InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16
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IN REVIEW ONLINE<br />
FEATURES<br />
RE-INTERROGATING<br />
THE BODY<br />
An Interview With Lucien<br />
Castaing-Taylor & Véréna<br />
Paravel <strong>—</strong> 1<br />
KICKING THE CANON<br />
TOTAL RECALL <strong>—</strong> 7<br />
YOUTH OF THE BEAST <strong>—</strong> 9<br />
DEAD RINGERS <strong>—</strong> 11<br />
FILM REVIEWS<br />
BEAU IS AFRAID <strong>—</strong> 13<br />
EVIL DEAD RISE <strong>—</strong> 15<br />
TRENQUE LAUQUEN <strong>—</strong> 17<br />
THE COVENANT <strong>—</strong> 17<br />
CHEVALIER <strong>—</strong> 18<br />
OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN <strong>—</strong> 19<br />
GHOSTED <strong>—</strong> 19<br />
PLAN 75 <strong>—</strong> 20<br />
CARMEN <strong>—</strong> 21<br />
DRY GROUND BURNING <strong>—</strong> 23<br />
THE POPE’S EXORCIST <strong>—</strong> 23<br />
SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS <strong>—</strong> 24<br />
CHERRY <strong>—</strong> 26<br />
TO CATCH A KILLER <strong>—</strong> 26<br />
JUDY BLUME FOREVER <strong>—</strong> 28<br />
THE REAL THING <strong>—</strong> 29<br />
ALBUM REVIEWS<br />
IVE <strong>—</strong> 30<br />
Zelooperz <strong>—</strong> 31<br />
April 21, 2023<br />
<strong>Volume</strong> 1, <strong>Issue</strong> <strong>16</strong>
Re-Interrogating the Body<br />
An Interview With Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel<br />
Anthropologist-filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and<br />
Véréna Paravel’s work dissolves the space between their camera and their subject. Previous films<br />
Leviathan and Caniba both treat their respective subjects <strong>—</strong> the marine landscapes of commercial fishing, the domestic world of an<br />
infamous cannibal <strong>—</strong> with startling intimacy, but the proximity of their filmmaking finds new extremes with De Humani Corporis<br />
Fabrica, an observational exploration of eight Parisian hospitals. This new film unfolds across subterranean infirmary tunnels,<br />
operating tables, and inside patients’ bodies; it was assembled over the course of six years, and presents an unflinching document of<br />
state-of-the-art surgical procedures, directing our gaze to otherwise unseeable sights of the human interior.<br />
In the spirit of Stan Brakhage’s monumental autopsy documentation The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, De Humani probes the<br />
experience of looking at otherwise imperceptible depths of the human body. The film facilitates an encounter between spectators<br />
and the most disavowed corners of their biology. There’s no shortage of haunting corporeal images, visions of the body at its most<br />
frail and vulnerable <strong>—</strong> and yet the film asks us to reckon with what it means to be repelled by the sight of our own biology. At the crux<br />
of De Humani’s ambitious feat (both formally and thematically) is the groundwork for a new relationship with our own bodies, beyond<br />
fear and abjection. I spoke with Castaing-Taylor and Paravel about bodily anxiety and the political imperative of looking at the body in<br />
De Humani; Alice Diop’s reaction to the film; David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future; the work of Walter Benjamin; and plenty more.<br />
As I understand it, the idea for your last movie, Caniba, began with you researching Japanese Pink films and then reorienting<br />
your focus towards Issei Sagawa when you realized he appeared in a Hisayasu Satō film. Did De Humani have a similar<br />
trajectory of shifting focus, or was the central concept solidified from the beginning of your research?<br />
LCT: We read an interview that we apparently gave to a French newspaper called Libération <strong>—</strong> a New York Times-y thing for France <strong>—</strong> I<br />
think in 2011 that said we were already working on this project, which is hard to believe. I think it was just in the idea stage. There<br />
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were lots of original ideas. One of them was Walter Benjamin’s<br />
concept of the Optical Unconscious, where he basically<br />
compared the way cinema allows us to perceive the world to the<br />
way a surgeon making an incision in the body can perceive the<br />
body. I never really believed in that metaphor, even though it’s<br />
very trendy in critical theory/academic circles. But I wanted to<br />
put it to the test… what would happen if we literalized that<br />
metaphor? What does it mean to study surgery with an empirical<br />
visual proximity and intensity that’s never really been done before?<br />
That was one conceptual start.<br />
We started filming in university-affiliated hospitals in Boston. But<br />
it was impossible to make this film in the US because the<br />
doctors no longer have any rights over the imagery they need to<br />
