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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Butter on the Latch/Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014)

tulees: scene immersion, unresolved ad infinitum, dirty margins, movie as poem, more murder but trying like hell to not to make it picturesque or “badass”, quietloudquiet, bad dream bender, unsettled as style-unsettled as human, intention vs reflex

It’s tempting to say, as some have, that Butter is the lesser of these two. But I wonder about that temptation. Is it because simply because Thou Wast contains more prurient on-screen action? Having watched both back to back, it seems they’re just as good. They both have the same qualities that distinguish an art film from an “arty” one and deftly establish a potent out-of-the-gate je ne sais quoi for director Josephine Decker.

The first thing that comes to mind is the backs of heads. She must’ve paid particular attention in casting or in the process of filming to how her actors hair looked from behind. The camera follows these blank heads both tentatively and purposefully and part of the tension comes from not knowing which approach it’s going to be. The uncannily naturalistic acting is unceremoniously broken up in the editing, sometimes in a way that is less signature and more of a flashy, herky-jerky Blair Witch business. However, in Decker’s assured hands, this familiar low budget technique sews in a fever pitched mania that heightens the bracing instability of her characters.

What’s cool about these two movies is how they are both slow and subtle yet economic and eye-catching quick in their own way. They don’t drag things out too much and when there is the subtraction of curiosity satisfying outcome (particularly in Butter) there is still a sense that you have been some place distinct and delicately infused with a harrowing, stark significance.

I don’t need sympathetic characters. I get tired of reading this complaint. It’s not that I don’t sometimes want likable characters, but intrigue is all that’s required for any story to work. It doesn’t really matter if they’re good or bad, especially since that dichotomy has been mined well past the point of peakng. Both of these films give me precisely what I look for when I am approaching a story. I don’t wanna understand. I don’t want to see the beats spilling out before me. But I don’t just want to be locked away in someone’s confusatron either (see: Calvin Reader’s The Oregonian). It’s nice that Decker (quite literally with the “my lover” refrained voice over narration in Thou Wast) has figured out how to make poetry cinematic without being precious about it. These are lopsided columns and collapsing stanzas of well piqued punctuation. Punctuation that illuminates and punctuation induces delirium.

The stories spool out like harrowing benders, only you don’t have to wake up on a nest of packing tape (great sound bit!) in a dark garage like Butter’s unreliable protagonist. They are bad adventures. The descriptions say “existential nightmare” which is not needed. While Butter bears some resemblance to films of that nature (Persona, Queen of Earth, 3 Women) you can just call them nightmares. But they are rendered more potent by existing amidst bucolic, hypnotically placid environments.

Both feature music as a strong aspect of their palettes. With Butter, it’s mostly beautiful, diegetically presented Bulgarian folk fragments while Thou Wast bumps its bluegrass and ominous droning score (save some noncommital guitar plucks and a lil bit ‘o metal) in the soundtrack.

Maybe it’s meant to be detachedly funny, but it mostly irritated me when Swanberg pulls up and turns off the soundtrack with his ignition toward the beginning. This is a cloying sorta trope I’ve seen in other films and it always feels dumb. But it’s one small flaw in otherwise sterling effort.

To reiterate, the films are different, not better or worse. There are differing levels of observable plot development, but that is because Butter is about two friends who are close smashing apart despite concerted efforts. The distance that comes with this is imparted to the viewer rather than trying to reveal it with dialogue or exposition. Thou Wast, on the other hand is about strangers smashing together and the bloody horndog mayhem that results is relevant and therefore (if fleetingly) shown. They both wield a flurry glancing impressionistic blows - the sort you don’t feel right off but gradually sting like hell.

Each stand on their own, but I’m glad I watched them together, as an overall style emerged that has me hankering to see Madeline’s Madeline (Decker’s newest/next, recently released for streaming rental or purchase). They’re both dizzying, scratchy little treats that show how wonderful doing a lot with a little can be.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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A Field in England (2013)

trabsterns: deadpan, monochromatic filth, wretched tableau, dialogue, existential drear, monty python, limbo, grubby violence

Once again liberated from cares and frets, this one actually grants one a pure revel in man’s eternal consternated folly. It shows how absurdism doesn’t need much help when you shove a bunch of dudes together with little to no purpose or direction in a field. I suppose its a period piece, but it doesn’t much matter. Like its spiritual grandfather, Hard to Be a God, specifics of what’s happening and why just fall away like so much loose dirt and idle spittle.

“I am my own master” is repeated like it’s as inportant as breathing, even if it moreso achieves the effect of powerless flailing. Much like the drifting men in Valhalla Rising, these ambling dickwags are essentially straining and grunting and gnashing against the crushing certainty that their significance has abandoned them. They tarry in a zone where survival is meaningless and nature flits about on roving, insensate machinations.

If all this sounds like a drag of a viewing experience, that’s cause it is. But, as we are none of us exempt from utterly losing our bearings, getting lost in it is not hard. And there are plenty of laughs to be had. They’re kind of similar to chokey Coen brothers laughs. These dude’s are so proud and thick, that it’s like gazing upon a crude but elusively intricate Rube Goldberg machine of debased cutthroat shambles. “Shame thistles”, says one of the scoundrels with his dying breath, irritated by the nettles he fell into whilst crapping earlier. It was a different field. Or was it? It really doesn’t matter. One field is as deep as they go.

