Logan Lucky

 I never know how to start these things.

Before going to see Steven Soderbergh’s latest, a foreseeable return from a very brief movie-making retirement, I went out to dinner with my two brothers and father. My younger brother (five years) has spent over eight years immersed in med school and all the fun that comes with it. I asked him the cliché questions regarding his chosen field, specifically about how hard it must be to be constantly in the presence of death and suffering. It was a heavy conversation, but one that I think we both needed to have for some reason. My brother was always predisposed to positivity, his decision to heal has taken a toll. This has nothing to do with Logan Lucky, which we saw after a rare evening together on the town.

Though never arduous, Logan Lucky’s heist dynamics spring from more than the desire to acquire wealth and the status/toys that comes with it. It’s built on the robust fundamentals of hierarchal antipathy, familial fidelity, and paternal desperation. The system itself is the one being outwitted and avenged. Jimmy doesn’t make much of his social grievances, he seems to accept them for what they are, but in a structure built upon survival he’s focused and determined to beat em at their own game, which he does. If the film itself has any contempt for actual people, it’s almost exclusively pinned on a sports drink tycoon prick. He’s the only character devoid of even a hint of humanity. He’s in fact a full blown villain, albeit an extremely inconsequential one. The rest of the very big cast is imbued with grace and admiration and occasional derision of the comedic variety which I’m sure will offend some and cause others to charge the very smart director with superciliousness.  I personally couldn’t give a darn about that sort of thing.

I also appreciated Soderbergh’s willingness to grant luddite propensities an esteem that approaches adoration. Cell phones and other connections to the digital realm are taken to task or mocked, while Jimmy’s disdain for such technologies, and specifically their sidetracking inclinations, ultimately spare him a lengthy stint in prison. The robbery itself is cheap, a refreshing alternative to most movies dealing with cracking safes and dodging cameras/sensors. In a film so mindful of its characters’ financial/economic/social impasse, it’s appropriate that it becomes ultimately a poor man’s heist, executed within its means. I should also point out that the performances are fine (with some minor late exceptions), my favorite being the one that I imagine many will consider the most brash. I never really know how to write about acting so I’ll just say that everything down to Daniel Craig’s enunciations had me either laughing or smiling, and I need more of that these days.   

And after admonishing a performance so big I’ll risk contrasting myself in admitting  that it’s nice to see a movie lacking the showboating/legacy building brio of other recent output. It’s also nice to see something so fun and happy. Soderbergh’s poor West Virginian edifice totters between condescension, idealism, and sincerity. But even at its sappiest or most churlish, it’s always eager to return to the film’s emotional crux; the love end devotion to family and community. I guess that’s how I’ll leave it for now. 

bleak bleak bleak

Jeff said of Hounds of Love that “I'm more than a little weary of suburban underbelly exposes like this; the idyllic community facade belying a deplorable evil behind the picket fence isn't an incisive observation at this point.  I'd say it's fairly clear to most people that evil can harbor anywhere; the true crime craze has probably killed any remnant of shock value the culture has for middle-class decay.”. To that point I would argue that the same underbelly has been dug up in regards to milquetoast youngsters looking to get out and enjoy nature, especially down under. Deplorable evil has been waiting just outside the flappy tent zipper for close to fifty years. I guess this is why I found myself surprised by my friend Mike’s late night texts regarding Killing Ground, where he bemoaned its dejection and inhumanity. I can’t blame the guy, we get plenty of palpable reminders of our species’ wicked proclivities. And throwing an endangered infant into the mix only raises the level of concern and disgust. I was admittedly shaken by the scene in Under the Skin, where an abandoned baby was likely swept out with the rising tide. All Jonathan Glazer did was took was the sight of that child crying and attempting to crawl away from the inching ocean to get my mind working in all sorts of terrible ways. Likewise, the last thing I would ever want to grant an A24-craft beard-toe dipping-horror-hating-kid such as Robert Eggers was the satisfaction of admitting that he got under my skin, but the scene where the little one is disposed of in his The VVitch had me hot and bothered in quite the literal sense. I must be in a sad moral state these days because Damien Power’s debut didn’t bother me much at all.

I’d concur with Jeff that the material is handled with care and respect, at least as far as these things go. The William Tell aftermath scene, shot wide and still, only shows bodies tied and worn down, two naked and one bound to a tree. One line of dialogue explains pretty much all that we hoped not to hear, especially regarding the very young daughter that we’ve spent the most time with. The callous nature of one killer sets him initially up as the one to fear while this is slightly contrasted by the other still battling trepidation. In this scene we witness the birth of this young hunter’s fresh thirst for a different kind of game. I’m not entirely sure, but I think he’s the one who shoots the daughter in the head as she lays unconscious. He’s also the man eager to return to the eponymous site, for no other conceivable reason than to engage in more sex and violence. Lord knows that he and his Neanderthal buddy left sufficient evidence (DNA, bullets, footprints) to land them in a prison for the rest of their lives. Earlier scenes show him scrolling through pictures on a cell phone like a teen on social media, the jumbled time-narrative revealing that he’s obsessively admiring his handy work.