undertake these surgeries. Though the medical staff was super<br />
open, the hospital administrations were really closed-off. It<br />
would’ve been different if we were coming in from some major<br />
cable network and could’ve given them millions of dollars, but<br />
that wasn’t an option. Then we met François Crémieux, who was<br />
the head of some hospitals in Paris. He does many things. He’s<br />
not really a filmmaker himself, but he did make three films with<br />
Chris Marker: The Balkan Trilogy. He runs a<br />
medical-philosophy-anthropology cinema club in Paris.<br />
[Verena Paravel puffs a vape cloud into the webcam.]<br />
LCT: You just blew smoke in his face.<br />
VP: Sorry.<br />
LCT: Anyway, [Crémieux]’s very interested in bringing<br />
non-medical perspectives. Unlike in the US, he gave us carte<br />
blanche to film anything in the [French] hospitals he was then<br />
director of.<br />
VP: My memory of the project’s genesis is when I was reading<br />
The Boston Globe, which is very strange because I would never<br />
read The Boston Globe. There was a story about how, during<br />
medical training, you’re given a cadaver at the beginning of the<br />
semester. Then, you work on this cadaver during your whole<br />
semester: doing dissection, learning anatomy, learning surgery.<br />
One student was given a cadaver at the beginning of the year<br />
and, when she unveiled the face, it was her aunt. She fainted and<br />
everything. I remember being horrified by the story and, at the<br />
same time, with my weird humor, I found it hilarious. I told<br />
Lucien, “Can you imagine the violence of unveiling and seeing it’s<br />
your family member who’d given their body to science?” We<br />
looked at each other and started to think about what it means to<br />
give your body to science and what’s being done with your body.<br />
Harvard is a place with so many cadavers because of the<br />
prestige. People in this country have the ability to say not only<br />
“I’m going to give my body to science,” but also specify where<br />
you want your body to go. Harvard has a ridiculous amount of<br />
bodies, whereas the rest of medical schools have a serious lack<br />
of bodies to train students. That was the beginning of our<br />
discussion, and we both said at the exact same time: “We should<br />
make a film about that.”<br />
LCT: There’s this expression, “If you can’t get into Harvard when<br />
you’re alive, you can get in when you’re dead.” But you don’t know<br />
that they can also sell your body to other medical schools.<br />
VP: That was the entrance into the hospital world. Then, we soon<br />
realized [filming] in America was too complicated because of<br />
the culture of suing for no reason, for every reason, and every<br />
opportunity. François Crémieux was the key: the miraculous<br />
magic formula to get into the hospital. Once you get in there, it’s<br />
an immense resource of ideas because the hospital itself is a<br />
society in miniature. It’s a microcosm where you feel what’s<br />
going on in society: the violence, the conflicts, religious belief,<br />
social-cultural behavior. Everything is there because the whole<br />
world is coming to the hospital without any filter. Everybody is<br />
there. It’s not that we are equal in front of disease, but we all end<br />
up in hospitals at some point. We all die. We all have a body that<br />
is more or less made of the same organs. That’s an amazing<br />
vantage point.<br />
LCT: Until working in the French public hospitals, the original<br />
conceptual idea we had is indicated by the title. De Humani<br />
Corporis Fabrica, that’s the title of the founding tome of Western<br />
anatomy by a Flemish physician named Andreas Vesalius. There<br />
were seven books in that work. His sense of anatomy was very<br />
revolutionary but it’s now completely outdated. The idea is that<br />
we’d make a film with seven parts, films, or movements. Each<br />
would use a different, contemporary cutting-edge medical<br />
scoping technology that’s come into being the last 10-15 years.<br />
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Each would be filmed only by that imaging device in seven<br />
different countries. The idea was a much more global approach<br />
to the ways medical imagery allows us to perceive the body in a<br />
way that had never been possible before in history. But also, in<br />
the ways doctors themselves perceive their bodies when they’re<br />
objectifying them, when they’re subjectifiying them, when they’re<br />
mutilating them, when they’re trying to heal them. But it’s a kind<br />
of vision that the rest of the world, aside from these surgeons,<br />
have no access to. The idea was to open up that vision to<br />
humanity at large.<br />
When we got to Paris, we let go of the idea of having seven<br />
different countries, seven different surgical inventions, seven<br />
different scoping technologies because it was absurdly<br />