Director Ben Wheatly has done well at making dire films that turn the guts. My favorite is still Sightseers, which roundly puts every “what if we just started killing all the people that annoyed us” black comedy that’s come out since Heathers to shame. But the giddy mess that is A Field in England runs a close second. More high grade low budget charm, please and thank you! Shame there’s not more Julian Barratt, who looks great in the period garb. But everyone else is fantastic, particularly the angel-voiced, soft and sage Friend (Richard Glover).

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)

rakiinesels: wet cough, too sober and itchy as fuck, drib drab lifestyle, trashsploitation, flipping the oblique stratego board, subgenre fissure, ooze without a secret, zombie sans appetite

I know of a trailer in the woods on the Cotton Hill ridgeline in the neighboring town to mine. It sits behind a giant, christmas light-festooned metal star that you’d be able to see from the road. Must not work anymore or i’ve just failed to notice it. The trailer had that embedded must you’d expect, but abandoned isn’t the right word. Seemed like a hang out of sorts. Maybe hiked to from some property on the other side, but more likely i’d hear revving atv motors before getting into it with the owners or their relatives. I hiked to it, knowing full well it wasn’t Long Path territory. I took some pics and video. Didn’t get too comfy. There was one of those dollar bin dvd-paks on the counter inside. 50 Gene Autrey movies in one pak, or some such. Don’t remember seeing a tv or player.

Point is, despite knowing it’s a bad place, I wished I could linger there. Same goes for Sean’s slapdash chemical toilet/laboratory of a trailer. Even having thoroughly noted how much the place stinks, Sean’s familiar, Cortez wants to linger. And I get it. Even though I know they’re among the worst of Arnold’s ouvre, I wanted to chill with these ratched dudes and watch that double feature of Red Heat/Raw Deal. But Sean was having none of that so…

I mean, after that, it’s just bad. Bad vibes. Though Cortez returns, he returns to an unmedicated Sean that’s even less hospitable than before. This is no scum out party. This isn’t Chloe Sevigny and Natasha Leone dancing around to Suicide (Antibirth). We’re going to hell with this guy. And it’s lonely, manic and horribly mundane. He doesn’t process anything without static - a sort of aneurism edging. And when a scene has found it’s cut point, we’re not sure if he’s better, worse or the same.

A Joel Potrykus movie is full of impotent flailing rage, but inertia is the main preoccupation. Much like the Josh Burge protagonists before him Sean (natural neurotic, Ty Hickson), is set back to one over and over again. He runs like the constipated water in his dubious filtration system. Like muck that lists toward the drain, but clings to the sink for some unaccountable reason. He comes alive when he’s trying to summon the demon from his mysterious book, underglowed by a raging bonfire in the dead of night. But he sputters the rest of the time. Caught between frustration and lunging toward machinations that resemble purpose. Forgetting to put on his gasmask, freaking out his cat.

I know some might see this, maybe read a Potrykus interview like I did, and think: why does every trashy chic creator operate as though story watchin’ satisfaction is a liability? I sometimes get there. Then I remember that sour feeling. Most recently, I felt it in Silverado. Great movie, great cast. Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline. Kevin Kline meets Glenn having been robbed and abandoned by his traveling conpanions. Glenn helps him to the next town, and asks him to ride with him. Kline is hesitant. He doesn’t wanna kill anymore. Just wants to work and spend time in his beloved saloons. Sure enough, events accumulate and he’s plugging dudes left and right. I bring this up, because likeably gentle as this man is, you are chomping at the bit for him to start murdering folks. A western is one of those perennial unquestioned pleasures. But I’m sure the put upon horses involved think its a load of bullshit. Kevin Kline should’ve too. But he just warmly smiles over those bodies in the dust behind him, knowing full well the boss lady (Linda Hunt) has got that high grade whiskey waiting for him.

You could say that poor possum, or kittycat Cass likely feel the same about Alchemist Cookbook. But what makes a non-boilerplate wallow like this worthwhile is how denobling it is to their biped costars. It is heroically cold blooded to our shithead species, which explains Potrykus citing Michael Haneke as a major influence. That sour, if addictive realm of “man has no choice but to kill-ain’t it grand!” is released into the rot where it belongs.

The drab beats and stunted reveries of this film carry you through dead end after dead end. The director (perhaps as a marketing strategy, though he’s obviously a fetishist of sorts) suggested Evil Dead directed by Jarmusch, but thankfully it’s not that pandering. I recognized the “Caribou” lyric (“This human form where I was born, I now repent”) but it’s wafty and ambiguous as the Pixies have well dimmed their legacy with shitty comeback material since Come on Pilgrim. “Cool” does work for this film. It has an embarassment of lo-fi charms, right up to the freeze frame ending, but it never loses its vivid boils and all appeal. Relaxer is next, with a return to Burge-land. Can’t wait.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Spring (2014)

tysurnes: ethereal roughneck, kick ‘n bounce ballet, well heeled ramblers, romance, Ryan Gosling, golden moments, live free or die, walk and talk, ghoulfiend experience

Director team Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead did a wonderful thing with their 2012 debut, Resolution. But I was too hung up by what felt like a punch-out ending on the first viewing time to appreciate it. On revisiting, I realize it staked out some truly fresh territory in the buddy horror genre. Its moments of chummy levity weren’t leadingly scored and its horror skirted boilerplate beats and acutely unnerves. It’s so confidently written, acted and directed that the solipsistic supernatural element comes off more curious than confounding.

