Although the scavenger already has a broken leg, Arlen shoots her and takes the girl back to Comfort, clearly an attempt to give her a measurably better life in this barren wasteland. But she’s robbed the girl of her doting father (Jason Momoa, sporting a giant “Miami Man” chest tattoo) only to have The Dream immediately swoop in to take her into his harem full of pregnant wives. At least with her father she wasn’t likely to end up a child-bearing slave drugged into submissive bliss.

Even in such a brutal story, Amirpour infuses her film with sly irreverence. Arlen, for one, sports the same pair of yellow booty shorts with a winky face on the left cheek throughout. And the wandering hermit who appears periodically and seemingly survives by catching crows in his tattered shirt is, in fact, a completely unrecognizable Jim Carrey. Even Momoa’s Miami Man tattoo has an absurdist quality to it: it’s both his only character identifier and his scant backstory, as well as being undeniably gaudy. Arlen herself has “Suicide” tattooed on her remaining arm, as if taunting her with an out.

Amirpour’s world is one that doesn’t value those it throws into the “Bad Batch” wasteland, regardless of their safety. In the face of such exile, it’s up to each individual to draw the line themselves. If there are no rules, do you establish rules for yourself? As Arlen learns that there is no good way to live among the “Bad Batch,” so too does Amirpour show us that moral high grounds are subjective. This isn’t merely a question of the lesser of two evils, a gross oversimplification of the situation, it’s a question of adapting to a brutal, unforgiving reality. Miami Man is a hulking figure, but he’s also a talented artist, constantly drawing his daughter. We never get the sense that he loves killing, but it’s a necessity. In the film’s finale, even his daughter comes to understand explicitly how sometimes you have to kill the things you love in order to survive.

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Holy Hell! Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery Turns 20

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A spy-film spoof starring a Canadian comedian as a walking caricature from ‘60s-era Swinging London would fit right into a time capsule of late-‘90s America. Released in the middle of the blissful decade after the Cold War and before the 9/11 attacks, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery premiered in an era when the threat of nuclear war had faded into the rearview and a terrorist mastermind could be depicted as a bumbling supervillain who operates without extremist political or religious motives. It arrived at the height of the catchphrase comedies of the ‘90s, when Mike Myers’ fellow SNL alums Chris Farley and Adam Sandler were striking lowbrow comedy gold by sputtering nonsense like “Holy Schnikes!” and “Stop looking at me swan!” and fellow Canadian Jim Carrey was talking out of his butt.

Using the conceit of Austin Powers, a renowned spy and unlikely lothario, cryogenically freezing himself in order to fight another day against his nemesis, Dr. Evil (also Myers), who had done the same, the film most directly parodies James Bond, even though Austin possesses little of 007’s sophistication, dignity or physical allure. Instead, the running joke in this film is that the fur-chested, crooked-toothed boor of a spy is nevertheless irresistible to women. There’s rich material to be mined out of the three-decade gap since Austin was frozen, with someone from the ‘60s likely experiencing plenty of culture shock, but the film instead remains content to only casually touch upon that aspect when it’s not dwelling on lengthy urination sequences and Austin’s embarrassment at reclaiming his Swedish-made penis enlarger.

When he’s paired with Agent Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), the daughter of his old partner, Austin is seemingly faced with the fact that times have changed in regards to how men are expected to treat women. But not really. Despite a few initial qualms, Vanessa mostly takes his overt sexual harassment in stride, eventually falling in love with him, and the only real difference for Austin in the ‘90s is the buzzkill of STD awareness creating the expectation to wear a rubber when he bangs strangers, a precaution he nevertheless forgoes when he shags Pussy Galore-parody Alotta Fagina (Fabiana Udenio) in a hot tub.

In fact, one of the aspects of Austin Powers that has most clearly taken on a different light in the 20 years since the film’s release is its cavalier attitude toward sexual aggression, making overt horniness by a man in a position of power into a punchline. Some of this obviously stems from the spy films it spoofs, where misogyny and sexual conquest were as standard-issue as a firearm, but it’s difficult to imagine a similarly high-profile film being made with the same lighthearted tone toward the subject today (even when we currently have a president who has bragged about sexual assault). There are a few other outdated gags, like a fez-wearing Will Ferrell briefly appearing in brownface as Dr. Evil’s Middle Eastern henchman, Mustafa, who is soon “very badly burned” by his boss—though I suppose you can still find similar culturally insensitive material in modern-day Adam Sandler flicks.

Twenty years later, Dr. Evil endures as a far more comical entity than Austin Powers himself. While Myers incessantly mugs for the camera as each character, Dr. Evil’s ineptitude and outright absurdity still carries some comedic weight, while Austin’s shtick has worn thin in the past two decades. Dr. Evil is made all the more dynamic as a comedic character by the revelation that he has a son, Scott (Seth Green), who was conceived using frozen sperm so that the supervillain could leave a genetic legacy in the event that the whole cryogenic-preservation-in-outer-space deal went south. In hating his deadbeat dad for not being there when he was growing up, and otherwise just wanting to hang out in his room, Scott acts as a real-world foil to the cartoonish lunacy of Dr. Evil’s malevolent operation. Scott even chimes in as the voice of reason when his cat-petting, finger-wagging father captures Austin and decides to “place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.”

Dr. Evil’s own struggles with adjusting to the 30-year gap since he froze himself also remain more amusing than Austin’s, as he memorably threatens to blow up the world with “liquid hot magma” for the paltry ransom of “one million dollars.” But the film again feels dated when he spitballs villainous ideas to frame Prince Charles for adultery or to poke a hole in the ozone layer, two things that, unbeknownst to him, had already happened while he was in the deep freeze. Princess Diana would die later that year, instantly dating a joke that didn’t make much sense in the first place (frozen since the ‘60s, how would Dr. Evil know Prince Charles was married?), and ozone layer jokes seem positively quaint in the age of rampant climate change.

Where Austin perpetually feels like a kooky character shoehorned into a James Bond role, Dr. Evil is a far more genuine parody. Not only does he mimic the appearance and eccentricities of a famous Bond villain, but his voice is a spot-on impression of Myers’ former boss, Lorne Michaels. Rife with Bond-film homage and parody—some, like the shoe-throwing Asian hitman character Random Task (Joe Son) stepping in for the hat-tossing Oddjob, acting as near carbon-copies of their source material—the characters and comedy clearly had a shorter shelf life than those found on Wayne’s World, which still resonates on many levels. But in 1997, Austin Powers would strike enough of a chord to spawn two sequels, with Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me grossing five times as much as its predecessor and introducing the term “Mini-Me” into the pop cultural lexicon. Whether you still hold a soft spot for this shagadelic film is up to you; but viewed through a 2017 lens, Austin Powers makes one realize how, unlike its cryogenically-preserved hero, most blockbuster comedies simply don’t age well.