unprecedented to be afforded carte blanche. To have complete,<br />
unrestricted access was such an opportunity that we didn’t want<br />
to be constrained by the conceptual framework we initially had.<br />
I’m curious about the approach you took to shooting the<br />
surgeries. Did your logistical setup of the camera and its<br />
apparatus vary dramatically from operation-to-operation or<br />
was it consistent throughout?<br />
LCT: The original idea was: we wouldn’t film ourselves. We’d only<br />
record sound and all the imagery in the film would come from<br />
the medical cameras: laparoscopic and celioscopic cameras<br />
that were inside the bodies which the doctors were looking at. So<br />
that footage would be synced up with the sound mostly outside<br />
the body or on the bodies with contact microphones. We’re both<br />
very impetuous and we’re both very ocular centric creatures. So<br />
quite soon, in order to allow ourselves to focus, we also started<br />
filming outside the body. Initially, we used a conventional<br />
camera. But the imagery that gave us wasn’t very exciting and<br />
looked like things we’d seen before. Then we experimented and,<br />
with an amazing engineer in Zurich, fabricated a lipstick camera:<br />
a camera that, as closely as possible, resembles the same optics<br />
and aesthetics as the camera the doctors use. That camera was<br />
breaking down the whole time and we had to find a way to touch<br />
the lens without it burning our hands. But it basically stayed the<br />
same throughout.<br />
Of course, the film is nothing. It’s two hours or something out of<br />
350 hours. Each time we filmed a surgical procedure, and we<br />
filmed hundreds of them, the kind of imagery that the doctors<br />
themselves were using changes according to the operation they<br />
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were performing, according to the hospital, according to their<br />
resources, etc.<br />
When I saw the movie with an audience last September, I<br />
was struck by very audible exclamations from other people<br />
in the theater. Was that visceral, almost spectacle-like<br />
reception something you anticipated?<br />
VP: We never really have an audience in mind. We were just<br />
worried about being extremely precise. We were expecting the<br />
audience to be maybe a bit touched or overwhelmed at some<br />
points. I think we knew somehow it’s a film that would be lived<br />
and experienced very subjectively. What I’m saying is super<br />
banal because it’s the case for every film. But in this case, it’s a<br />
little different because, as we said earlier, everybody has a body<br />
and everyone has a very particular relationship with their body.<br />
It’s not the same if somebody’s had a prostatectomy. Or if<br />
somebody’s had breast cancer. Or somebody had a parent who<br />
died or who had dementia… They will experience the film<br />
completely differently. We knew this was something we could not<br />
control. When you write a book, you cannot control how the book<br />
is going to be read. This is the case with every film you make.<br />
And this one in particular, we knew that. We did try to be careful<br />
with that because there are many things we didn’t put into the<br />
film because we thought maybe it was just too hard.<br />
LCT: We had to censor ourselves a lot. It doesn’t seem like it<br />
when you see the film because it’s so overwhelming for many<br />
people. But there was so much we took out even though it was<br />
extremely beautiful and incredibly moving or displayed an ethic<br />
of care we thought was really important. It would just be<br />
unwatchable for most viewers. The body is super weird because<br />
it’s the thing we’re closest to in our lives. Your body is the only<br />
thing in the world that you yourself experience from the inside<br />
as well as the outside. It is the most permanent and present<br />
thing in our lives. And yet it is shrouded in taboo, with anxiety<br />
and alienation. Despite its centrality in our lives <strong>—</strong> all we do is<br />
stare at each other’s bodies and inspect our own <strong>—</strong> we have<br />
difficulties transgressing membrane and skin and looking inside<br />
the body.<br />
We weren’t naïve in thinking that wouldn’t generate anxiety, but<br />
we thought it’s important not to turn away our gaze but to<br />
engage with the most important subject in our lives: bodies. We<br />
spend our whole lives pretending we don’t know we’re going to<br />
die. It’s the only thing we know. And we just repress that<br />
knowledge as much as we can. By visualizing the body, we see<br />
our fragility, our resilience. And of course, its fragility is going to<br />
be deeply anxiety-inducing.<br />
VP: Or the contrary. Yesterday, Alice Diop was visiting our class.<br />
She saw the film, and she said she was so scared. We had the<br />
film projected for her, and she was like, “No stay with me! Stay<br />