The same holds for Spring, save the supernatural element. That aspect may be a little less original, but benefits more from the no-nonsense grappling in the face of the fantastic. This is partly due to the phenomenon’s ability to explain itself, however reluctantly. The explanation is convoluted enough (far from some Bram Stoker shit) that it should be unwieldy, but flits blithely along from place to place and conversation to conversation. Like Mindwalk for hungry, foolhardy hearts on the edge of reason, ready to beat free or burst trying.

Its gruesomeness never feels silly, and is balanced in yearning to understand rather than shock and disgust. And it brings vulnerability to the fearsome (not Stoker either, but Coppola was of that mind for his 1992 adaptation). “Tell me more about the finite”, says the multi-millennia old, supine love interest. And on the telling, plain as everything else the mortal says, ominous slithery sounds swim up in the mix. A nearby volcano rumbles for punctuation. For the first time the music leans in. Some Coldplay-ish tinkly piano wist. And… SPRING. Romance wins out. And for a film so casually hard bitten and raw, it’s not entirely unsurprising.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Ms. 45 (1981)

zilchidis: bigappleseedy, copless/lawless, seeing red, purging, art deth, hokey fun, sex is violent, glazed o'er prurience, downward spiral

Rape, like anything that happens in life, is fair game for storytelling. But the fact that “rape-revenge” is a subgenre is disheartening, to say the least. Whatever the violation, “revenge” makes sense as an appealing theme. Injustice abounds in this world. So much so that our moral universe is hopelessly compromised. We wanna see these violators pay, proportionately and then some. But “rape-revenge”, is nauseatingly specific, even if survivors of rape may get a vicarious release from watching such a film.

Un-commercial is fine. Even porn, to an extent, is fairly harmless. But rape is weird as a selling point. It just seems rotten. Why do you want that? What’s a good rape scene? Why not have a youtube count-down of the best ones? What’s the criteria? Best sexual anti-chemistry? What did Wes Craven see in The Virgin Spring? Gorgeous cinematography? The direct line of one evil act begetting another? Given the rote content of Last House on The Left and the slew of cheap garbage that followed in its wake, it just seemed like a crass, bottomfeeder bet on the headline-scanning rubbernecker in us all.

So why am I watching this? I could say that I’m into Abel Ferrara, and curious about his early work. But it’s true that even the films of his I admire are messy slogs of limited rewatchability. And I can’t remember a single thing about Driller Killer (except that, similarly to this film, it had an awesome scum rock soundtrack by Joe Delia). I suppose its the completist in me. But after much trepidation, I’m glad I watched it. Thankfully, the alliterative glibness of “rape-revenge”, doesn’t quite work here. Going on his output, Ferrara is likely a hard-bitten cynic. And, like Craven, his direction is subtle as a chainsaw. But dim as he may be, Ms 45 is a reminder that his street smart rendering of the faces and places of New York’s scumtopia retain a verisimilitude on par with William Friedkin.

So I guess I’m here for those delicious, eye-stinging garbagey NYC vibes. Even low budget films set there are bursting with life. And Ms. 45 does not disappoint on this score. It puts you in a place where everyone is desperate and depraved and disgusted, and pretty much never taking the time to reflect. In this film, the tiny corners left for reflection are flooded with death. After being raped twice in the span of a few minutes, Thana goes mute. It’s a familiar symbolic development, but it works well nonetheless. The palpably vitriolic atmosphere is heightened without any needless, obvious editorializing. Her subsequent victims, extending dramatically beyond her assailants, are dispatched loudly and with little resistance. We are in this shrieking cocoon of blind rage with her, absent of cops or the right-wing polemicizing of Death Wish and the like. There is one scene where her busy-body neighbor, Mrs. Nasone (rendered with classically hammy aplomb by Editta Sherman) is giving a statement to police in her apartment but they seem unconcerned and even a little put out.

What saves this one from being a methodical bit of low rent exploitation is its eschewing of big picture realism or any sort of pandering sentiment (save one blessed twist at the very end - a pander that I’ll take with thanks). My favorite scene is when she targets a talker (one who’s vocabulary extends beyond “hey babe!” or “ooo-wee!”, etc.) at a dive bar. Thana is a good listener (of sorts) and he is more than happy to prattle on about how much his ex fucked him over and up. When, later on a park bench, he gets to the part about breaking into the ex’s apartment and choking her cat, Thana has heard enough. But her gun misfires. At first the man is startled. “Is this some kind of a joke?” he exclaims, swiping the gun from her. Then the man re-cocks and stares at her maniacally as he blows his own brains out, probably thinking he was shocking her. But she takes her gun and skulks away, visibly put-out by the usurping of her gratification.

I like this scene, and the Halloween party massacre (glad Ferrara lingered on the house band, because they’re an infectious bit of skronky fantastic) that follows, because they are enjoyable in the quaintly sardonic fashion of DePalma or, more recently, Joel Potrykus. Also a guilty pleasure is Ferrara’s trademark sacrilegious fetishism. Thana’s habit-frocked, pre-slaughter mirror ritual and subsequent staircase descending turkey shoot are Carrie-level powerful, visually. Also a fantastic, if a bit silly, touch is her tomboy friend stabbing Thana in the back with a knife held phallus-like at crotch level. I’m sure it’s meant as some dopey full circle irony (Thana’s first rapist took her from behind), but it’s a solid example of how it’s always better when a sleazy genre flick goes for broke.