The post Holy Hell! Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery Turns 20 appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

The Little Hours

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The debauchery-ridden weekend is a staple of lewd comedy. Director Jeff Baena’s film Joshy adheres to a similar bent of sex, drugs and indulgence. His follow-up, The Little Hours, attempts to put a twist on the raucous ensemble comedy by drawing from tales in Boccaccio’s The Decameron and maintaining the 14th century setting. The movie, however, struggles to be more than its concept. Characters are barely developed and are mostly there in service of the risqué scenarios and jokes, which are risqué purely because of the era. It’s very much a project of efficacy, with little done to enhance the overall movie. There are humorous moments, but after the first half hour, it becomes clear that Baena has run out of enough gags to warrant even the 90-minute length.

Unfolding in an austere nunnery, The Little Hours establishes its joke immediately. Our focus is on a clique of crass nuns led by Sister Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) and rounded out by the inexperienced Sister Genevra (Kate Micucci) and the shamelessly romantic Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie). After the trio chase off the groundskeeper with an assault of expletives, Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) brings in the servant Massetto (Dave Franco) after he’s fired from a nearby castle for sleeping with his master’s wife. The catch, though, is that he must pretend to be mute and never tell of his nefarious background. In the days of Boccaccio, the situation is rife for misunderstandings and miscommunications. For the lustful Alessandra, however, it hardly matters that Massetto doesn’t speak. Father Tommasso, for his part, carries on an affair with the Mother Superior, Marea (Molly Shannon). The hypocrisy of the story goes largely ignored, as redundant as it’s made by the sheer repetitiveness of these “holy” characters’ sinful behavior.

The Little Hours is a historical comedy in the vein of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Indeed, much of the humor stems from the mere use of colloquialisms and curse words in a 14th century setting—and by nuns, no less. This movie, however, pales in comparison to the Arthurian classic. The Holy Grail at least told the story of King Arthur, with heaps of comedic asides. But Baena cherry-picks tales from The Decameron with the sole intent to fill the script with horny scene after horny scene. Baena’s characters are so roughly drawn—nothing more than stereotypes—that their arcs are irrelevant, secondary to the lewd language and jokes. You would think if this concept were being turned into something longer than a short sketch that Baena would have made a concerted effort to develop the story, not just compound the taboo scenarios.

Despite the fact that the comedy doesn’t aim for more than the laughs elicited from medieval nuns saying fuck, The Little Hours boasts an unrivaled comedic cast. In addition to Plaza, Micucci, Brie and Reilly, Nick Offerman makes an appearance as the betrayed Lord Bruno, and Fred Armisen takes a brief turn as Bishop Bartolomeo, enumerating the sins of the convent inhabitants. But even these skilled comedians have difficulty fleshing out Baena’s story with sight gags. Neither the humor nor the sexual desire on display in The Little Hours is anything new, and perhaps by setting the movie in a medieval convent only emphasizes that fact, to its detriment.

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Oeuvre: Demme: Handle with Care

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Prior to its modern designation as the term of art for wide-scale radio-wave distribution, broadcasting indicated a method of seed dispersal, by which evenness and accuracy are sacrificed to cover larger swaths of land. The leap from this practical usage to a metaphorical descriptor for the seeding of information is a logical one, with kernels of sound flung out randomly into the ether, picked up by whichever individual receivers happen to catch the signal. Such diffusive technology has become even more central to our lives with the rise of the internet, which compounds the audio broadcasting platform to an infinite degree, interlacing the globe with a billion streams of dispersed, haphazardly projected data.

Years before the worldwide web was even considered as an invention, let alone the basis for a new model of populist communication, CB radio fanatics were forging a similar style of network in primitive form, carving out a linked community of far-flung operators. A passionate chronicler of the often eccentric intricacies of human connection, Jonathan Demme was perhaps the only person capable of turning an ill-conceived cash-in project on this short-lived CB fad into a commentary on such complex bonds. This is what he manages to pull off with Handle With Care, his first post-Corman, major-studio movie, which examines how the anonymity afforded by the open-wave format allows for the possibility of fantasy to flourish. It also takes into account the dark side, in which such obscurity is utilized to dispense hatred, hucksterism and deception.

A truly odd curio of late ‘70s cinema, this is the first Demme movie that feels aligned both in spirit and tone with his later work, finally landing on the pure expression of a set of themes he’d been circling around in his first three features. The system is corrupt, the odds are against most of us and the whole game is fixed, but by sticking together we can at least maintain some semblance of communal dignity, and maybe force the odds in our favor down the road. This hopeful treatment of downbeat material, along with the director’s insistence on digging into previously untold stories, links Handle With Care, at a time when trends were titling away from this kind of ragged, free-form expressiveness in favor of a growing mood of jaded surrender.

Befitting its dogged idealism, the film appropriately details one man’s efforts to maintain radio’s function as a connective tool within one small Nebraska community, where an expansive network of hobbyists spends their nights establishing a diverse set of alter egos. The central figure in this world of doubles is Spider (Paul LeMat), a man who insists on behaving the same in both real life and on the air, his lack of secrets pointing to his essential sincerity while refusing to function as a referendum on the creative liberties taken by other characters. Volunteering as an emergency channel dispatcher, Spider is both thrilled by the possibilities of the culture and disgusted by the amount of aural garbage that filters its way through his speakers. After such congestion leads to a frenzied scenario in which a small plane accidentally puts down on the highway, he swoops in to the rescue, then devotes himself to the larger task of cleaning up the airwaves.

His targets include a miscreant child, a priest trying to hock religious wares, and a virulent white supremacist, a gamut of bad behavior that highlights the ambitious scope of this otherwise sparely constructed work. Initially released under the superior name “Citizen’s Band,” the film’s original titular pun points to both the CB format and the rag-tag group of residents knit together by its ethereal pull, a group that functions as a reasonable cross-section of mid ‘70s rural America. Beyond on-air troublemakers, Spider has his hands full with issues related to his ex-trucker father, his part-time lover and his screw-up brother, all of whom adopt different personas through the airwaves, refracting these conflicts into distorted alternate forms. There’s also a roguish trucker and his two unassuming wives, whose gradual realization that they’re married to the same polygamous jerk is handled with a surprising level of care and attention.

This last bit at first seems like a throwaway subplot, but ultimately proves essential, a compressed version of the themes stretched out across Spider’s various storylines. In short; new information acts both as a disruptive force, demanding characters to reexamine their core relationships, and also provides the means for them to move beyond those seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Married to the same man, the two women initially seem to be at odds, but are actually experiencing a situation which benefits from forming a mutually empathetic, staunchly unified front. The type of networked story structure that Handle With Care employs has gotten a bad name of late, often exploited as an easy means of fudging actual characterization through lazy narrative shorthand and exploitative emotional tricks. Here, it’s less a case of corner cutting than of a world bursting at the seams with stories to tell, the paired nature and overflowing abundance of these interlinked tales providing a complex cinematic companion to the complicated richness of real life.