with me!” At some point I needed to leave, and when I came<br />
back, she was completely transfixed. When the film ended, she<br />
said “I think it healed me.” For her, it was completely therapeutic.<br />
She’s not afraid anymore.<br />
For me, the movie got me to dissect the aversion I felt to<br />
some of the images of the inside of the body and to confront<br />
what it means to look at flesh and feel repulsion to your own<br />
biology. Which was a really unique encounter. I was also<br />
wondering if any of the patients saw the footage of their own<br />
operations?<br />
LCT: Thing is, we filmed hundreds of patients and hundreds of<br />
medical personnel of different stripes. There were all these<br />
screenings in Paris in December and January, like 20 or 30, and<br />
they were invited to many of them. So, we were present for some<br />
of those but not all. The person who had the first operation in the<br />
film <strong>—</strong> the brain surgery for hydrocephalus [treated with] an<br />
endoscopic third ventriculostomy <strong>—</strong> studied his medical<br />
procedure at length in the final cut. That’s also true for some<br />
others. But there’s no way of knowing what percentage of<br />
doctors or patients have seen the film. There were some doctors<br />
and medical staff who came and saw rough cuts towards the<br />
end; we wanted to make sure they found it accurate and not a<br />
misrepresentation. But most people only saw the final film.<br />
What’s the division of labor between the two of you? Are<br />
there specific roles that you individually assume?<br />
LCT: One of us would hold the lipstick camera and the other<br />
would hold the sound. In past films, like Caniba or Leviathan,<br />
there was no division of labor. With Leviathan, the filming<br />
conditions were difficult so one of us would have to hold onto<br />
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the other to make sure they didn’t fall overboard. But even in that<br />
case, whoever was the least exhausted would hold the camera.<br />
But that also had sound. In this case, we added a microphone to<br />
the camera, so we’d alternate without rhyme or reason. It was<br />
also exhausting; we’d get up and bike to the hospital an<br />
hour/hour-and-a-half every morning at 5 AM. Then we’d get back<br />
at midnight. Whoever was least exhausted would usually hold the<br />
camera and the other one would do the sound.<br />
Do you often find your two approaches and ideas are<br />
simpatico? Or do you find yourselves disagreeing about what<br />
the movie should be?<br />
LCT: There’s almost invariably antipatico. They’re not at all<br />
sympathetic. We fight like cats and dogs.<br />
VP: C'est complètement faux [translation: That’s completely<br />
wrong].<br />
LCT: She’s already disagreeing with me. At the end of a day, one<br />
of us, especially during editing but even during filming, will feel<br />
one way and the other will feel the other. Then, when we meet<br />
again in the editing studio the following morning, I will have<br />
changed position and come to her point of view. And she will<br />
have come to mine. Then we’re like “fuck” because each of us<br />
thinks the opposite. So it’s a constant<strong>—</strong>sorry, it’s a big, stupid<br />
word<strong>—</strong>dialectic going back and forth between the two of us. We<br />
never come to any particular consensus. Every spectator makes<br />
up something different than every other spectator according to<br />
individuality, nationality, gender, race, class position: multiple<br />
different variables that are uncontrollable. Even us, we never<br />
have a singular intellectual perspective; the film still means<br />
different things to us. And what it means to each of us changes<br />
through time. We’re still learning about the film by interacting<br />
with audiences.<br />
VP: I agree… I almost agree, actually. You’re completely right<br />
about the fighting or dialectical process. Can you imagine<br />
agreeing with yourself and being alone? Since we edit<br />
[ourselves], it’s two brains rather than one. It’s like having a<br />
conversation. Somehow, we need the other to trust what we’re<br />
doing. But also, especially when we look at our footage, there is a<br />
common sensibility that is sometimes mind-blowing. Very often<br />
we’re having the same reaction at the same half-second,<br />
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vibrating in front of the same images. There is a shared<br />
sensibility that is extremely important in our work and<br />
collaboration.<br />
LCT: Even if I don’t vibrate as much as you.<br />
You talked about how Benjamin’s metaphor of the Optical<br />
Unconscious was a starting point, and you talked about how<br />
you’ve never fully bought into it. I’m wondering how the<br />
process of making the movie and thinking back on making it<br />
