dosed and confused

Even without foreknowledge of neither Gaspar Noe’s crave to goad nor any info involving a horny dance troupe and a very portentous bowl of sangria, you know you’re headed towards a hellscape. The opening shot, directly overhead, features a blood-soaked woman wriggling in anguish, snow-angel style on a white snowy canvas as the end credits scroll up. I fell for it, pushing pause and seeing if I somehow started it at the wrong place. From here we watch interviews with the company, presumably audition videos peppered with tidbits of data regarding their personalities, information that doesn’t really add up to much though the ensuing perpetrator is hiding here in plain sight. This smorgasbord of humanity is then shown in beautiful solidarity performing a choreographed dance to Cerrone’s Supernature. For me to call this a highpoint in this scalawag’s brash career might seem like a snide commendation as said career has mostly annoyed the shit out me, but for once his talent isn’t eclipsed by his true vocation to eternally stick in bourgeois festival leech’s crawl. In this he has made a brand and stuck staunchly to it. I’ve said before that such an aptitude is rigged to avoid any true criticism; react and out yourself as a delicate sucker. Still, it’s nice to see him filming his actors with such adoration and grace even if it’ll all end as it typically does with everyone either dead or worse. These scenes are intercut with dialogue that implies certain characters are here to either fight or fuck, some of the implications suggest that the sex won’t be consensual and this seed is planted making much of what’s to come all the more alarming. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that dialogue is Noe’s knack and Climax is no exception. The aforementioned bowl of sangria has been spiked with LSD, and I’m guessing based on everyone’s eventual ruin it was a substantial amount. The effects don’t rear their ugly head until at least 45 minutes of relative niceties have passed (including another dance sequence shot directly above the performers). The preliminary shock leads to three of the dancers getting fucked up by their troupe; one burn victim, one frozen man, and one pregnant woman kicked in the stomach. This violence and the violence forthcoming seem to stem from Noe’s puerile notions of foul human nature coaxed out by the acid. This is where Climax started to lose me, but not completely. My problem with the descent into hell wasn’t that it was horrid and disturbing (the sound of a scared tripping 5 year old screaming for his mother, who locked him in a storage room and lost the key, was sufficient nightmare fuel for me), it’s that Noe can’t resist tethering contrived plot to what ought to be pure nonsensical anguish and chaos. The worst and most unforgivable also takes up the most time; a brother chasing down and attempting to rape his sister. This is the type of puerile baby baiting that distracts from the genuinely revolting and oddly beautiful funhouse of insanity strewn about the red soaked dancefloor. The callbacks only sidetrack us and break the spell. Noe is working with a dream synopsis, so simple that it doesn’t really require much. His need to spike this punch with reason is telling. Stop making sense. 

dragged across burning

It’s hard for me to believe that the inherent danger in associating fictional actions with creative consent has become so widely accepted in media discourse. It’s comical to read grown adults worry that audiences won’t be able to discern things for themselves; as though we laymen are simply sponges hoping to soak up our wavering values through Hollywood. Even if this assertion occasionally holds water, I wonder what the alternative would be. Should we implement another Hayes Code? Should there be a certificate that said film either falls in line with a certain credo or perhaps we can slap a certificate of approval when a movie is believed to present no clear and present danger to progressive society. Maybe this sense of danger comes from a voice inside us that might rationalize a wrongheaded point of view thus momentarily walk in the shoes of a racist, misogynist, serial killer, or homophobe. I think this same fear has alerted mega conglomerates to lace their otherwise empty tentpoles with hints of “activism.” If you aren’t immediately wary of Disney imploring you to see their latest superhero movie lest mouth breathing incels take over the cinema forever (you only have one shot here guys, either pay to see this movie or there will never be another _______ caped crusader, don’t fuck it up), then you are a sucker. Either way, I think that within that sense of danger we learn something perhaps unsavory about ourselves or maybe even unsavory about evil and its enticement. As they say, the first step to redemption is in recognizing the problem. S Craig Zahler doesn’t shy away from the problem, including corrupt cops (the only kind) justifying their actions with what, on the surface, seems like sound reasoning. These are the lies they tell themselves to justify their unjustifiable actions. The imminent conjunction of cop and thief in Dragged Across Concrete is predictable, but it’s the beats along the way that make it so fresh and intricate. The decision to portray a dirty pair of cops (one played by mad Mel to complicate matters) without the ethical markers that shepherd and soothe the diffident, dwarfs the more substantial decision to give equal if not deeper consideration to their counterpart (Tory Kittles who deserves all of the awards). Zahler specializes in weaponizing desperation; a harbinger for approaching carnage. In this department he might just be the current champion, which predictably has landed him under the ever-watchful eye of milquetoast handwringers for the foreseeable future. And at times he is irrefutably pitiless. Take the scene involving a mother’s return to work, a scene that uses a mother’s hardest day (the first without her child) as a revolting punchline to both further complicate the complicity of Kittles’ character as well as fortify the almost mystical heartlessness of a masked villain. Like the Sadfies’ Good Time, another genre film to draw suspicion and contempt regarding its authorial provocation, Dragged Across Concrete never feels banal or predictable, toppling nearly all narrative and spoken clichés in its path. Here’s hoping that its financial woes don’t prevent Zahler from continuing to shine a light on the worst of us.