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The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography

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Errol Morris’s new film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, isn’t a great documentary, and that’s okay. It’s less about opening our eyes to new worlds and more about celebrating the considerable achievements of a single life. In many ways—both structurally and content-wise—the film resembles sitting down and listening to an interesting grandparent for an hour or so. It doesn’t aim for revolution; it’s a human-interest piece, stripped of even the most modest embellishment. Morris does well to simply let his subject speak, with a journalist’s nose for subtext and poignancy.

It doesn’t hurt that his subject is so damned endearing. Elsa Dorfman, a now-80-year-old photographer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the sort of character novelists wish they could dream up. Everything about her seems curated, vivid, almost unfairly wonderful. She’s a small-framed Good Jewish Girl from New England who considers her formidable photographic achievements fairly run-of-the-mill, but without a hint of false modesty. She manages to be both unflappable and wholly approachable. Her voice is ready-made for telling you about the Good Ol’ Days, and her bluntness and resilience inject the proceedings with humor.

Essentially, the film follows Dorfman as she looks through the archives in her Cambridge home and reminisces about what she sees. We get stories about Allen Ginsberg (a close personal friend), Joni Mitchell, “the folks at Polaroid,” the various bosses who dismissed her work as “too sunny.” Morris splices in stock footage and the occasional exterior shot to keep things from becoming too claustrophobic, but we mostly just get those stories and the prints that support them.

Which, by the way, are truly wonderful, to the point that it elicits major pause when we find out that Dorfman’s work was ridiculed for most of her early career. She rose to (and retained) prominence for her use of one of only six total 20×24-inch Polaroid cameras in the entire world, which she stored at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Many of her stories end with her exalting the format. The detail on the camera’s images is undeniably exquisite; at one point, Dorfman casually says that she’s “not at all interested in photographing people’s souls,” that she prefers to think of her subjects as a collection of surfaces.

There are a number of times over the course of the film where Dorfman tosses off a line like this, of throwaway brilliance, and it’s here that The B-Side is most compelling. Morris and Dorfman are old friends, and that level of warmth radiates throughout, coming through especially strong when Morris catches Dorfman arriving at some profound meditative thought as if by accident. It feels like he’s taking pride in her eloquence, nudging us and saying, “Isn’t she brilliant?” with the solemn smile of a blown-away peer.

Equally compelling are some of the graver moments, as when Dorfman recounts Ginsberg’s death and pulls out the last photo she ever took of him. She tells the story pragmatically and follows it up with a gentle reproach of people who complain too much, and especially the people who attempt to wallow in sadness with their work. Photography is for joy, she thinks, and the thought is doubly poignant: there’s a pitiable aspect of emotional repression, but then her genuine belief in the power of the image supersedes it.

When she’s not being sneakily brilliant or tugging at the heartstrings, though, Dorfman is pretty much just talking, and that’s what keeps The B-Side from becoming a classic. It is lovingly made, a clear passion project for all involved, but the whole enterprise feels designed to linger in the memory for as long as one of those pleasant conversations with Grandma: enough to recall it if you really want to, but not long enough to tell someone else about it. Its modesty is charming, certainly, but it keeps the film just a smidge light.

By the end, we’re glad we’ve taken the trip, perhaps spurred to read a bit more about Polaroid or Joni Mitchell, but we’re not changed. We’re left smiling, not necessarily knowing something we didn’t already know, but certainly learning a thing or two about someone who could use a little more of the spotlight.

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2:22

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2:22, the new film from Australian director Paul Currie (One Perfect Day), is a beautifully packaged but ultimately inert film. Stylistically, 2:22 fits into the category of slick, vaguely sci-fi urban thrillers alongside films like Limitless and The Game but isn’t as entertaining as the former or as smart as the latter. While both of those films establish a central conceit and then dig into it, 2:22 jumps around, dipping in and out of a variety of themes yet failing to convincingly relay any of them. The script, by Nathan Parker (who wrote Duncan Jones’ excellent Moon) and Todd Stein, never settles on what story it wants to tell.

Dylan (“Game of Thrones'” Michiel Huisman) is a New York-based air traffic controller who narrowly avoids sending two planes flying into each other. Suspended from work, Dylan begins to notice daily car accidents occurring outside his apartment at the very same time the planes nearly collided: 2:22 P.M. The pristine gloss on these opening moments is disconcerting. 2:22‘s team of air traffic controllers move and dress like models and can somehow afford stunning Manhattan apartments and front row ballet tickets. It all plays out like a Jerry Bruckheimer TV pilot with an abundance of shiny lights, beautiful people and dramatic poses.

Things don’t get any more grounded as Dylan meets Sarah (Teresa Palmer) at a stunningly staged aerial dance performance and discovers that she was on one of the planes he nearly destroyed and also that the two of them share the exact same birthday. 2:22 grows more compelling as Dylan and Sarah’s serendipitous romance develops, however the plot makes an abrupt shift around the halfway point, when Dylan discovers a set of old letters in his apartment and the film suddenly becomes a cold case crime thriller.

Though a late twist actually does a good job of tying together the various plot threads, the problem is that none of the threads are ever explored thoroughly enough to warrant any actual investment. And while a lot of care is given to technical elements, several significant story elements are treated lazily, such as an empty gun case signaling impending villainy.

2:22 does get some things right, such as an excellent soundtrack (and lively score by Lisa Gerrard and James Orr), and lovely cinematography by David Eggby (Riddick). It is also hard not to admire how earnest 2:22 is in its presentation. It is easy to see how much director Currie wants to entertain, even though his film never gels.

Huisman and Palmer turn in spirited performances, but they are given little help from the script. Huisman infuses Dylan with sensitivity and likability, making him easy to root for even when the script forces him into increasingly outlandish scenarios. And Palmer’s Sarah is elegant and charismatic, but it is incredibly disappointing to see an actress as talented as Palmer shoved into a helpless girlfriend role. 2:22 fails the Bechdel test, as Sarah is the only female role of any substance and she is completely reactive to her male counterparts. Diversity doesn’t appear to be a factor in any facet, as the only parts played by nonwhite actors are service workers like subway workers and cab drivers. As 2:22 is set in the very diverse New York City, this is particularly egregious.

Though it will win no points for storytelling, 2:22 features a reasonably satisfying twist, a beautiful soundtrack and first-rate visuals. And though its script sags where it should provoke, it is always nice to see a filmmaker really try to give audiences a true cinematic experience, even if the pursuit doesn’t pay off.

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The Skyjacker’s Tale

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Despite its succinct runtime, the documentary The Skyjacker’s Tale manages to traverse a multitude of subjects: Vietnam, racial tension, terrorism, true crime, white privilege, post-colonialism, revolution and, most compelling of all, Ishmael Muslim Ali, the titular fugitive currently laying low somewhere in Cuba. In 1973, Ali (then known as Ishmael LaBeet) was convicted alongside four other men of murdering eight people in a shooting at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in the Virgin Islands. The tragic crime underlined the dramatic transformation that saw the country openly catering to the business and tourist whims of white Americans, largely at the expense of the local population. Seven white people were killed in the massacre; the shooters, police claimed, were all black.