have changed your understanding of Benjamin’s metaphor?<br />
LCT: It’s complicated… it would take ten pages. Even in ten years<br />
when [the movie] will be in the past, but especially now when it’s<br />
been out for only a couple months in France or almost a year in<br />
festivals. Though we haven’t been to many festivals because it’s<br />
absurd post-COVID in the climate crisis to travel to all these<br />
festivals. But it’s not as if now we’ve reached a certain particular<br />
understanding of either Benjamin or the body. When we started<br />
filming in Paris, not only did the seven-part structure go out the<br />
window but so did the interrogation of that metaphor, partially.<br />
Our understanding of the body and medicine was, and is, in<br />
constant flux.<br />
I still don’t think [Benjamin’s] metaphor holds that much water.<br />
He’s a terribly authoritarian writer who’s completely à la mode in<br />
American universities. To think there’s an optical unconscious<br />
equivalent to the instinctive/psychic unconscious that Freud was<br />
exploring… I don’t think that holds up. He thought painting could<br />
only represent the world from the outside; it was destined or<br />
doomed to have an exterior regard on the world, whereas film<br />
would blow the world asunder in the dynamite of a <strong>16</strong> th of a<br />
second, as he called it. Then, in the detritus of what it captured:<br />
a new vision of the world. It was still very teleological and very<br />
technofilic and romanticized the camera’s vision. The camera’s<br />
vision is as flawed and partial as human vision. In many ways, it’s<br />
not a superhuman vision as Vertov thought; it’s less than human<br />
vision. It’s a constant struggle to work with these audio-visual<br />
technologies, to give us a new perspective on reality and to<br />
perceive the world in ways our own eyes don’t. Or to augment<br />
that apprehension we have of the world. It’s not easy and it’s not<br />
as if there’s one methodology or technology you can pursue that<br />
would allow for that.<br />
VP: Wow…<br />
LCT: We should write on this at some point because, honestly,<br />
it’s a super interesting question.<br />
VP: As I was listening to you, I said, “This is exactly telepathic.<br />
When you were talking I thought, ‘we always refuse to write, but<br />
why?’”<br />
LCT: Because we can’t write. That’s why we use images and<br />
sound… You can write, but I can’t write.<br />
VP: I cannot… you can.<br />
LCT: I also think there’s a political imperative to look at the body,<br />
especially now. With COVID, it’s terrifying how little humanity<br />
seems to have learned from that pandemic. I was really<br />
optimistic during it that there’d be a radically different<br />
relationship to the environment, to the world, to the<br />
extra-human. But I do think we have been fragilized about our<br />
bodies, our mortality. Now is the time to contemplate our<br />
relationship to other species and to the natural world through<br />
the prism of our bodies. The hope is that people like Alice [Diop]<br />
who watch this film, which is very violent in many ways, will<br />
perceive an incredible kind of tenderness. Paradoxically,<br />
perhaps, they’re able to reconcile <strong>—</strong> as you were <strong>—</strong> with their<br />
bodies.<br />
It’s not disgusting, it’s not gory. People often compare it with<br />
Cronenberg’s film [Crimes of the Future]. It’s the opposite of<br />
Cronenberg’s film. But I still think there’s this prohibition about<br />
looking at one’s body that has to be interrogated. And if we’re<br />
going to have a healthy relationship to the rest of the world,<br />
other species (animal, plant, and mineral), that has to start<br />
with a capacity for reinterrogating our own relationship to our<br />
bodies.<br />
VP: I was talking about the hospital as a microcosm of society,<br />
but the body itself is. It’s a place of multiple cohabitation<br />
between viruses and bacteria. It’s also a place that cannot be<br />
sustainable if you want to push the metaphor of being alive.<br />
There’s no body that can survive without the care of other<br />
bodies. <strong>—</strong> INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY RYAN AKLER-BISHOP<br />
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KICKING THE CANON<br />
TOTAL RECALL<br />
Paul Verhoeven<br />
"Reality is that which, when you<br />
stop believing in it, doesn't go away."<br />
- Philip K. Dick<br />
With his bionic biceps threatening to split his skin wide open in a<br />
fashion not dissimilar to the Hulk with his shirts and that endearing<br />
accent, sort of Russian but not quite, that he never shook, Arnold<br />
Schwarzenegger, an immigrant, was the paradigm of big dumb '80s<br />
American action movies, a hulky hero who could mow down droves of<br />
nondescript bad guys with a machine gun so big it's comical while<br />
tossing out lovably lame one-liners with a wry smile that lets you know<br />