Ms. 45 deserves better than a “a classic of the rape-revenge subgenre”. Even though it’s a far different animal, this flick is no more a rape-revenger than A Time to Kill. It takes a firmly sympathetic position with its protagonist, even though her killings become less righteous as they go on. Despite being a decidedly superior film, Taxi Driver uses Travis Bickle to frighten and implicate the viewer. Thana is cool, calm and collected - a rebuke to those who would not question their ravenous sexual appetites even as she kinkily plays to them. Ms. 45 could be viewed as a big foamy gob in the face of casual complacency. And again, it’s an essential, vibrant artifact of a New York still awash in the warts and all, piss-on-its-sleeve grime of the seventies. But I’m most surprised and blown away by its conciseness. Most similarly low budget genre films of this period look like they were made up as they went along and edited in a fugue state. But this one is perfectly paced with a satisfyingly concise arc. It’s almost breezy! Fetidly so, but still! Don’t let its subgenre ghettoizing deter you. This is a cool little flick.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Timecrimes (2007)

twikolvens: temporal headfuckery, stalker, worst case scenario, death puzzle, spoilt idyll, voyeurism meets amateur sleuthing, blundery black comedy

“The table doesn’t fit in the door. I’d rather lose the bet than have you against me.”

“Never bring this up again. Not even once, okay?”

-Clara

This moment, early in the film (or is it the middle?), is not only winking about her bumbling brute of a husband and the film’s theme of repetition, but occurs around two infuriating details. Which is significant in a film that has you actively grasping for these at every turn. Firstly, she most certainly does get the table through the door! Secondly, the woman that her husband, Hector, sees with his binoculars has her hair in her face. You wait for it, later (or earlier?), but this never happens. She has fucking bangs!

So I’m dumb when it comes to this time/space stuff, but I thought I’d have a better time thrice around. Certianly it’s no Primer, in terms of migraine inducing meta-narrative. But I’ll be damned if I can follow this thing. As such, the above nitpick feels good. It’s one thing, in a series of vague a-ha conflations, that I feel I can truly claim as a logical victory. The hair is either a mistake or a cheating necessity out of a desire to keep the woman’s identity from the audience. But either way, its an incongruity in a film that asks us to take most everything we see as a precise structure of re-occurance.

“It’s not worth worrying about”

-Clara (about the aforementioned table fitting or not)

“Don’t tell me. It’s better not to know details.”

-El Joven

Confounding, sloppy and pretentious as it very well may be, this is a likable film. It’s well acted, with a charming lead (the lumpen Kerra Elejalde, who exudes a uniquely sulky sort of intrepidness) while Candela Fernandez plays his wife Clara with a natural, no-nonsense sort of wholesome ardor (reminiscent of Cynthia Stevenson in The Player). The partial time-keeping sound devices of thunder and Blondie’s “Picture This” playing on the radio is clever even if the music being on doesn’t make a ton of sense. There is something bizarrely unnerving about the motif, not unlike the bubble gum strains of Dwight Twilley Band playing to a dead body in You’re Next.

The Hectors are hilariously stoic and resilient in the face of chaos, confusion and severe injury. His binoculars (perhaps the source of his troubles) are always there, bouncing about on his protruding belly. They wind up being more of a memorable creepy image (even when he’s miming them) than the facial bandage or barber scissors featured on the film’s poster. They connote not just damning curiosity, but a distant sort of pseudo-understanding that renders Hector able to commit reckless, monstrous acts.

There’s something to be said for the vibe of Hector’s newly renovated home as well. Like in Lethal Weapon 2, it’s an opaque, skeletal place of disoriented peril. And much like Hector’s dementedly slidshod process of elimination, full of an unfinished sense of purpose. I don’t know what he’s accomplished by the film’s end, but he seems to think its something. So he leaves his twisted parallel tripartite sunset loop to close itself out. Or something like that.

It could be Nacho Vigalando wrote himself into a corner here. But, as is true for his protagonist, he directs his hopelessly tangled threads as if everything is as it should be. It is both clever and about a human banging his head against a wall repeatedly and doggedly thinking himself clever along the way. I imagine, to audiences with their own sort of control freak tendencies, they say it makes perfect sense just to flex on a fellow viewer’s disheveled response. I’m inclined to let them have their way. I’d rather lose than have ‘em against me.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

The Duke of Burgundy

(2014)

lulbuozets: Giallo meets Brakhage, sensssoohaahlity, style as substance, savory>sweet, brittle grasps, (p)lush interiors, asmr, vixens, dominance/submission, sedate hysteria, dissociative gracenotes, tuff luv, dream illogic, september/may

In a sense, English director Peter Strickland is a sort of executive lounge perv - like those chin stroking suits in Enemy, watching high-heeled women squish exotic spiders in a secret, dark room. Not unlike Cronenberg, he’s an unapologetically glazed over sensationalist, dragging the intrepid moviegoer into his tantric hedonism kaleidoscope. Both of his films here are the sort where you are more likely taken for a blind ride by their signature quality than premeditatedly engaged. They don’t offer expansiveness in the traditional sense, more often content to snuggle up to their vividly rendered seedy spaces and graze.

He is tremendously good, so far, at doing him. Already having a calling card style is quite astonishing, given an ouvre standing at two as I write this. Though it is technically his third film (with one on the way). Sadly, his first - 2009’s Katalin Varga, is available next to nowhere (in the uk, on region 2 dvd). It seems like something else entirely, which has me abuzz with curiosity. Hopefully it will turn up somewhere soon.

