I’m reposting an essay from the archives this week — what the olden days of TV would call a “rerun,” forcing me to wonder if kids today would be as confused as Milton Baines was about what a rerun is — because, quite frankly, life kicked my ass this past week. I was already leaning toward taking a week off.
The decision was made for me when I broke out in an allergic reaction rash all over my body. It has been excruciating. After suffering the worst itch you could possibly imagine last weekend — there is no way I could have focused enough to be able to write a coherent review — I finally got myself to a dermatologist, who prescribed me a round of steroid pills to beat the allergic reaction into submission. I also have no idea what caused this, so I’m about as anxious as the newscasters in Batman ‘89 of using any products on my body, lest the Joker poison me again. I still have fairly angry looking rash spots across my body, but, mercifully, the worst of the itching has subsided, although, it’s still there. Then, I bricked my phone on Wednesday when it slipped out of my hand as I was setting it down.
So, enjoy a golden oldie this week. Odds are you missed it the first time around. What follows is the essay I wrote after attending a screening of the complete Man with No Name trilogy. I picked this one because I enjoyed writing it and it was the first not-strictly-a-movie-review piece that I ever wrote for my site. I originally published it on June 19, 2015. I had been writing film criticism for six months at that point, so please be kind when considering my skill level. I am simply reposting it without a fresh round of edits because… I’m itchy.
Peace.
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The crispness and clarity of digital projection has finally, I believe, overtaken that of the method born in the fin de siècle and used exclusively throughout the 20th century. As someone born in what the kids are now calling “the late 20th century,” it brings me no joy to acknowledge that the old way of doing things is obsolete and will likely fade from cultural memory even before I shuffle off into oblivion myself.
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A tagline on the poster for the 1934 horror film The 9th Guest proclaims, “Eight were invited…but death came unasked!” The all-but-forgotten pre-Code murder mystery is an example of the “old dark house” subgenre of horror. The 9th Guest was based on a Broadway play, which itself was based on a 1930 novel. I love the fact that the plot employs the hip new technology of the time, wireless radio. The eight guests are informed by their unknown host – via mysterious radio transmission – that he considers them all his enemies, and that over the course of the night, they will meet his ninth guest…death!
The old dark house trope in horror movies is exactly what it sounds like. Get a motley cast of characters together on a “dark and stormy night,” signal that there is danger afoot in the form of a killer, introduce a power outage, let mayhem ensue. My favorite exemplar of the model is literally called The Old Dark House, and I was introduced to it in college. It was produced by Universal Studios horror impresario Carl Laemmle Jr. in 1932 and directed by the legendary James Whale, who directed the 1931 character-defining version of Frankenstein as well as the 1933 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man. Another pre-Code entry, The Old Dark House is, especially for 1932, fairly freaky stuff. Seek it out if you get the chance.
The new horror/comedy from independent studio A24, Bodies Bodies Bodies, is the old dark house subgenre for the 21st century. The script was based on a story by writer Kristen Roupenian, with a re-write by playwright and first-time screenwriter Sarah DeLappe. It was directed by Dutch actress, writer, and director Halina Reijn. I’m including that litany of names as a way to signal that I’m not sure who gets the credit for doing their homework on bringing the authenticity of the old dark house tropes and aesthetic to the picture. It’s likely that all three of them did.
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“Understanding is love’s other name.”
That quote is attributed to Thích Nhất Hạnh, an influential Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk and peace activist. Known as the “father of mindfulness,” Hanh died at the age of 95 in January of this year. The quote appears in documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, an examination of the lives and work of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. At this moment, I can’t recall in what context the quote appears in the movie. I don’t remember if it’s spoken by either Katia or Maurice, if the film’s narrator – filmmaker and actor Miranda July – utters it during the film, or if it appears on screen in text form. I quickly jotted it down in my notes as I watched Fire of Love, but I failed to add an attribution.
The exact context of those words within the documentary isn’t important. At a broader level, the sentiment behind Hanh’s idea is a beautiful and apt thesis statement for everything Dosa explores in her picture. Understanding was at the heart of Katia and Maurice’s personal and professional lives together. It is what the pair were trying to achieve with the white-hot intensity of their decades-long study of volcanos.
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Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
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Kids, get out your popcorn, and let me tell you a story about the space Viking, Thor Odinson. This isn’t Thor as seen in Kenneth Branagh’s terminally boring 2011 outing, which made the mythical god and his world as dour and operatic as possible. No, this is Taika Waititi’s Thor, which we got a snootful of in Waititi’s previous outing with the character, Thor: Ragnarok. As in that film – which influenced the general comedic direction the character has taken in the non-standalone MCU movies in which he appears – Thor, in Waititi’s hands, is here for a good time. But, it’s important to note, he’s not here only for a good time.