he loves this. And the joy, the unfettered joy with which he<br />
serves those quips, often bad puns that don't sound so<br />
different from a Dad Joke, is the kind of acting<br />
you don't learn from the Actors Studio.<br />
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KICKING THE CANON<br />
In the '80s, after Sylvester Stallone <strong>—</strong> who, remember, got<br />
famous with an intimate, modest film playing a bum who refuses<br />
to give up on his dreams with aching vulnerability <strong>—</strong> made the<br />
move to machismo and bombast, moviegoers were given a<br />
choice: Team Arnold or Team Sly. It's not really a fair comparison,<br />
as Stallone is also a writer and director (and a good one, too,<br />
adroit at montage in ways that hark back to the great Russian<br />
filmmakers of the silent era) and was a respected actor before<br />
he transmogrified into the corporeal personification of<br />
testosterone; Arnold was a bodybuilder, the best ever, who<br />
became an actor to further engorge his ego (watch Pumping Iron<br />
and witness his narcissism and bloated sense of<br />
self-importance) and who found early success in the movies<br />
playing big meaty men. He soon developed an inimitable charm<br />
that made him one of American cinema's most enthralling<br />
presences, a Reagan-era John Wayne, but he was never<br />
considered a good actor.<br />
Well, Arnold's pretty good in Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall, a loose<br />
adaptation of a story by perpetually poor pill-popper Philip K.<br />
Dick. As Doug Quaid, a hulky nobody who becomes an<br />
interplanetary hero, or maybe has a schizoid embolism after a<br />
memory implantation operation gone awry, Arnold exudes that<br />
inimitable charm that made him a megastar. But it's here<br />
tinctured with a self-awareness (the embryonic stage of the kind<br />
of honest self-exploration that imbues his performance in the<br />
great Last Action Hero, still his best role) that, if you interpret the<br />
film <strong>—</strong> as Verhoeven does <strong>—</strong> as the fantasy of a Joe Schmo who<br />
dreams of being somebody important, is actually pretty sad. Go<br />
back to Pumping Iron <strong>—</strong> the seminal documentary purveying the<br />
world of bodybuilding <strong>—</strong> when Arnold, then 27 years old and<br />
already a legend and almost heavenly idol to his acolytes (see:<br />
the scene at the prison), openly indulged his egotism, literally<br />
saying he admires "powerful men," like dictators, and aspires for<br />
greatness <strong>—</strong> and not just greatness, but being the best at<br />
everything he does. In Total Recall, he plays an unexceptional guy<br />
who wants to be great, who finds his dreams literally in his<br />
dreams while he sits still, comatose, forever in his own mind. And<br />
the face he makes when he is hit in the balls <strong>—</strong> more than once!<br />
<strong>—</strong> is unmatched, all his facial muscles clenching like digits in a<br />
fist.<br />
Verhoeven is a consummate craftsman whose films couldn't<br />
have been made by anyone else, but he doesn't really have a<br />
distinct visual style, at least regarding compositions and<br />
movement and so on. His approach isn't showy, but the images<br />
are always coherent, as is the action, even when<br />
things get surreal or grotesque; the loving detail of<br />
the mutants evinces a bold humanism you don't find<br />
in many $100 million blockbusters. And, of course,<br />
Paul was the satirist par excellence of '90s<br />
Hollywood. Here, he eviscerates, with brutal care,<br />
capitalism (the craven villain, played slimily by Ronny<br />
Cox, who was similarly slimy in Robocop, charges<br />
exorbitant prices for air on Mars, the way America<br />
charges disturbingly high fees for basic necessities),<br />
imperialism, the police force, etc. He also butchers<br />
bodies. The somatic savagery <strong>—</strong> Arnold uses a man<br />
as a meat shield, as bullets batter the body and<br />
blood sprays from holes spurting all over his torso,<br />
for instance <strong>—</strong> is excellently excessive; it's<br />
Verhoeven's willingness to be so mean, his<br />
conviction obvious each time a bullet collides with<br />
flesh, that makes the whole thing so fun. He takes<br />
glee in it, thus, so do we. <strong>—</strong> GREG CWIK<br />
8
KICKING THE CANON<br />
YOUTH OF THE BEAST<br />
Seun Suzuki<br />
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks <strong>—</strong> The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a<br />
Shadow (1958), Man With a Shotgun (1961) <strong>—</strong> but is probably best known to contemporary audiences for his yakuza films. A relatively<br />
inhibited take on American gangster noirs quickly evolved into a kaleidoscopic assault on the form that made him both beloved and<br />