Berberian Sound Studio has much to love and explore. The soundtrack contains the last work of the fantastic early 2000’s group, Broadcast, its production sadly coinciding with lead singer Trish Keenan’s sudden passing. It is a fine thing, and their hard-charging harpsichord title sequence song is arguably the most exciting passage in the film. The sequence cleverly (perhaps confusingly for some) contains credits for the film within the film, which i’ll annotate forthwith.

producer: Francesco Coraggio (Cosimo Fusco) A vile mysoginist, who doesn’t have anything positive or neutral to say about anyone or anything.

director: Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) A self-aggrandizing, work averse glad-hander. Doesn’t seem that interested in post-production studio rigors, beyond pawing at his female cast.)

Il Vortice Equestre (The Equestrian Vortex) In Santini’s witch torture-fest, this title never comes to mean a damn thing. Not even some foley coconuts - which is hilarious.

music: Hymenoptera (Broadcast) Defined as a large order of insects, comprising sawflies, wasps, bees and ants. This never comes to any sort of significance either, and Burgundy is preoccupied with lepidopterology. I’m guessing its something to do with the gynecological root of the word.)

The doleful, adorable puss of Toby Jones is a special thing, and Strickland surely isn’t the only one to’ve capitalized on this fact. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him oogled quite to this extent, at one (seemingly signicant) point being rippled and mushed like a wad of celluloid playdough. Perhaps his sweet, daddy long-leg rescuing Gilderoy is too sympathetic for a film so resistant to a storyline. His disgust with the lurid set pieces he is producing sound for is a hook of sorts, but it doesn’t pay off. Despite his grounding of a winningly surreal setting full of clunky vintage gear and sudden power outtages, Strickland seems content to merely fold him up like wallpaper origami. The shift to him, and his increasingly dire letters from mum, being the subject of another film within a film, comes off like a solipsistic punch-out.

But it’s a fun mess, with all its noisome fruits and veggies and demented, face contorting soundbooth histrionics (was reminded of Mike Schank’s blood curdling soundbooth howl in American Movie). One I was sure I’d enjoy more than the S&M love affair of his next film. But I was decidedly wrong. Where Berberian Sound frustrates, and lunges for a cheap beginning-to-end loop with its blurry film reel image, The Duke of Burgundy is an impressively well rounded circle.

Again there is repetition. But rather than mere recurring visuals (that flashing “SILENZIO” sign of diminishing returns) it is direct reckoning with the practice. Particularly, when it fails to make perfect. Perfection in role playing seems to be the goal in the relationship on display. But despite fooling us with their act at the onset, it becomes clear that the imperiously beautiful Cynthia (Borgen’s imperiously beautiful Sidse Babett Knudsen), who is older, is mostly driven by the desire to make Evelyn (an eerily faux-innocent Chiara D'Anna) happy. We see their routine, day-spanningly meticulous as it may be, going from refinement to going through the motions.

The world of moths and butterflies seems infinite to Cynthia, the imagery of her studies juxtaposed with her more traditional gratification from Evelyn when the play is done. In these moments, there are whispered devotions (uncannily spooky, like those of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death) that we do not see Evelyn mouthing. When we see the fear in Cynthia’s eyes, it comes clear that these reassurances are in her head. When the strain of trying to keep up the charade later reaches its peak, these whisperings shift to one word: “pinastri” (Sphinx pinastri aka the pine hawk-moth). Their safe word, a discouraged protest for Evelyn, becomes Cynthia’s haunted keening on the doubt infesting and devouring her love’s foundation.

Perhaps Evelyn tries to be accomodating, but she is unmistakably insatiable in everything she does. Even her delvings into encyclopedic butterfly trivia feel like but a fetishized extension of Cynthia’s confectionarily domineering role for her. Cynthia has to be someone else, while Evelyn only need be served. Even after Cynthia finally breaks down in tears under the rigors of keeping up the routine and Evelyn vehemently consoles her, the older woman knows its ‘either buck up, or let this girl slip through your fingers’.

Much moreso than his previous work, The Duke of Burgundy expertly arranges its drama, deadpan humor and surrealist chills into a satisfyingly seamless whole. And even more compellingly, these elements are often interchangeable. Cynthia’s sonorous snoring, for example, is both a funny contrast to her sleek routine and a touchingly sad tell after she has exhausted herself to the utmost for her love’s devotion. Elsewhere, acts that might be repulsive are rendered kind of bittersweet. Without bespoiling his (their) heightened tableau, he gives the unglamorous rigors of human frailty their full thematic due.

Once again, we are graced with a drop dead gorgeous soundtrack, this time from the duo, Cat’s Eyes (awesome cat in this movie as well, who is content to just look on). The opening Belle & Sebastianesque piece is particularly winning (there’s that harpsichord again) with its distinct use of a single clipped breath on the downbeat. It closes with a much sadder, Julee Cruise kind of thing, which is fitting given that Cynthia will likely keel over in mid face-sit some day.