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning spends the majority of its two plus hours in the company of an isolated and horny South Korean youth tending to his recently incarcerated father’s farmhouse in Paju. The young man’s name is Jongsu and he is a writer, though we get very little insight outside of a petition as to what his prose is all about. Early on, he reunites with a childhood acquaintance from his hometown. Her name is Haemi and it’s immediately evident that her version of reality might be slightly skewed. For instance, we are told she has a cat whom Jongsu has been entrusted to feed and water while she is in Africa for a short trip. We may or may not ever see this cat at any point of the film, thus sharing his confusion as to the validity of its existence. The importance of this cat’s existence plays a large role in what lies ahead. Chang-dong’s careful and deliberate structure ensures that all information pertinent to what will eventually unravel is slyly withheld; clues dangled just tantalizingly enough to let our minds do most of the heavy lifting, perhaps leading to a shared fixation with our tortured central character. This method is nothing new and in fact there is a crucial pantomiming sequence that recalls the finale of Antonioni’s Blow Up, another film about a fanatical man turned greenhorn sleuth as a result of meticulously withheld evidence. In Burning we learn that one character’s secret to persuasive performance is simply believing in that which is simply not there. This is a movie full of instances in which we are baited to do just that. Here Jongsu scrambles frantically to find Haemi after a phone call seems to imply foul play. The main suspect is Ben, a wealthy socialite whose company Jongsu is forced to suffer thanks to his jealousy. Ben constantly seems amused by his newly acquired underprivileged company and a later scene would imply that he’s been down this road before, that the poor are simply diversions until they inevitably get tossed aside or worse. Haemi’s disappearance is worthy case to crack, especially as cryptic signs seem to lead further past the point of no return. A drawer full of female possessions, a flippant mention of arson, a yawn, a bizarre trip to a lake, and even a cat fuel the fires of distrust. Unrequited desire begets resentment and confusion which in turn begets anger and delirium regarding our gumshoe’s increasingly bewildered state. Even the miserable final scene contains a single line of dialogue that only sends us further into uncertainty, which surely has left most to rejoice and luxuriate in its scrupulous and never not beautifully composed chaos. I couldn’t help but feel that the last twenty minutes piled it on too thick, but I’m certainly on the outside looking in. Love hurts. 