infamous, with what’s now his most acclaimed work <strong>—</strong> 1967's eclectic, satirical yakuza classic Branded to Kill <strong>—</strong> initially landing as a<br />
critical and commercial failure, and leading to Suzuki's dismissal by Nikkatsu, for making "movies that make no sense and no money,"<br />
according to the filmmaker. This then led Suzuki to successfully sue the production company, but the ordeal cost him a decade-long<br />
blacklisting.<br />
Though Suzuki’s freewheeling cinematic sensibilities can actually be traced all the way back to his debut film, 1956's Victory is Ours,<br />
the first genuine flashes of his trademark style appeared in the 1958 crime film Underworld Beauty. Not only was this the first of his<br />
films credited to Seijun Suzuki (as opposed to Seitaro Suzuki, his birth name), but it also featured an unorthodox visual creativity <strong>—</strong><br />
cleverly obscured nudity; deep, mysterious shadows; creepy mannequin set design <strong>—</strong> which was nevertheless noticeably restrained<br />
by Nikkatsu's expectations of commercial viability. Take Aim at the Police Van (1960) and Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards!<br />
(1963) can be similarly described. But then came Youth of the Beast, which marked a true turning point for the filmmaker.<br />
One of four Suzuki films released in 1963, Youth of the Beast saw the auteur truly embrace his playful pop artistry for the<br />
first time <strong>—</strong> even Suzuki himself called it his "first truly original film." The plot is essentially a spin on Kurosawa's<br />
1961 samurai film Yojimbo, wherein a wandering ronin, Kuwabatake Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), infiltrates the<br />
organizations of two opposing crime bosses struggling for supremacy<br />
to bring peace to a small village. But unlike<br />
9
KICKING THE CANON<br />
Kurosawa's classic, Suzuki's crime tale has no place for such<br />
noble aims. Joji "Jo" Mizuno (the famously chipmunk-cheeked Joe<br />
Shishido) is an ex-cop driven solely by revenge. Having been<br />
wrongfully convicted of embezzlement, the newly released Jo<br />
becomes singularly focused on avenging the murder of his loyal<br />
former partner, whose death was staged to look like a lover's<br />
suicide.<br />
Jo's pursuit of "justice" becomes a relentless, violent, and slyly<br />
comical odyssey through Kobe's criminal underworld. Although<br />
1966's Tokyo Drifter would mark Suzuki's first identifiably<br />
deconstructionist take on the genre, Youth of the Beast scans as<br />
similarly satirical. The film occupies a space between<br />
straightforward gangster film homage and Godardian<br />
pranksterism, amplifying genre tropes to near-absurd levels with<br />
increasingly<br />
convoluted<br />
violence, plot<br />
machinations,<br />
and set<br />
pieces <strong>—</strong> at one<br />
point, Jo disposes<br />
of his adversaries<br />
while hanging<br />
upside down from a chandelier <strong>—</strong> while occasionally pushing<br />
things into the realm of the avant-garde. For every blade<br />
violently shoved under a fingernail, there is a shot of radiant red<br />
flowers illuminating the otherwise black-and-white frames of the<br />
film's intro. And Suzuki's farcical tough-guy introduction for Jo <strong>—</strong><br />
he beats up young delinquents before heading to a club to drink<br />
and beat up some more people <strong>—</strong> feels like a purposeful<br />
escalation of Breathless' Bogart-obsessed main character, Michel<br />
(Jean-Paul Belmondo).<br />
Youth of the Beast’s gritty textures don't rival Tokyo Drifter's<br />
arresting production design. But Suzuki still provides his share of<br />
striking images, such as when Jo invades the office of crime<br />
boss Shinzuke Onodera (Kinzo Shin). The head honcho's office<br />
walls are illuminated by images of American and Japanese<br />
B-movie gangster melodramas <strong>—</strong> the kind of films that Suzuki<br />
was slowly but surely leaving behind. (Incidentally, Onodera, as<br />
well as his rival Tetsuo Nomoto (Akiji Kobayashi), are depicted as<br />
weaselly, bottom-line-obsessed businessmen, far removed from<br />
the honor codes often employed to romanticize Japanese<br />
organized crime.) This juxtaposition ultimately acknowledges the<br />
framework that the film <strong>—</strong> for all its clever subversions <strong>—</strong><br />
operates within, obscuring the visceral violence that ensues by<br />
calling attention to its artificiality.<br />
This unsentimental, stylized approach would prove influential on<br />
filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, John Woo,<br />
and Takashi Miike,<br />
whose genre efforts<br />
often echo Beast's<br />
elaborate brutality.<br />
Even Scorsese might<br />
have looked to<br />
Keiko's (Naomi<br />
Hoshi) agonizing<br />
junkie floor crawl for<br />
The Wolf of Wall<br />
Street's infamous<br />
Quaaludes scene.<br />