Worth mentioning as well is the welcome return of instantly striking Romanian actress Fatma Mohamed, who plays a kink specialist carpenter with unnerving, Lynchian command. She was a spirited, camera-beloved highlight of Berberian, giving no quarter to her dickhead bosses. Luckily she’s back for this year’s release, In Fabric, along with Knudsen, Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth herself), Julian Barratt and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (who played one of the best characters ever with the lovable, all-suffering Hortense Cumberbatch in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies). With that cast, and the significant improvement ratio between these two films, I’m chomping at that bit to see what that dirty birdy Strickland has in store.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Beyond The Black Rainbow (2010)

oaworfeentils: drone, hypersaturated schemes, slow descent, retro-futurism, mindful self-indulgence, beauty and the haughty intellectual beast, the quarantined telekinetic

Apparently financed off of Tombstone (on which Panos Cosmatos served as second unit director for his father) dvd residuals, you gotta love the wildly divergent juxtaposition here. Can’t help but wonder what the dude I overheard at a restaurant raving about Val Kilmer’s performance as “Doc Hollywood” would’ve made of this. For fans of Cobra, George P. Cosmatos’ other seminal effort, however - it’s less of a leap. Genre classic though it may be, Tombstone has more than a bit of cornball pablum mixed in with its iconic-ness. Even with the film’s drab meathead lead, Cobra is significantly more of a key gauzy synthsploitation standard-bearer than any overwrought Michael Mann affair.

Despite its relative adherence to mainstream preoccupations of snappy dialogue, montage and shootouts, Cobra’s enduring charm is its stark imagery. It is a vibrantly lurid film, consequently coming off more Giallo than Dirty Harry. Even if Panos eschews traditional pacing (or fleshed-out story) in favor of a whole lotta hazy waft, there is a similar penchant for chiarscuro showing over telling. It is also unapologetically over-the-top in its tradition-based splashy comic book prurience.

Michael Rogers most embodies this aspect in his glowering Patrick Bateman-by-way-of-The-Shining’s-Lloyd performance as Barry Nyle. Whether he’s deliriously stretching out his bruise-purple prose (an approach reprised with Mandy’s Ned Dennehy as Brother Swan) or glibly dispatching incompetent lackeys and camping heshers. However, winning as the hammy stuff is, one must have a hankering for some abstracted, sinister THX 1138-style tripping out.

This is impeccably rendered throughout, the well-dressed set of the hermetic, minimalist institute trapping the viewer in its demented reality. This immersion crests in a flashback to Nyle’s first experimental drug transmutation. The entire flashback is bleached out, makng his black goop-bathed (ya got me!) monstrous form pop in horrific fashion. It masterfully holds both immense menace and transportive sensuality for the whole of its lengthy digression.

As the mute Elena, Eva Allan’s gap toothed beauty brings to mind Beatrice Dalle a bit, but moreso the tormentedly compulsive Emmanuelle Escourrou in the 1990 film Baby Blood (titled The Evil Within, back when I was traumatized by it on late night cable). She doesn’t get to do much besides be pretty and frightened, but her mysterious significance is a key quality of the film’s pitch perfect atmosphere. Just as key as Rogers, expertly shading in the experience with his glottal-thick hubris (comically peaking, if not with his idiotic death, in a moment where his pre-transmutated self remarks to his ghoulified other “you are doing so good” from the passenger seat while pursuing the just escaped Elena).

Maybe it’s not the delirious free-for-all that was this year’s glorious Mandy, but this work shares much of the same hypnotically surreal charm. The score by Sinoia Caves (Black Moutain’s Jeremy Schmidt) may be decidedly less epic than the late Johan Johansson’s for Mandy, but it’s pretty perfect just the same. Closed captioning (I sometimes use this feature when there is sparse, easy to miss dialogue) says [moody electronic music] or [suspenseful electronic music]. Fair enough, but it’s decidedly closer to John Carpenter greatness than Survive or any others comprising the legion of imitators coming and going. Along with its Holy Mountainesque anthemic tableau, it is the reason for the season here. I’d strongly recommend putting aside any pat reservations and letting the good wicked vibe times roll.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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The Exorcist III (1990)

finxerniligens: o the blasphemy!, sock yr sacrilege in a sack!, wasting Kevin Corrigan, creepy cathedrals, horror hospitals, ACTING!, post-mortem procedural, “I can do this Friedkin shit in my sleep”, signs and wonders

Man sakes alive, does this movie try hard! While William Peter Blatty may’ve written a solidly frightening book (haven’t read Legion, on which this is based, but The Exorcist was a legitimate page-turner), his film is gallingly insipid. As much as one simply cannot go wrong with a powerhouse like George C. Scott, he looks lost in the weeds here. He yells, he quips, he cops it up, he yells some more. There is a great moment earlier in the film, where his Detective Kinderman delivers an extended deadpan fret over a live carp his visiting mother-in-law put in his bathtub. His buddy, an elderly iteration of the original’s Father Dyer* smirks in profile at key turns of phrase in Kinderman’s anecdote, giving Exorcist III one if its more well-oiled, genuine moments.

His shouty tête-à-têtes with the crabby Nurse Allerton (Nancy Fish) are just weird. Sure she’s hitting him with the bureaucratic red tape, but the dude goes from three to ten like she jammed a hot poker up his urethra. So after we prematurely lose Dyer following an epically dopey premonatory dream sequence (a clumsily frenetic seven hundred symbol pile-up, with Fabio and Patrick Ewing getting paid to be bored angels in some heaven-ish greatest generation convention hall), things get fairly rote. Of course Brad Dourif is a treasure, but his pazuzu-inhabited serial killer is pretty ho hum. It doesn’t help that he transforms into or is embodied by Jason Miller’s Father Karras, Miller thereby metaphysically stepping on Dourif’s fevered, eternal struggle assembly line delivery.