Ali, a charismatic sexagenarian with a hilariously foul mouth and a penchant for self-mythology, has long maintained his innocence, though there’s plenty of reason to suspect he had something to do with the crime. After leaving the army on a dishonorable discharge from Vietnam, he spent some time in New York with the Black Panthers cultivating a sense of revolutionary power. Upon returning home to the V.I., he and his associates started selling weed and sticking up tourists. Facing considerable pressure from a local government beholden to powerful American stakeholders, authorities instantly pegged Ali and company as the killers. Ali, in turn, accused the police of using torture to force a confession, and, in the film, he cites an unusually accelerated judicial process, which culminated in life sentences for each suspect, as proof of corruption. There’s even more evidence where that came from, but Ali was convicted nonetheless.

The film doesn’t attempt to clear Ali’s name, though it does a good job of revealing the suspect nature of his conviction, with Kastner taking a lighter approach to the model Errol Morris used in The Thin Blue Line. Across various interviews with the main players from the trial and investigation, the director accounts for all the conflicting testimonies and possible cover-ups, but he maintains a sort of relaxed vibe throughout, using a funky ’70s soundtrack and an investigative style that conspicuously lacks Morris’ probing obsessiveness and serious demeanor. This might be the most fun documentary about systemic corruption and racial injustice ever made, which isn’t exactly a compliment.

The story of the Fountain Valley massacre is compelling enough on its own, but Ali truly made a name for himself on New Year’s Eve in 1984. While being transported back to the United States after a failed appeal in the Virgin Islands, he hijacked a plane using a gun he assembled in prison and ordered the pilot to take him to Cuba, where he’s resided ever since. Kastner receives firsthand commentary from an array of subjects, including the pilot, one of the flight attendants and a few of the passengers, each of whom ironically seem to possess a kind of cautious admiration for Ali, who openly referred to himself as the “Fountain Valley murderer” as he rounded up his hostages. (One subject even describes him as a “nice, respectful” hijacker.) To hear them recall the event sounds like someone describing a movie, making an already larger-than-life story that much more immense and bewildering.

Ali’s case sheds light on the racial injustice in Caribbean countries, highlighting the widespread exploitation that comes with wealthy Americans making tropical playgrounds of places like the Virgin Islands, but it’s also one hell of a story, something the film struggles to translate. Kastner brings little in the way of energy and creativity, relying exclusively on familiar documentary conventions like staged reenactments and talking head interviews, each of which are framed in identical medium close-ups. At a meager 76 minutes, The Skyjacker’s Tale could make for quality television, but it’s mostly uninspired as cinema. Despite all this, Kastner manages to stick the landing. The film ends on a somewhat ominous note, with Barack Obama announcing renewed relations between America and Cuba, and we leave Ali with the notion that no amount of in-flight piracy and self-styled revolution is enough to escape the reach of global influence.

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The Big Sick

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Meeting the parents of a significant other carries with it such implicit awkwardness that there’s an entire film franchise dedicated to that conceit. Maneuvering those types of social situations becomes even more unwieldy when different cultural backgrounds get thrown into the mix. The Big Sick takes these romantic comedy tropes and adds some hospital drama for good measure. On the surface, there’s nothing particularly new or fresh about comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s breakout film, but its emotional earnestness, razor-sharp writing and offbeat chemistry of its stars make this film into a hilarious and compelling story about relationships.

With a script written by Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, The Big Sick opens by following the couple’s cute courtship and abrupt breakup. After playfully admonishing her for heckling him during his stand-up set, fledgling Chicago comedian Kumail (Nanjiani) goes home with Emily (Zoe Kazan) for what the two insist will be a one-night stand. Their assertion that they will never see each other again continues over several dates and becomes a running joke as their relationship begins to stretch into months. The problem is, Kumail comes from a staunchly Muslim Pakistani family which practices arranged marriage, and his overbearing mother insists on parading in a series of available Pakistani women at their frequent family dinners. When Emily, a white girl, eventually catches wind of this and discovers that Kumail has not even told his family about her existence, things end badly.

As effective as the film is in its first act—Nanjiani and Kazan make an intensely likable onscreen couple—The Big Sick hinges on Kumail forging a precarious relationship with his ex-girlfriend’s parents when Emily is hospitalized with a serious mystery infection. In the absence of local next of kin, Kumail ends up fudging an authorization for the hospital to induce a coma to combat the illness, for which Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) are grateful when they arrive from North Carolina. But unlike Kumail, Emily had told her parents everything about the couple’s failed relationship, and he gets a heavy dose of the cold shoulder from fiery mama bear Beth in particular.

What follows is the development of the film’s most interesting relationship. While Beth is slow to accept Kumail’s insistent presence at the hospital, Terry starts to warm up to him. He awkwardly jumps at the opportunity to talk to a real-life Muslim about 9/11 (“What’s your stance on that?”), which leads to one of the most disarmingly funny jokes about terrorism you’re likely to hear. Soon, Beth’s on board with him too, and Kumail is spending downtime with them both at Emily’s apartment, getting nostalgic and a bit tipsy together and even lending an ear to frustrations about their own relationship problems. The burgeoning affection between Kumail and his ex-girlfriend’s parents, the kind that can only be forged out of enduring trying times together, becomes stronger than the connection he had with Emily, which sets up a dicey situation when she inevitably wakes up.

Though Nanjiani and Gordon have penned a fearless script that tackles thorny issues with sharp wit, it’s the performances that really make the film stand out. Despite her recent criticism of Hollywood always casting her as the “forthright, strong, blah blah blah” mother, Hunter really does bring an infectious mix of tenacity and heart to Beth. Romano nails not only the awkwardness of a middle-aged man meeting the dude who used to have sex with his daughter, but also of a guy from a red state interacting with someone from a politically demonized culture, and he excels in this well-meaning sad-sack role. Moreover, Kazan and Nanjiani make the kind of realistic onscreen couple that’s difficult to find in rom-coms, and they effectively capture the dizzying euphoria of new love, the transparent efforts to play it cool in the face of such excitement and the frustration when real-world concerns inevitably burst the bubble.

With so many think pieces over the past few years about the “death of the romantic comedy,” it’s easy to saddle The Big Sick with outsized expectations to revive an entire genre. That’s a bit unrealistic, especially given that the film is only indirectly about romance. Kumail coming to terms with his own family and their culture, and facing the dilemma of spurning their traditions for the sake of his own happiness, is a crucial subplot to the film as well, and the various family dynamics at play make this much more than a simple rom-com. Ultimately, The Big Sick is that rare film that reminds us, through both wry humor and understated poignancy, that life’s most meaningful moments often occur when we veer off script.

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

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Spider-Man: Homecoming is the sixth movie to feature the wall-crawler in 15 years, the third to introduce a new actor in the role of Peter Parker, the second to reboot the character since 2012, and the first to follow the web-slinger as he navigates his new environs, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whew! These numbers shouldn’t bode well for another Spider-Man sequel. And yet, as a truism of finance states, past performance doesn’t always predict future gains or losses. Homecoming swings past these dire omens with no shortage of glee. Say what you will about Marvel Studios, but Kevin Feige, its president, understands the comic characters, the properties, within his purview. “Homecoming” here works on multiple levels, a school dance, Peter’s return to Queens (following the events of Captain America: Civil War). But it’s Spidey’s cinematic fate, now safe in Marvel’s loving arms, that best fits the reference.