pride, death, fame, and self-preservation

Zama (2018): Don Diego de Zama is a functionary of the Spanish empire in colonialized Paraguay, and he extremely desperate for a transfer back to his motherland because he feels above it. He may also miss his wife and kids, it’s possible. He’s a monster, sure, but he’s got feelings too. He was a magistrate not born in Spain, thus bound to the new world that he hates so much. The local governor uses his request for a transfer as a tool to bend his well, it is clear to us that he is just yanking his chain. The governor is a different breed of monster, I’m not sure he has feelings beyond those that tend to his needs. Zama’s happiness or lack thereof is a result of his pride and status, caught somewhere in between, a social purgatory that finds him with power but no respect. Of course, all this colonial pride deserves a villain if only to make it all worth something. He gets one. A native prisoner speaks of a fish fighting to remain in water that seeks to reject it. The finale basically literalizes the flopping fish losing air. Martel invites us to be voyeurs of his follies and it’s hard not to laugh, until the cold hard realities of death creep up and spoil the party.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): “Uncertainty—that is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next can we vouchsafe certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and touch, it is seldom justified, if ever. Down the ages from our remote past, what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones, wanting their comfort.” I stopped taking comfort in false certainty, at least I tried. It’s not that I find it all so dismal and cruel that I’ll wind up like the characters in this, the Coen’s six-part western anthology of death, but you never know. Banking on certainties, those which aren’t tangible can get you in a lot of trouble. But where is the hope in that? I don’t know, and for once I take comfort in not knowing. If there is one bit of comfort that we can all take from death, it’s that none of us will make it out of this life alive. Buster Scruggs tells five tales of varying tones, complexities, cruelties, and ironies with death a consistent presence and certainty. The first story introduces the titular San Saba songbird who is quick to remind us that he is indeed no misanthrope right before sending at least seven men to the reapers. It’s a fully committed cartoon; replete with song numbers and animated angel wings. I think it’s glorious but as some have noted, it certainly plays as a greatest-hits of every bad inclination lobbed against the brothers as navel gazing assholes. Maybe they are, but I don’t care. It’s customary to remind all that anthologies vary in quality and this is no exception but while the highs are extremely high, the lows are merely not as tall. My personal favorite seems to be the consensus.

A Star is Born (2018): A story so nice they told it twice… twice. It’s built around the tragedy of love, addiction, and showbiz and all the evil compromises therein. One character’s ascension is predicated upon another’s ruin; in Bradley Cooper’s hands it’s rock martyrdom (the Pearl Jam kind) at the altar of pop superficiality. The songs weren’t my cup of tea, especially the rock ones, but I liked it. I’ve read a lot of bellyaching about Cooper’s self-infatuation here and how his overemphasis on his doomed drug/booze hound is just a conceited distraction from the titular star whom the film ought to celebrate and luxuriate. But the movie is about the tragedy of his addiction and thus needs to be a tragedy and what good is a tragedy if you don’t give a fuck about the person biting the dust? And this notion that Gaga is somehow upstaged here is ridiculous. The love story is the main attraction and while pop culture junkies with a binary view of love will speculate as to whether or not the stars fell into it IRL (tabloid fodder that rules the land) I would like to float the notion that even when one is pretending to “love” another, he/she/they might be susceptible to manifest feelings that can be redefined within the slender strictures of what we have deemed to be love itself. This hybrid is the main draw here and the movie benefits greatly from its complexity. I don’t know how this happened but somehow I’m on team Cooper.

US (2019): Jordan Peele loves the word tethered and so do I. It’s an evocative word that conjures weaving fabric or taking a thread and embedding it within a larger whole. In horror I imagine the 80s goop gore, a body horror travesty where a head grows out of a slimy torso, reeling in pain and torment, ready to spoil my lunch and dreams. Here we get tunnel dwelling clones who inexplicably mimic the motions of those above, the titular US? Peele, after winning over most critics as well as taking home a best original screenplay Oscar for his debut, nobly stuck with the genre that so many insist he elevated. I think it’s important to note that he gained his notoriety writing sketch comedy, not necessarily because he specialized in comedy but that he specialized in short form, which might explain why this screenplay fails to explain why or how the “tethered” are indeed tethered to their doppelganger. I’m not the kind of viewer who needs explanations, I prefer to be left with more to ponder but here we have just enough exposition dangled in front of us to wonder why certain details were left out of the final product. Specifically, how and why do these angry puppets mimic our every motion? I think the word tethered and all the connotations that this word induces drove the narrative here, and Peele could benefit from abridging his ideas. It’s not an uncommon notion in modern horror to tether a film to a superimposed allegory as we live in such politically boisterous times that declaring and identifying oneself 24/7 is a constant pressure and perceived civic duty. When the themes drive the narrative, all must fall in line with the message within and art winds up the victim. This, to me, is the what irks me about this notion of horror as a genre in desperate need of redemption. It’s a boring notion that boxes movies within their higher purpose. US thankfully isn’t sunk by this. Though built on a short form premise, it’s stretched out with much more grace and aptitude than its predecessor. My heart constantly went out to Winston Duke’s dad, stuck acting out the role of protector with little to no real-life experience to survive let alone keep your family alive. The Hands Across America gag continues Peele’s evisceration of shallow neo-liberal self-congratulatory lip service. Get Out succeeded in its succinctness, a great concept that maybe lacked the aesthetic goods. Here he remedies what I would say was a lackluster style but at the service of a convoluted story that probably would have benefited from a golden pair of scissors. I’m not saying that horror ought to lack ideas but that those ideas need not be the impetus and chauffeur to guide us through. And yet, somehow this movie still works which is a testament to Peele’s hype which is certainly now justified and we who love horror will be lucky to have him stick around and trust the genre that he’s now supposedly king of.