The second couple proves more practical in their methods of survival. Power draws much attention to the terrified boyfriend’s decision to run and find help. The key to his supposed cowardice lies in his decision to leave the infant behind, which will lead many to believe that this poor little thing succumbed to the elements. I guess I’m a little skeptical of this theory, only because he has been given water and is being watched over by a dog who hunts the wild boars that would probably threaten its life the most. The same police and medical dispatches that discover the couple combed the wooded area and could have found the baby. I’m just sayin. Power lost me once the boyfriend left to get help. Suddenly the fledgling killer seemed to inherit boogeyman survival skills, only to be undone by the classic stone to head bludgeoning routine. All of Power’s steady nerves suddenly gave way to custom, almost as a sense of duty. As for the boyfriend’s decision; yeah it’s cowardly but practical. If Power really wanted us to hate the guy outright, he would have had the guy return to a scene of atrocity similar to the first.

-          It needs to be noted that my sensitive friend also dragged me to see Alien: Covenant, which he held in very high esteem, precisely the ending in which the film’s two sole survivors are trapped in stasis pods where they will undoubtedly be forcefully saddled with a fatal face-hugger whilst sleeping.  It’s been a bleak year at the movies.  

Back again, though still deadbeat.

Green Room finds Jeremy Saulnier once again exploring how the inexperienced wimps of this world react and withstand men weathered in the ways of bloodshed. The weaklings in this case are the Ain't Rights, a down-on-their-luck four-piece punk band trying to survive the long drives of the Pacific Northwest on what appears to be the last leg of a very ineffective tour, aka a standard DIY tour experience. Saulnier nails the tour milieu within the first fifteen minutes, specifically where he shows the band sleeping on the promoter's floor after driving through the night. I remember those long drives and the fruitless shows that they yielded. I can still feel the deflated sense of purpose after playing to three humans in Spokane while my friends partied and slept comfortably over three-thousand miles away. I suppose it's that desperation that lends the plot a certain authenticity, because I'm sure most would avoid a matinee out in the middle of nowhere to a crowd of red-laced boots and braces agro-dudes. The Ain't Rights should have syphoned their way home, wherever that is. After a last minute Dead Kennedys' cover they discover a young woman with a butterfly knife sticking out of her temple in their dressing room. Note: I highly doubt a venue of this repute would have such a room but that's pretty much neither here nor there. From here the movie becomes a siege flick, with our completely fucked neophytes trapped in a room with a heavily armed and trained group of racist thugs waiting on the other side of the door. The racism is of no consequence, just an easy way for the audience to identify with the protagonists and loath their attackers. The violence that we know will unfold, unfolds in ways that one could consider unique. For instance, it's not entirely customary to see our jittery hero's forearm sliced all the way down to its tendons before the real shit starts to hit the fan, nor would we expect the most battle-trained bandmate to meet such a sudden and calloused end, with all of his strength (when weighed against his skinny/timid bandmates and the chubby skinhead he chokes out) of little to no use outside of the titular clink. And yet, all of the camaraderie that one would expect from a group of road warriors such as these is all but dissipated once the dogs are let loose. I found this troubling, not only as a fellow wanderer but also as a moviegoer who finds the current cinema's lack of emotional vulnerability calculated and false. A lot of Green Room started to feel like a posture, both cinematically and musically. All of the genre familiarities looked like easy nods (posters, stickers, desert-island-discs, and shirts) for suckers after a second viewing. The suspense holds up and the violence is truly horrifying at times, but the setup is just an empty means to end. I enjoyed the end just fine, but I couldn't help but feel that this was all just one carefully composed trifle from a technically proficient expired punk.

I don't want to hold Green Room's solemn, airish, toe-dipping approach to genre too hard against it. I also don't want to give off the impression that I didn't like, at least the first time around. The truth is that fatigue has set in for me in regards to hype-art of this kind. It's far better than Cloverfield Lane, which similarly toys with confinement and the dangers that lurk outside. Whatever questions we're fed about the actual dangers that wait are spoiled by the title, which leaves the host's intentions as the primary concern. John Goodman's performance leaves little doubt that he will eventually freak out and fulfill his role as the villain, which I suppose is the Hitchcockian method of telling us there is a bomb under the table and letting us fret over when it'll explode. I didn't fret much about Goodman because I never once questioned Mary Elizabeth Winstead's ability to outsmart and overpower him. And the finale which finds our heroine up against large aliens (which blended so well with the darkness that I could barely see them) left me similarly cold. There are allusions to our heroine's past and specifically her tendency to cower when the going gets tough, which I suppose could add weight to her actions, though dumb luck seems to play a larger role in her survival.

That's all for now.