In a supreme act of mercy, no radioactive arachnids were harmed (or filmed) in the production of Spider-Man: Homecoming. Director Jon Watts, and a posse of screenwriters, elide the details of an origin story equal in obscurity to those of DC’s two marquee dudes. Homecoming instead recaps Spider-Man’s guest appearance in the previous Captain America movie by way of some delightful, first-person cellphone videos shot by our hero. With maximum efficiency and little fuss, the film gets to the business at hand: a breezy adventure that could’ve been ripped from a single floppy comic displayed in a convenience store’s spinner rack.

Homecoming mines joy from its low-stakes sensibility, a perspective that’s obvious to the audience and lost on our adolescent protagonist. Yes, lives hang in the balance during multiple action sequences. But no city or planet remains in peril. Peter Parker is a novice with burgeoning powers, unrefined skills and a hi-tech suit (designed by Iron Man). Played by the excellent Tom Holland, he’s also a bright high-school sophomore, managing mundane academic and social commitments while holding down a unique side gig. From Peter’s point of view, this struggle, between his vigilante aspirations and the daily pitfalls of a teenager, might as well be global in scale. Any outcome shy of success would seem cataclysmic.

The movie opens in the wake of the first Avengers installment.Manhattan is in a shambles following that film’s alien invasion. Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton, soon to be winged, for a fourth time), a local businessman, runs the recovery effort until a government agency (created with the help of that stooge, Tony Stark) kicks him to the curb. With truckloads of extraterrestrial tech at his disposal and heaps of earthbound grievance as his motivation, Toomes starts a black-market operation, peddling refashioned alien armaments to two-bit criminals. He commissions a groaning, Transformers-style flying apparatus for himself, and dons it for (what else?) nefarious ends.

In the comics, Toomes was Spider-Man’s first recurring adversary, the Vulture. So it only makes sense that this minor villain looms as the antagonist in a back-to-basics story. But Homecoming isn’t so concerned with overblown brawls (though they pop up, sadly, here and there, and then dominate the final act). Those moments interrupt the wry high school foibles of a picture more akin to an episode of “Freaks and Geeks” than a blockbuster whose box office totals will match the GDP of a small island nation. Homecoming smartly recalls its hero’s tagline, that Spider-Man’s disposition (“friendly”) and bailiwick (the “neighborhood”) set him apart from the bulk his catastrophe-thwarting peers.

Holland, with his pipsqueak boyishness, salvages the role of Peter Parker that Tobey Maguire approximated and Andrew Garfield whiffed. The rest of the young cast is a panoply of diversity, from Peter’s partner-in-crime Ned (Jacob Batalon) to his schoolroom rival Flash (Tony Revolori), from his current crush Liz (Laura Harrier) to his (maybe) future sweetheart Michelle (Zendaya). And then there’s Marissa Tomei, not yet aged enough to portray the elderly Aunt May, but fine nonetheless. Robert Downey Jr., who zips in and out of the picture as Tony Stark, is Peter’s mentor and benefactor. Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man and its first sequel, plays Happy, Stark’s chauffeur and deputy. All of these human connections are tangled in the particulars of youth, a web of house parties, extracurricular gatherings, evening dinners, side-quests and field trips.

Peter’s juggling act of real-world commitments, newfound responsibilities and soaring ambitions is a deft feat, which Homecoming delivers, sharp and nimble, to the screen. Here is a comedy, dressed as a big-budget reboot, that remains light on its toes despite the usual trappings of a superhero undertaking. The Vulture may be the Big Bad this go around, but it’s a troubled cinematic legacy that Spider-Man overcomes in the end.

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A Ghost Story

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Though clearly inspired by the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Terrence Malick and John Carpenter, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is just the kind of sensationally original movie the world needs in this summer of sequels and spinoffs. And though it comes in tidy, bleak packaging, A Ghost Story provides an expansive, universal and spiritually profound experience.

The premise is simple. C (Casey Affleck) dies in a car accident and his sheet-clad ghost returns, invisible to the living, to the run-down home he shared with his wife M (Rooney Mara). The first half hour of A Ghost Story is incredibly somber, almost excessively so, as we watch C watch M suffer. His ghostly shroud is ominous rather than playful, almost gothic, its mournful eye holes fixed on M like an Edward Gorey creation.

If the film were to stay fixed on this relationship, it would be too much to bear. There is just too much sadness in C’s ghost, in M and in their shoddy, crumbling suburban house. This is where writer-director Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) elevates A Ghost Story beyond a simple meditation on grief. Though he keeps his camera takes long and mournful, the story shifts dramatically. M falls in love again and moves on, replaced in the house by a woman and her two young children and, later, a houseful of hard-partying hipsters (including a delightful cameo by singer Kesha).

Though C’s ghost is tied to M, it is also tied to their home, and in her absence, the ghost continues to haunt the house. Soon, the long, slow movements of Lowery’s camera are achieving more than melancholy; he uses them to show the slow passage of time, and the film feels like it lasts for hundreds of years (in a good way) in under 90 minutes. C’s ghost watches as its house is torn down, replaced as the suburbs turn into megalopolis, and then it is flying back through time to observe the property’s first residents, pioneers making a home on the frontier.

It is a profound journey, achieved through imagery and action rather than dialogue. The film is nearly silent, outside of some overheard conversations, a passionate monologue by one of the aforementioned partying hipsters (musician Will Oldham) and some absolutely devastating, subtitled conversation between C’s ghost and a ghost haunting the neighboring home.

Music is also very important to A Ghost Story, both in terms of the production and in terms of the plot, as C was, in life, a musician. Pete’s Dragon composer Daniel Hart does an exceptional job here, with the score and the soundtrack leading to a number of profound moments, most notably the stirring conclusion.

Significantly, A Ghost Story is a cerebral, satisfying film, filled with clues, allusions and subtle imagery that beg repeat viewings. Comparisons will likely be made to the recent It Comes at Night as that both are minimalistic, genre-straddling affairs, but unlike the evasive Night, A Ghost Story is brimming with references. Though it doesn’t explain them overtly, it wants you to uncover its mysteries. When C’s ghost manages to engage in some paranormal activity, knocking books to the floor, the camera settles in on the book’s titles: A Haunted House, Love in the Time of Cholera and a book by Nietzsche. Thinking about these books individually and as a group adds color and texture to the experience, and the film is filled with plenty of other hints and secrets, large and small.

It’s no surprise to see Affleck play a sad character, but this is no Manchester by the Séance. While A Ghost Story does examine grief, it is far more concerned with big thoughts and questions. Affleck’s performance, almost entirely physical as he is shrouded in a heavy sheet, is so effective because of its universality. And though she’s only in about a third of the film, Mara is intensely relatable in a part that features almost no lines. A scene that finds M eating an entire pie in the throws of grief is the film’s buzziest scene and perfectly encapsulates the overwhelming nature of loss.