2017

Top ten lists are stupid, but they happen and someone ought write about the need to catalogue, rank, and canonize the things and what good it ultimately does for the artform itself. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s pointless. With a year faded into the ether, it’s easier to silence the hype. Some of these were revisited recently, some caught up with. The rest were just hazy recollections, but somehow they stuck around this long and for that I give them big kisses.

Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch): Sometimes they come back. They have been coming back like baby bunnies lately. Most of the time they are just spit out and wrinkled; hitting all the same beats and rhythms that earned them a place in some foggy version of our hallowed nostalgia heap. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, in my mind, was a ten-tape box set ever present at various punk houses across America, usually on a shelf right about my head as I tried to sleep on a hardwood floor in my neon lightning bolt sleeping bag. My family wasn’t much of a T.V. show family and I very much doubt that if they were that I would have been permitted to see it in the early nineties. Eventually I caught up with the show, thankfully well before the hip Netflix hype faze, therefore I had a proceeding investment in old friends like Bob, Laura, Coop, Lucy, James, Hawk, the Log Lady, Agent Phillip Jefferies (once David Bowie and now a giant steaming tea kettle), etc. While its nice to catch up with the ole gang, it’s maybe nicer to spend so much time with Dougie Jones as he acclimates to the bizarre rituals of middle-class suburban Vegas existence. Sometimes I think we don’t realize how often we are laughing with Lynch and his characters rather than at them. It’s rare to see something this funny and moving shift instantly to bleak and inquisitive about these mortal coils that we will all shuffle off someday. It swears allegiance to no set register, happily shifting gears without a warning shot, keeping us always on our toes. It doesn’t simply rest on the lazy laurels of fanboy service maintenance. Episode eight is perfectly content to be a great film unto itself. It has become customary for these unending returns to wreak of our shared communal acceptance of mediocrity if it’s rolled up in a husk of wistful nods to something being born and conceived before burrowing deep into our minds and hearts. This feels like a fetus, looking up at its mom asking “what year is it?”

Goodtime (Sadfies): Connie spends most this movie racing against the clock to release his developmentally disabled brother Nick from the notorious clutches of Rikers detainment system. Sounds heartwarming, but it couldn’t be further from. Connie as played by Robert Pattison, in a performance worthy of its hype, is a wily and callous opportunist, willing to destroy anyone standing in his path. As is often the case, one man’s journey to betterment seals another’s pain and sorrow and the Sadfie’s don’t offer clemency as a moral respite nor a form of consolation or contrition. Everything from the camera’s physicality to the words that characters choose sound fresh and mapped out with regards to who these people might really be on the streets. At its core Good Time is a futile race to a nonexistent freedom; the upshot of desperation. We all know that Connie won’t get away and we know that he shouldn’t, and somehow, we are wrought to root against our better moral and logical judgment. As for the unlucky people he uses to get what he wants; it’s sickening, and it should be. The scenes specifically dealing with Nick are especially precise. We have seen plenty of bombastic Hollywood elucidations of individuals with developmental disabilities but this one rings truer to me. The final scene was among the best that I’ve seen in any film in years.

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman): It’s been said before, but somehow Wiseman makes the seemingly mundane vital and captivating. Without uttering a single word and by simply beholding and forming mounds of material, he makes the case for the importance of information and harmony. It’s not just about the fortification of this crucial union between public and private, it’s about development and how we spread knowledge like a plague to quell the swelling insanity.

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson): Sometimes love requires a push, a nudge, or kick to correct our self-serving trajectory. I know I need to get knocked off my perch from time to time. It’s rare to be truly surprised where a story ends up. I’ve seen enough variations on the jerk dude falling back down to earth, but poisonous mushrooms weren’t the emancipators I had anticipated. Given how meticulous this director tends to be, I must tip my hat to the timing here. I was just about to write the entire thing off (impatience and distrust on my part) when the “twist” arrives. The fact that he was able to pull the exact same trick twice with even more efficiency the second time around is pretty impressive.