Right below the surface of all the sight gags and screaming goats in Thor: Love and Thunder – I laughed out loud more than once at those giant screaming goats – is effective and heartfelt pathos that gives the picture its emotional anchor. That’s Waititi’s stock-in-trade. As can be seen as far back as 2010’s Boy, through 2014’s What We Do in the Shadows, to 2019’s Jojo Rabbit and his work in the MCU, Waititi uses all the goofy humor to disguise more serious themes. His technique is as fresh and entertaining here in Love and Thunder as it’s ever been.
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I’m attracted to the kinds of transgressive, subversive movies that Joe Bob Briggs curates in his TV and live shows because they’re like a pressure release valve. They let us laugh and be shocked and be grossed-out in a safe environment. They, like virtually all movies, allow me to experience the world in a way that is radically different from how I experience it. They overturn the acceptable behavior – or, more often, show it for the hypocrisy it often is – of square society. (And, yes, I realize that I’m about the squarest person you could ever meet, which adds to the appeal of these movies for me.)
I can’t think of a better overseer for these dubious masterpieces than the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Bob Briggs. In his immortal words, “The drive-in will never die!”
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It’s often said that the best entertainment for children is the stuff that deals with the harsh realities of life, but on a level that kids can handle. Bambi’s mother getting killed by a hunter; Artax succumbing to the Swamp of Sadness in The Neverending Story; The loss and change that comes with getting older as explored in the Toy Story saga.
You can add a tiny, one-eyed talking seashell to the list. Based on three popular short films – the first won Best Animated Short at the 2010 AFI Fest, was an official selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and won the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at the New York International Children's Film Festival – Marcel is the brain child of filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp and actor Jenny Slate.
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I am not perfect. I have many faults. But I can make one promise to you that I will never break: I’m trying. I try every single day to be a better person, to be someone I can be proud of. I sometimes fail in that goal, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop trying.
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There is a sequence in the first half of Neptune Frost that references the biblical revelations of the prophet Ezekiel. An important character in the three major Abrahamic religions, Ezekiel is given a prophecy from God, who is accompanied in the vision by four cherubim that have “four wheels” that move alongside each creature.
In Neptune Frost, codirectors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman reimagine this holy encounter with a mix of DIY style that manages to add to its ethereal, dream-like quality. The Ezekiel counterpart in the movie has a harness attached to his back with five bicycle wheels that slowly rotate slightly above and behind him as he moves. The addition of blacklight paint to the wheels and the characters in the scene makes the sequence even more mysterious and hypnotic.
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It is the duty of every American to watch the House January 6 Select Committee’s hearings on the attempted coup that Donald Trump and his followers instigated in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power to the duly and lawfully elected candidate, Joe Biden.
The first of eight planned hearings aired on Thursday, June 9. It served as an opening statement, detailing the actions that Trump took – and in some instances, the actions that he didn’t take – in an attempt to overthrow the seat of American government and the will of the American people. If you missed the first three hearings, I will link to YouTube videos of each.
I’m writing this because we are at a crisis point in American democracy. If you’ve been paying attention, the first congressional hearing probably didn’t tell you much which you didn’t already know. But it also featured revelations about the failed coup that the committee kept secret until now.
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While it must have been personally frustrating for director David Cronenberg, the fact that it took almost 20 years for him to get his latest film, Crimes of the Future, onto the screen was probably for the best. Originally titled Painkillers, Cronenberg’s return to funky, disturbing body horror was first set to begin production in 2003, but the project stalled out until last year.
What he’s made feels like a snapshot of our current moment. I suspect Painkillers wouldn’t have captured the feel of its time, had it been released when initially planned. Crimes of the Future’s fidelity to our present malaise is probably due in part to the rewrites and revisions that undoubtedly took place in the interim between Cronenberg’s first draft and the start of production.
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It took Gaspar Noé almost dying to transform his usually grim and nihilistic take on life into something wholly new with Vortex, the director’s seventh feature film. Well, maybe not wholly new. His latest is still grim and nihilistic, but there is an empathy present that boarders on humanistic. That’s a quality that might seem antithetical to describing Noé’s work, but what appears in only trace amounts – and only if you’re really engaging with his films – in previous of the director’s titles like Enter the Void and Climax takes an uneasy spotlight in Vortex, even as it works alongside Noé’s more signature preoccupations like dread and terror.
In early 2020, the Paris-based Argentine filmmaker, who is 58 years old, suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage which ultimately helped inspire the story for Vortex. The opening line of text for the film, “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts,” leaves no doubt as to what’s on Noé’s mind with this picture.