A Ghost Story is a small film filled with huge ideas. It’s a soulful mediation on what it means to love, what it means to die and what happens after. That these themes can be addressed in an 87-minute film is a testament to the talent of David Lowery and the fantastic team he’s assembled here. Everyone should see A Ghost Story, and if you go in with an open mind you’ll certainly leave
with a full heart.

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City of Ghosts

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City of Ghosts tells the story of a band of citizen journalists who take on ISIS in the city of Raqqa, Syria after the so-called Islamic State has seized control. Directed by Academy Award-nominated documentarian Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land), the film not only chronicles the lives of the courageous people who continue to bear witness to the atrocities wrought by ISIS, it also serves as an indictment of how narratives are constructed in new and old media.

The film begins at the 2015 International Press Freedom Awards where we are introduced to the members of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (abbreviated RBSS throughout the documentary), the online rubric the Syrian activists publish under. There we meet the principle members of the citizen journalist collective we will be following: Aziz, Mohamed and Haroud. Because his English is not “so horrible,” Aziz is the RBSS spokesperson. All three men are wearing tuxedos, their brown, bearded faces standing out in the sea of white media elites in the New York City ballroom. They are there to be honored, but a voiceover begins in Arabic. Time and space shifts and we are transported to Syria in 2012.

The event that sparked the Syrian civil war happened in Raqqa, according to Aziz, when 15 children were arrested and tortured for painting anti-Assad graffiti. The rebellion commenced and ISIS invaded with the intention of making Raqqa its capital. The beheadings, oppression and public executions the Islamic State is known for became part of life in the city. RBSS formed when Aziz and his compatriots refused to let the violence go unseen. They wanted to show the world what was happening in their city and set up Facebook and Twitter accounts to disseminate their articles, pictures and videos. The world began to take notice, as did ISIS. Members of RBSS became Raqqa’s most wanted, were tracked down, tortured and executed, yet the movement of citizen journalists continued to endure.

The documentary is structured like an international thriller. Large letters superimpose over shots of cityscapes to tell us we are in Syria or a safe house in Germany or London or NYC. We follow Aziz, Mohamed, Haroud and other members of RBSS who have escaped Syria and manage the group’s website and social media accounts from the outside while the internal members of RBSS feed them information from within Raqqa. The transfer of files from Raqqa to Germany is a race against time as ISIS forces monitor online transmissions and destroy satellite dishes. Heineman uses the same quick cutting visual grammar as a Bourne thriller, but the story unfolding onscreen is more harrowing.

RBSS members move from safe house to safe house. ISIS is on their tail, posting images of their doorways on social media and calling for the radicalized to find and kill them. ISIS recruitment videos – replete with production values and jingoism that put the Pentagon and Michael Bay to shame – depict the execution of RBSS members. Aziz and the others watch, putting names to faces while watching this virtual morgue. ISIS took particular glee in making propaganda out of the execution of Haroud’s father. The use of slow motion and close-ups between the muzzle of a .45 and the blindfolded old man are straight out of Peckinpah, a real life ended through the techniques of constructing fantasies.

Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently represents everything good that was supposed to come with the democratization of media. Smartphones and social media allow movements to form organically and spread their messages. The members of RBSS still risk their lives daily to show the world what bulkier news organizations could not: the bloody savagery of fanaticism. But the fanatics have the same tools and bigger budgets. More people seem ready to kill for the distorted religion of the Islamic State than want to die to defend the simple freedoms they should enjoy as humans. But it is not just an ISIS problem.

The black flag of ISIS flutters in the corner of all their media. It becomes a subtle ubiquity in City of Ghosts, like the animated logo of a pirate television station. After the series of terrorist attacks that have plagued Europe since Paris in 2015, life for refugees in Europe has become more difficult. Rightwing nationalist have made them the focus of hatemongering. Mohamed and his wife and friends protest on the sidewalk during a parade of German nationalists. The nationalists shout Islamophobic slogans, threaten the protestors and wave flags. The flags are black with white lettering, Islamophobes and ISIS with an affinity for color schemes. No matter the religion or race, it seems hatred flies under one flag.

The harassment of ISIS forces a meeting of the RBSS members abroad. They decide the time has come to break their anonymity. A montage of media appearances follows where outlets across the world ask for their stories. There is a sense of freedom among the group. Haroud has a child he names after his father. Aziz delivers a rousing speech to the audience at the International Press Freedom Awards. The documentary seems bent on a hopeful note until it ends on Aziz alone in Germany, holding vigil with his smartphone while falling asleep in his chair. It is a powerful image.

In a documentary that explores the construction of media narratives it is arresting. City of Ghosts is a powerful film, yet it adds to the continuous blurring of reality and fantasy. Heineman is telling an important story about what everyday people can do to battle powerful tools with the simplest of available media tools and it is that sense of the importance that makes the final moments with Aziz feel so constructed. Are we watching a character or a man? Perhaps as we all grow into our roles as the media this will be the question that is always pondered but never answered.

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Revisit: The Lion King

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Walt Disney Pictures produced two animated features in parallel during its early-‘90s zenith. One was seen as a marquee project, on which its elite talent clamored to work. The other was a curio, decidedly second-tier, of interest mostly to new animators and those who sought to create a world inhabited by four-legged characters. The former picture was Pocahontas, which, despite its merits, marked the end of the Disney Renaissance. The latter was The Lion King, a masterpiece that now hangs high in the studio’s gallery of two-dimensional greats, the apotheosis of hand-drawn animation (from Hollywood, at least. Japan’s Studio Ghibli carries the mantle to this day).

Disney discovered, early on, that its B-project was special. So, in an unprecedented move, it released the first few minutes of its 32nd animated film as a teaser trailer, while The Lion King was still in development, a year before its 1994 summer debut. Without a single line of dialogue, or even a hint about the film’s larger story, audiences responded with eagerness. Everyone, on both sides of the screen, understood that “The Circle of Life” sequence – with its glorious, almost painterly vistas; an overwhelming sense of majesty, as beasts of all varieties march and fly to the same destination; set to a song, about birth (and, by implication, death), that reaches skyward just as a baboon, high on a rock, holds a lion cub aloft, while the animal pilgrims below go nuts – heralded a capital-E Event. Those four minutes of splendor still induce goosebumps.

The Lion King was an instant sensation, a blockbuster whose enthusiastic audience included both children and adults back when animated pictures were only pitched at kids. The tragedy of Mufasa and the rise of his son Simba, from an exile to a monarch, held a broad appeal. Much of this was thanks to the film’s indelible songs (courtesy of Elton John and Tim Rice), its magnificent score (courtesy of Hans Zimmer), its fine vocal performances (courtesy of a sterling cast) and its gorgeous backdrop (courtesy of the Serengeti). But its tale was the star of the show, a storyline at once prototypical and new.