Downsizing (Alexander Payne): Payne’s oeuvre spends a lot of time with men entering and maneuvering sudden crossroads. He hasn’t ever attempted something so big and bold as Downsizing, though the overall stencil remains the same. This time we follow Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) from overpopulated and unsustainable world that we all know from a very accustomed vantage point to the same world but smaller (5 inches according to Wikipedia). A large part of the initial suspense lies in Paul and his wife (Kristen Wig) investigating and thus wrestling with the titular irreversible process. Once it’s done and Paul is left alone, he’s left wondering what we all tend to wonder; what’s it all about and how we can make it seem/feel meaningful? From there we meet the best cast of eccentric (to normies like Paul) companions in recent memory. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier play a pair of tiny hedonists who supply their community with the good stuff, while Hong Chau steals the show as a Vietnamese dissident forced to downsize as political punishment, an action that nearly cost her life and claimed the lives of everyone with her. Paul’s overwhelming sense of insignificance is exploited for good and eventually he sees the light in a finale that isn’t afraid of the foreseeable charges of mawkishness. The concept itself calls for a steady visual hand, the specifics are carefully and engagingly mapped out, and Payne doesn’t shrink away from his overall message here despite facing a cynical throng constantly diagnosing intention.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Craig Zahler): Zahler’s worlds are hellscapes that erupt into attentive and unadorned scenes of tough violence. He’s an impenitent genre guy and I hope that he can enjoy his success without being tantalized and diluted by the inevitable amplified budget. If I’m being completely honest, sometimes these movies drag on too long and talk too much, but that’s a small price to pay for this guy’s pristine renunciation of our communal good nature. In Zahler’s stories, his protagonists beat men into mush, men who are bound to a systematic moral decay driven by greed and lust. Humanity is the devil.

mother! (Darren Aronofsky): It’s lame but I guess it might be useful to note that I haven’t wholeheartedly liked a single movie by Aronofsky. While his talent isn’t lost on me, his bold style has always felt at odds with his normie narrative duties. I know its something well beyond my comprehension, begging rich people to fund your movie, but his movies always seem compromised by the time he gets to where he’s going, either that or they just plain didn’t do it for me. This time around he finally went for it, and its imperfections are far more interesting than any tidying up he’s done in the past. For starters, he lures the viewer in by flashing little chards of lucid plot right before hurdling us further and further into complete disorder. For a better look at how I felt around the time of seeing this you can read this: https://musabran.blogspot.com/2017/09/mother.html

I’m out of steam. Look:

1.       Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)

2.       Good Time (Josh and Benny Sadfie)

3.       Downsizing (Alexander Payne)

4.       Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

5.       Ex Libris (Frederick Wiseman)

6.       Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)

7.       mother! (Darren Aronofsky)

8.       All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)

9.       Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)

10.   Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)

Honorable: The Florida Project, Faces/Places, A Quiet Passion, Get Out, The Lost City of Z,  Girls Trip, The Merowytz Stories, Dawson City: Frozen Time.

Purgatory: Spiderman: Homecoming, Lady Bird, Personal Shopper, Okja, A Ghost Story, Wind River, Leatherface, Blade Runner, Monster Truck, Song to Song, Stronger, Thor: Ragnorak, The Last Jedi,

No: Wonder Woman, The Big Sick, The Work, Split, A Cure for Wellness, Logan, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island, Raw, Baby Driver, The Belko Experiment, Power Rangers, Life, Alien: Covenant, It Comes At Night, Rough Night, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled, The Bad Batch, Dunkirk, Atomic Blond, 3 Billboards, It, I Tonya, Jeepers Creepers 3, Happy Death Day, The Foreigner, The Snowman, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Call Me by Your Name, The Shape of Water, Jumanji 2, The Post, Hostiles.

 I didn’t/I couldn’t: BPM, Mudbound, Loveless, The Other Side of Hope, The Square (I saw half of it), Columbus, The Human Surge, On the Beach Alone at Night, Staying Vertical, Wonderstruck, Kedi, The Death of Louis XIV.