Though it surpasses John Boorman’s 1977 sequel, Exorcist III is largely a trainwreck. It takes that “it’s scarier when you have to imagine the carnage” notion to the point of easily missing that anything has happened at all. There is so much forensic detailing that it feels like a dry read. Blatty obviously wanted to shock us, but largely stops well short, save a gnarly bit of gore where the Father Merrin stand-in gets skinned on the ceiling. There is too much derivativeness in general, and an over-reliance on music stung bolts of eerie imagery (something much more effective in the orginal, before they nearly ruined it with surplus flashy bits in the re-released version) and George C. Scott’s stricken face. For a more effective application of this last, see The Changeling (1980), an underrated ghost story that is non-bloody terror at its best.

Most of this film’s attempts to freak you out are squarely laughable. But there is one sequence that has a strange sort of power to it. Hospitals at night are genuinely unnerving settings. I point this out from experience and by way of Rick Rosenthal’s imperfect but effectively moody and horrific 1981 Haloween sequel, set largely (when Pleasance isn’t waxing Colonel Trautman-like with the exasperated local constabulary) amidst a hospital’s graveyard shift. In any case, the scene here is an almost absurdly long scare set-up, stretching roughly from 1:12-1:16, and to describe it in too much detail would surely result in a “withering under the lights” effect. All I can say is, it scared the bejeezums outta me in the nineties and it scares me now. But like that flashing pazuzu face, it’s only properly effective when framed within the vast space and silence surrounding it.

Exorcist III could have benefitted from less grandiose ambition and more focus, but even in its messy state it is not entirely a waste of time. But its glimpsed potential makes its glaring missteps all the more frustrating. Why no one, not even Cassavetes, could find something interesting for the singular Zohra Lampert (Kinderman’s wife - she of the bathtub carping mother-in-residence) beyond her strong turn in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is beyond me. There is a good movie in there somwhere. It’s at the very least a gas watching a giant like Scott, seemingly casting about in heroic effort to latch on to it.

* Ed Flanders, who is a lot of fun while he’s around, despite emiting throwaway groaners like “may the schwartz be with you”. Going by his spare filmogaphy, this performance may be the best he ever got to give us.

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)/

Halloween 5: The Revenge of

Michael Myers (1989)

gluishtuuks: return/revenge flick, Pleasence in extremis, creepy uncle, seasonal afflictive disorder, Haddonfield follies, formula soluable

This review is tougher to justify than the Ms. 45 one, which at least I hadn’t seen. These two I am somewhat well acquainted with, and am pretty sure are more bad than good. Not to mention Wham City’s pseudo-interactive livestreamed call-in melodrama (The Call of Warr) is back on Adult Swim for the next few days. If it’s as scary, hilarious, demented and original as last year’s The Cry of Mann (they even did a fantastically vapid accompanying show-about-a-show parody called Tanking Mann), then there is next to no reason to be wasting my time with these crummy sequels.

But I made this arbitrary October commitment, so I’m gonna go ahead and shovel some overdue dirt on this sorry pair and pat it down.

First of all, there’s Donald Pleasence. He don’t look so good. Particularly in Revenge, it seems as though the movie itself is trying to kill him as we watch on, bemused and more than a little bored. Danielle Harris is Laurie Strode’s daughter Jamie, who is now a foster child, but her uncle strides past the Videodrome-for-dummies corporate death conspiracy (easily the best sequel, both because of and despite its crazy Michael-less storyline, for starters) and death itself to cut that family line. Harris was great as Furry Tom and the thorn in her McClane-redux-daddy’s side in The Last Boyscout. She’s solid here too, conveying more believable traumatized intensity than either film earns.

I was ten when I first got steeped in these sorts of movies, and the ruthlessly simple machinery just worked. The mockery of the more silly elements (though more so with the Friday/Elm Street movies) was often over-eager, barely containing the rising dread. That the anticipation dulls with age is a phenomenon often fixed on the viewership, but I’d argue that the blame lies more with cynically crude bottom-lining, crass presumptions of audience by the money. Horror is a genre with merit beyond watching people get butchered, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d go too far to attest to as much. No matter what you’re watching, exploitation is the name of the game. But if you’re producing, as is the case here, purely rote content, who can blame a viewer for glazing over till the killing starts?

Depsite some nice flourishes here and there, the Jamie saga portion of this franchise is as dull as it is anti-climactic. Particularly regarding the kills, which are all flat. The original and naturally best of the series wasn’t particularly gory, but it had a lot more on the ball than anything that came after. It was working within budget constraints, but its perfect score and naturally winning cast (namely Curtis, PJ Soles and Nancy Kyes) and masterfully scored autmnal atmosphere made it work. These two films strive to recapture that original spark, but wind up feeling like drab, minor, tv movie-slight variations.

At a glance they may seem classier than the Friday the 13th stuff, but that’s kind of what makes them obnoxious. They’re slashers with delusions of thematic heft. The fact that they manage to stick some of their stylistic landings only seems to make this pretense worse. In Return there is a droning minimalist credit sequence comprising a series of drab, desolate country exteriors. It is a great mood setter, but when we leave these outskirt locations for the suburbs, it seems superfluous. All the best stuff happens outside of Haddonfield. Loomis gets nearly blown up at a sevice station, then hitches a ride with the boxcar hobo from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (still boozin’ his cares away, but with a somehow worse singing voice and a sweet gig as a turn of the century fire and brimstone preacher). Sam actually smiles in this bit, and the unPleasence of this is mitigated by the fact that its a small relief to see the man take a brief siesta from the ceaseless wide-eyed flailing.