Though it borrows thematic elements from “Hamlet,” The Lion King was Disney’s first animated picture that didn’t rework a known legend from the ground up. Its tone, a high-wire act of high pathos and lowbrow gags, somehow coalesces into something transcendent. Tug at any of the individual threads – palace intrigue and regicide, the coming-of-age quest and the revenge fantasy, romance and comedy – and The Lion King unravels into a mound of yarn. But these narratives are woven so tight, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. Simba’s trajectory holds them together in a knot of woe, laughter, and triumph.

The particulars of plot, entrancing as they are, fade if you take a step back and view The Lion King as an antecedent to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and its wild interlude, in particular. This film, this bundle of genres, this multi-faceted jewel, encapsulates life from its first breath to its final gasp. The setting is Africa, the cradle of mankind. And the natural order, the indisputable fact of mortality, is its thesis. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but grief wields its own cruel weaponry. When Simba shouts heavenward at a cloud formation that may or may not be his dead father, he’s confronting first principles, the fact that those whom we love will, at some point, never return after they’re extinguished. Just as we, too, will someday be whisked away without notice.

Such is life. Like the round yellow sun that started this miracle, existence waxes and wanes in an unending loop. The Lion King became a phenomenon by celebrating humankind’s brief trajectory through the cosmos. That a human never enters a single frame makes The Lion King universal, a blanket that covers all things that grow, reproduce, and then perish. It’s a saga of being and nothingness, whose hero faces a faceless truth and confronts the void with a little help from his friends, and a few fart jokes.

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Do You Take This Man

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Do You Take This Man tells the story of Daniel and Christopher the day before their wedding. As displayed by his morning coffee ritual, Daniel is the meticulous one and has been doing the wedding planning. Upon introduction, Christopher is kept a bit vague, but that’s his character. He seems like a sweet, jovial guy, but there’s information about his past he parses out on a need to know basis. As one would expect, the secrets and white lies between these two men will all come out during the rehearsal dinner Daniel is preparing for their close friends and family that evening.

As dramedies go, the setup is tried, true and sets the marker on the originality-o-meter fairly low. Nothing that follows in writer/director Joshua Tunick’s script will cause a jaw to drop. In fact, when the characters speak about topics like family, devotion and gay marriage they often sound like they’re regurgitating a paragraph from the most recent article they’ve read. Even those secrets and lies are kept fairly innocuous and understandable when finally brought to light. Even when the drama reaches its apex, such as it is, there is never any sense that the stakes are high enough for the nuptials to be in any danger. All Daniel and Christopher need to do is retire to separate safe spaces with their besties and hash things out. Hashing things out is really what the movie is all about.

While the script is standard and the direction uninspired, the acting is excellent. Anthony Rapp and Jonathan Bennett are affable and charming as Daniel and Christopher. Thomas Dekker and Hutchi Hancock are excellent as Christopher’s best friends and confidants. Lee Garlington and Sam Anderson bring a welcome veteran presence as Daniel’s parents with Anderson turning a rather cliché monologue about his son coming out into a tearjerker of a scene. As Daniel’s dear friend Jacob, Mackenzie Astin steals the movie. His scene with Dekker, flirting, hiking in Griffith Park and commenting on their new right to marry, is as good as this movie gets. Alona Tal does capable work as Emma, the surprise dinner guest, and Alyson Hannigan does her thing as Daniel’s brokenhearted sister.

One can only hope that we’re not too far away from a society that will embrace comedies and dramas about gay couples and that those films reinvigorate their respective genres. Do You Take This Man will not be remembered as one of these films. It is more like an acting exercise; the heart and commitment it took to make it is evident but ultimately the film is doomed for obscurity on your Netflix recommends list.

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From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Evil Bong

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You can always count on cheesy horror flicks to breathe malevolent life into inanimate objects. Haunted houses and sentient dolls have been midnight movie staples for decades. Stephen King’s lone directorial credit revolves around a radioactive comet somehow bringing machines to life…to kill! B-movie camp has brought us everything from predatory ice cream to killer condoms. Even when these outlandish exercises in blood-soaked schlock don’t contain even a whiff of satire or social commentary, they tend to offer some inventively gory practical effects or at least a good, brainless laugh. Not so with the painfully inane comedy-horror cheapie Evil Bong.

Directed by prolific B-movie purveyor Charles Band—whose greatest artistic achievement is probably writing and producing 1989’s Puppet Master, in which an Egyptian spell brings to life a chestful of malicious toys—2006 flick Evil Bong isn’t funny, scary or even much of a weed movie. Mostly, it’s an onslaught of college douchebags punctuating each sentence with the word “bro.” There’s the trophy-polishing star pitcher (Brian Lloyd) who got kicked off the baseball team for a failed “piss test,” the burnout law school drop-out (John Patrick Jordan) and the always-faded surfer dude (Mitch Eakins). Even though they all share one large studio apartment, they decide to split the rent further by bringing in a token Poindexter (David Weidoff), who declines to smoke pot and speaks in the kind of forced academic vernacular reserved exclusively for B-movie nerds.

Virtually the entire film takes place within a single room, the exception to this being, naturally, the hazy stripper world contained within the evil bong itself. You see, when Law School Dropout sees an ad for a huge “haunted bong” in the pages of High Times (you know, the magazine that every marijuana smoker subscribes to), he’s just got to have it. When it arrives, the three stoner bros smoke out of its various hoses (which technically makes it a bit more like a Wicked Hookah than an Evil Bong, but killer to-may-to, killer to-mah-to, I guess) while Poindexter studies a science textbook.

When Surfer Dude gets even more righteously baked than the others, the bong begins to glow and whisper things like “Yes! More!” and soon his soul gets sucked into the hazy stripper world inside the bong’s watery base. Within it, not only are there naked ladies dancing on poles, but there are also brief, inexplicable encounters with weird creatures from Band’s other contemporary endeavors—such as the racist African doll Ooga Booga from Doll Graveyard and the Gingerdead Man from the Gary-Busey-as-a-cookie flick of the same name, both released the previous year. Ultimately, the strippers, wearing bras adorned with sharks or skulls that actually bite, end up killing Surfer Dude, and Law School Dropout isn’t far behind. With each kill, the increasingly sassy bong, who we later learn is named Eebee (voiced by Michelle Mais), begins to grow a woman’s face upon its glass surface in the real world.

Despite the dying roommates and transmogrifying bong, Poindexter and Sporty Bro still decide to entertain some ladies in their cramped apartment, until their lungs are filled with sweet, sweet herb and they all realize the true nature of Eebee. Thankfully, just when all seems lost, Tommy Chong randomly shows up. He’s the bong’s original owner, Jimbo, whose old lady took the bong out of storage and put it up for sale in the first place. Besides briefly explaining Eebee’s evil origin (“a voodoo curse or something”), Jimbo also provides the deus ex machina necessary to thwart any malicious, parallel-dimension-strip-club-creating water pipe: he transports himself to the hazy stripper world and blows up Eebee with a bomb strapped to his chest, temporarily harshing everyone’s mellow but also somehow resurrecting all the bros in the process.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Band is probably as knowledgeable about marijuana culture as he is about gingerbread confectionery. Hell, the bros refer to it as “doing” weed, which any true High Times subscriber could tell you is total narc lingo. With a silly talking bong and a disappointing dearth of gore, there isn’t much within this film that can pass as horror, and the jokes are as weak as ditch weed (“I hope someday convicts will feast on your scrotum sack!”). Nevertheless, Band would go on to churn out five Evil Bong sequels and a Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong crossover flick, all currently available at the click of a button on Hulu. What a time to be alive.