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All I want to do is praise Top Gun: Maverick for being a slick and entertaining thrill-ride of a movie. It certainly is that. The action sequences are completely enthralling. The performances are mostly a lot of fun, too. Put all that together with the unrivaled screen magnetism of Tom Cruise – on the cusp of turning 60, Cruise still has plenty of charisma to burn – and Maverick should be a lock as the blockbuster action spectacle of the summer.
It undoubtedly will be.
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“Listen. There's only one woman in the world. One woman with many faces.” Those are the words of Satan, disguised as a guardian angel in the form of a young girl, in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. This is what Satan says to Jesus in order to tempt him to come off the cross and live his life as an ordinary man, so that he can have what he truly desires, a family. In the movie, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s true love, is dead, but Satan tries to convince Jesus he can still have what he wants, only with a different woman – or many different women – since they’re all the same.
Writer/director Alex Garland has gender swapped that idea for his new film, Men. It’s an intense fever dream of a movie. Using the subgenre of folk horror, Men is an exploration of every disturbing behavior that men perpetrate against women. Gaslighting. Intimidation. Possessiveness. The threat of violence. Actual violence. The picture’s final message, delivered in its last line of dialog, struck me as being a cop-out for why so many men treat women as property. Garland seems to think it’s a misplaced desire to be loved, instead of systemic oppression and culturally accepted subjugation. Still, his movie is startling in both the themes it tackles and its hallucinatory aesthetic.
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It seems like advertising is a good enough place as any to start. Maybe that’s because MCU movies themselves are starting to feel less like the art/entertainment that the marketing and advertising is designed to support and more like merely an extension of that marketing and advertising. On the day Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was released, May 6th, I saw an online ad for it. The text of the ad read, “The Marvel universe will never be the same.” I had already attended a press screening for the movie four days earlier, so I knew that claim was basically bullshit.
Things happen in Multiverse of Madness. There’s even a major development in the movie’s final minutes that does promise to change Dr. Stephen Strange in a fundamental way. But, as is increasingly the issue with these movies, the entirety of what comes before that moment feels like a flimsy excuse to get us there, not so that we can marvel (pun completely intended) at the development within the movie itself, but so we can be excited for what this change will mean for future installments.
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As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity in names between Prince Amleth, the hero of The Northman, and a certain other famous prince in world literature, namely Hamlet. As the story began to unfold in the new film from director Robert Eggers, who brought us the deeply researched and meticulously crafted films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I saw other similarities. There is a king who is betrayed and slain by his own brother. The young prince, his mother taken as a spoil of victory by the new king, vows revenge on his treacherous uncle.
I thought that Eggers and his cowriter, the Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who goes by Sjón, might have taken inspiration from the Bard for their tale of Nordic kings and Viking berserkers. Turns out – as I’m sure more than a few of you already knew – that I had it backwards. It was Shakespeare who took inspiration from young Amleth for his own Prince of Denmark. As I should have suspected after seeing his first two films, Eggers took inspiration for his movie from and adapted the 13th century version of the Nordic legend of Amleth as memorialized by Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum.
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This post is different from anything I’ve ever published on this website. I was compelled to write it due to increasing worries I have about what I believe is an impending authoritarian takeover of our government by rightwing extremists both inside and outside of elected office. I have never hoped more to be wrong. I will return to regular movie reviews with my next post.
TW: Rape
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I don’t think I knew what Ebert Interruptus was until 2013, when Roger Ebert died. In the myriad obituaries and tributes dedicated to the film-criticism titan that I read in the wake of his passing, I saw a few mentions of what was, at the time, still called Cinema Interruptus. What I read seemed to hold an almost mythic quality to it.
Ebert Interruptus is one event of dozens that make up the Conference on World Affairs, which is held each year on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus.
I attended Ebert Interruptus for the first time this year, and I wrote about my experience.
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The critical rap on most DCEU films – especially those with Zack Snyder attached, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – is that they’re too tonally dark. They’re often too visually dark, for that matter. While titles like the aforementioned Batman v Superman left me feeling beaten into submission and desperate for a way out, the new take on the Dark Knight from director Matt Reeves, The Batman, had me mesmerized, fully in thrall to the world Reeves created. His film is every bit as dark as Snyder’s, tonally as well as visually. (Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous 2021 adaptation of Dune, listed Gordon Willis’s muted look for The Godfather as inspiration for The Batman.)
So, why did The Batman work for me where BvS failed? Improbably, I think it’s because of proximity to reality. Snyder’s films are bleak, depressing, and oppressive. They also don’t feel particularly connected to the real world in any tangible way. It’s easy to disconnect from them because the worlds created within them feel divorced from our own. The Batman is so hypnotic – and, consequently, so disturbing – because Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, has crafted a world that isn’t ours, but that feels (to my great dismay) like it will be ours in another three to five years. That feeling is what fueled most of my discomfort and sick fascination while watching The Batman.
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