After that (and this holds for Revenge as well) it seems as though aping the highschool crush mini-drama of the original and endless hallucinatory false scares is supposed to suffice. Loomis would be hilarious in his stumbling mania were it not for the fact that he seems more horrific to poor Jamie than her stabby Uncle Mike. It doesn’t help that, as has oft been remarked, they kept fucking with the mask to worse and worse effect, leaving one to wonder if it was ever scary to begin with. One thing’s for sure, “humanizing” Michael (apparently what they were going for in Revenge) was never the fucking point! He was called “the shape” for good reason.

Even if they’re roughly the same ratioed templates, Revenge squeaks ahead in the quirky teen dept. Though its anachronistic greaser boyfriend in Revenge pales in comparison to those rat-a-tat-tooie boys in the fifth Friday movie (and we have to spend considerably less time with them). But Jamie’s friend (foster sister? who fuckin’ cares) Tina is actually kinda charming and smarter seeming than her ditsy lines and misguided notions (including ones of neon-hearted love w/r/t the aforementioned greaser) would suggest.

Sadly, it looks like Tina’s Wendy Kaplan may’ve never went on to anything more substantial. But here’s as good a place as any to remind people that there’s much more to Donald Pleasence than this babbling shrink with a gun (or the Bond villain, Blofeld). Despite having some decently budgeted technical chops (most exemplified in Jamie’s nerve shredding, claustrophobic knife/laundry chute sequence in Revenge), these two are not the beat use of one’s viewing time. So why not check out the 1971 film Wake In Fright? Directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood), its a nasty, sweaty, drunken trip set in the outback with a lively Pleasence, unhinged as you’ve never seen him. And if you’ve seen it, see it again. It’s better than both of these movies combined, with a lot of room to spare.

Halloween movies ranked:

10/11

Halloween ½ (Rob Zombie has too much money and no/dumb ideas. shoulda just stuck with that rusty rutabega mudflap metal what made him famous)

Halloween: Resurrection (reality tv premise bites hard, though that similarly plotted Tales from The Crypt ep with Morton Downey Jr.* was a hoot)

Halloween: The Curse of MM (Paul Rudd is wonderful and all, but he cannot begin to save this tedious exercise in myth padding - but here’s a clip anyway.)

Halloween 5 (roman numerals…

Halloween [2018] (I can remember nothing about this, except that I don’t see myself watching it again. i guess it was loud and expensive, and wasted Judy Greer and Toby Huss. Just another cash-grab reboot nail in imagination’s coffin.)

Halloween 4 …are for squares, man!)

Halloween II (creepy enough, strangely dreary, but more than a bit sluggish)

H20 (the boarding school setting works and its slick cast and production values don’t smooth over the grit. plus there’s the weird kid from The Ice Storm that Christina Ricci deflowers)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tom Atkins, heads exploding into bugs and snakes, mustard-bleeding robuts and a catchy jingle. Bites off more than it manages to chew, but in an uncommonly satisfying way)

Halloween (best John Carpenter film after The Thing and one of the best horror films period)

* “Television Terror”/S02/E16/1990

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driftingintomysolitudeovermyhead · 6 years ago

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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

eekresimsens: monochromantic, lens flares and focus pulls, hijab as caul, hard times, wafting and waiting with electro pop, icy hot vampin’

“ ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’ Are you an idiot now? Have you become an idiot?” -Hossein 'The Junkie’

“Idiots and rich people are the only ones who think things can change.” -Atti 'The Prostitute’

After two centuries of vampire lore, it’s surprising to see there is still some resonance to it. It helps that leads Sheila Vand and Arash Marandi are beautiful, beautifully scored and beautully lit. But moreso this film keeps the flame with a blessed simplicity. It takes a similar, if less silly, approach to Michael Almereyda’s Nadja. In that 1994 film, the undead title character waxes about the “pain of fleeting joy”. There is a similar sentiment at work here. Sometimes what fills ones life and what weighs it down are too close, and we are unmoored. It’s not that we’re “so happy we could cry”, so much as we are reminded of the essential feeling we’d ostensibly convinced ourselves we could manage without.

Love is like that. And a vampire would seemingly have no need for such a thing, likely turning the sentiment around in their hands like some earhtly bauble. But they pass for human, so they might as well be. This is the unspoken notion between Arash and The Girl. They both love sad songs. They are both lonely. They’re both hot. In a forsaken place, it should be enough. And in the slow, stark relief of these one hundred and forty minutes, it is. The only question that lingers is where they might be going, and how far will the mortal go with her (fleeting joy).

It is always a troublesome thing seeing a cat (Masuka, a perfectly charming creature) in a film of this sort. When Arash first acquires Masuka, we get a twinge that big fella will either be a victim of circumstance or a snack. It turns out to be more of the former, and that victimization just involves a round of unstable living conditions, to which he abidingly adjusts. To this end, he seems a good influence on our pair.

Going off this and her 2016 sophomore effort, The Bad Batch, director Ana Lily Amirpour has a strong affinity for desolate settings with cluster bursts of heady hedonism. The camera immerses you in these glisteningly trascendent sort of scenes, but also reminds one of their potential for easily alienating absurdity. A Girl Walks Home may be less of a thrill than her star-studded desert cannibal flick, but it is decidedly closer to flawless. It elevates its familiar cinephilic tricks with picturesque grace (stray raver, Rockabilly’s wee hours helium balloon dance is a highlight) and just the right amount of bleakness.

The shady moral universe The Girl embodies is expertly contrasted with the convenient, self-destructively cynical sentiments of her victims. She is a different sort of damned than them. One that has seen too much to be so dismissive of human beings. And, perhaps, seen too little to gorge indiscriminately.

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