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False Confessions

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Prolific Swiss director Luc Bondy’s final film, False Confessions was made in tandem with his own staged production at the Théatre de l’Odeon. The film was shot during the day and the same cast performed the play on stage each evening over the course of a year long run. This arrangement makes Bondy’s framing of the play that much more impactful, blurring the lines of stage and screen in the final shot of the film. The Marivaux play is a three-act comedy about manipulation and deception, with the ultimate goal to make people unwittingly fall in love. It’s a classic trope from Shakespeare, Wilde and beyond. Here, it’s rendered in a modern day (albeit luxuriously rich) Parisian setting.

Isabelle Huppert has been working at a super-human pace in recent years, and each of her films shows the actress in such command of her craft. False Confessions offers her a brief respite of comedic acting with the role of Araminte, a wealthy widow pressured by her overbearing mother to marry the elderly Count Dorimont (Jean-Pierre Malo) rather than carry through on their land dispute.

Enter Dubois (Yves Jacques), Araminte’s manservant and former valet of Dorante (Louis Garrel), with a cunning plan to get the smitten – and financially destitute – Dorante under the employ of Araminte and make her fall in love with him. The first victim of their duplicitous plan is Araminte’s companion, Marton (Manon Combes). The hardliner Monsieur Rémy (Bernard Verley), Dorante’s uncle and Araminte’s lawyer, compels his nephew to marry Marton and be satisfied with status and economic comfort that will bring him, and his insistence gives Dorante and Dubois the perfect setup for a series of false confessions of love.

There’s more than a hint of The Importance of Being Earnest here, although Oscar Wilde’s play debuted in 1895 whereas False Confessionsdebuted in 1737. Manipulating people into smitten love is obviously a well-worn plot, and Marivaux’s play today seems not so much dated but predictable and at times tired. Such a big cast of characters keeps the lies and subsequent comedic situations flowing, and Bondy assembled a cast of esteemed stage and film actors.

The resulting film, however, is rather staid. Bringing the story into modern Paris certainly attempts to infuse new life into it, but that doesn’t change the period language or the requisitely stilted manners of a wealthy household replete with a defined upstairs and downstairs. The setting update serves little discernible purpose other than novelty, creating more or less a reenactment of the 18th century production in a confusingly devised multi-story Parisian flat. And, although this is more a flaw in the original play, the sheer number of players and their quick introductions, make it difficult to distinguish who is who and what role they play in this convoluted love quest, especially when we aren’t offered much in the way of character depth.

Bondy’s direction likely translated well to a stage production, but making such a performance more three-dimensional is a sticking point for many adaptations. A clear weak point in False Confessions is the production design. There are attempts here to expand beyond the sets and give the luxury flat a sense of place, but that devolves into poor green screen work and low budget tricks that fail to convince. As a side project of a long theater run that was intended as a TV film, False Confessions is a capable rendering of a classic, but it lacks heart and is content to transfer the material from page to screen with little effort to make it engaging.

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Oeuvre: Demme: Last Embrace

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In his first feature outside Roger Corman’s exploitation factory, Jonathan Demme began to find his voice as a director. The 1977 film Handle with Care, originally released as Citizen’s Band, looked at a community on the fringes of society (not unlike the women in prison of Caged Heat or the crime family of Crazy Mama) and found flawed, humane characters longing for a connection. Paramount liked the movie so much that it opened it in 700 theaters, but after dismal box office returns, the movie was withdrawn after three days for retooling. Even after a successful rerelease at the New York Film Festival, the movie never found a commercial foothold. Then Demme made a Hitchcock pastiche. Despite Oscar nominee Roy Scheider and classic Hollywood composer Miklós Rózsa (Ben-Hur, Double Indemnity), the director’s next feature, the 1979 thriller Last Embrace, was a step backward.

Scheider plays Harry Hannan, a government agent working for an unidentified agency. As the movie opens, he’s having a drink with his wife in a remote Mexican cantina; unfortunately, it’s not remote enough to escape the colorful gunmen who kill his wife in a botched attempt on Harry’s life. Harry returns to New York a damaged man prone to anxiety attacks, convinced someone is trying to kill him. Upsetting his life even more is the fact that his old apartment has been rented out to Ellie (Janet Margolin), a doctoral student working at the Museum of Natural History. The seemingly prim young woman gives Harry a letter left behind for him, and its message, written in Aramaic, sends the agent and his new friend on a search that leads to an orthodox Jewish community and a startling twist.

Demme told The New York Times that, “There are no noticeable homages to anybody in this film,” explaining that the director’s Hitchcockian onscreen cameo as a train passenger was made because the production ran out of extras. But Demme was clearly being tongue-in-cheek; there are scenes in Last Embrace that would not exist without Vertigo and North by Northwest. Yet to his credit, Demme toys with familiar tropes; when fellow agent Dave Quittle (Demme regular Charles Napier) follows Harry into Central Park, a street musician is cleverly placed between them, one of several street performers who appear throughout the film playing a variation on Rózsa’s lush theme.

But the movie’s talent pool is for the most part uninspired. Scheider’s anxiety attacks seem forced, and Margolin can’t smooth out a script that requires her character to make the ridiculous shift from mousy student to split-personality hooker. While it’s a treat to see a baby-faced Christopher Walken in a small part as an agency administrator (blink and you’ll miss Mandy Patinkin and Max Wright as train commuters), the most entertaining performance here may be from John Glover as a foppish Princeton academic whose wavy hair somehow conveys his arrogance as much as his expressions.

Last Embrace most comes to life when it immerses us in the synagogues of the Lower East Side—the kind of misfit community that the director was so fond of. Demme was not fond of this movie, and you can tell that his heart wasn’t into it. In an interview with Michael Bliss and Christina Banks reproduced in their Demme study, “What Goes Around Comes Around, the director admitted, “I was kind of wallowing in style. I went into that movie thinking, okay, here’s a Hitchcockian thriller, and a lot of energy went into style more than content.”

Suspense tropes that Demme would tweak to much greater effect in Silence of the Lambs just don’t come off here, and the leads never generate romantic sparks. But the movie is not without its minor pleasures. Last Embrace has never had a good reputation; such critics as The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold and The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, who liked the film more than most, forgave its flaws. It was almost as if their admiration of Handle with Care made them give the director a pass in the hopes that he’d find a better property next time around. In fact, Demme’s next film would be his great breakthrough.

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