Suzuki's later, more<br />
surreal efforts<br />
overshadow the<br />
legacy of the first<br />
true Suzuki original,<br />
somewhat, and he<br />
remains tragically<br />
under-discussed as<br />
a talented dramatic<br />
filmmaker (1964's<br />
Gate of Flesh and<br />
1965's Story of a<br />
Prostitute rank<br />
amongst his best<br />
work). But it’s with<br />
Youth of the Beast<br />
that his anarchic<br />
vision truly snapped into focus, and at last converged with a<br />
searing poignancy, felt in its ending: after the antagonist finally<br />
dies a horrible, razor blade-related death, Jo succumbs to<br />
despair and has a vision of a grayscale graveyard, where<br />
flowers once again gleam with red-hot menace. <strong>—</strong> FRED<br />
BARRETT<br />
10
DEAD RINGERS<br />
It’s hard not to see the Dead Ringers miniseries as yet<br />
another domino tumbling on the remake assembly line<br />
that turns everything from The Parallax View to Fatal<br />
Attraction into half-hearted content, primed for<br />
couch-locked consumption. Credit where it's due,<br />
Cronenberg’s underrated 1988 thriller at least makes<br />
for an intriguing selection, given its restrained<br />
manner, disturbing gynecological sojourns, and the<br />
demanding dual performance of its lead-playing twin<br />
doctors stuck in a codependent spiral. Anyone<br />
looking to play it safe (though what Cronenberg<br />
remake really is?) could have chosen to adapt<br />
eXistenZ, whose twisty, mind-bending plot and<br />
science fiction trappings seem at least better suited for<br />
serialization than this icy, melodramatic chamber piece.<br />
That said, the assembled team here is pretty strong:<br />
there’s dual-lead Rachel Weisz, blending the composed<br />
vulnerability of Disobedience with the ravenous bite of The<br />
Favourite; the likes of Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and<br />
Karyn Kusama (The Invitation) directing; and it’s all run by<br />
playwright/screenwriter Alice Birch, who penned the phenomenal<br />
Florence Pugh breakout, Lady Macbeth, and whose impressive<br />
television credits include Normal People and Succession. It’s all this<br />
squandered potential that makes the predictably tepid end result <strong>—</strong> a<br />
parade of extraneous themes, characters, and plot lines, scattered across six<br />
disjointed episodes <strong>—</strong> such a letdown.<br />
This fumbling effort highlights the unavoidable catch-22 of the<br />
movie-to-miniseries pipeline: a straightforward remake would be considered<br />
a futile exercise in imitation, but the full-scale remodel (as embarked on<br />
by Birch) remains awkwardly chained to its source material, leaving its<br />
myriad ambitions out of arm's reach. The original narrative of<br />
Beverly and Elliot Mantle's co-dependent self-destruction still<br />
grounds the project, but there are now hours of filler to dilute<br />
Cronenberg’s concentrated dose. Long sequences with the<br />
twins' parents, their sociopathic angel investors,<br />
their artist-in-residence housekeeper, the<br />
11
magazine writer working on an expose <strong>—</strong> it’s a cascade of false<br />
starts and half-thoughts trailing off before they ever get<br />
anywhere interesting. This undercooked quality is most<br />
pronounced with the reorientated focus on the politics of<br />
reproductive health. This shift, defined by the Mantle twins’<br />
gender swap, might promise to be the series' greatest strength, a<br />
timely and clever inversion of some of the prickly, misogynistic<br />
undertones in the original brothers' psychology. But just like in<br />
the aforementioned threads, this too is presented in<br />
Twitter-bent one-liners and scattershot fragments that never<br />
have space to breathe.<br />
Accompanying the overstuffed scope of ideas is a similarly<br />
overstuffed stylization, presented in anamorphic widescreen to<br />
give ample room for the twins to share the frame. Where<br />
Cronenberg’s version avoided stressing its central gimmick, the<br />
miniseries embraces it with relish and abandon, collecting both<br />
Weiszs together in a shot as much as possible. Similarly absent<br />
is the restraint of the original’s visuals. Peter Suschitzky’s muted<br />
palette resembled a soap opera, lulling the viewer into an uneasy<br />
calm, only to blossom in spectacular moments like a bondage<br />
scene featuring rubber tubing and medical clamps shot in woozy<br />
blues, or the gloom of the operating theater pierced with the<br />
smoldering crimson of the Mantles’ surgical garb. Birch’s version<br />
nods at some of these ideas, but strikes a frustrating<br />
middle-ground of colorful, nicely framed banality that plays like<br />
microwaved leftovers. All this is goaded on by a snappy musical<br />
score and punctuated by an endless parade of tacky needle<br />
drops. If Cronenberg bemoaned the cost of featuring a single<br />
song in his film (“In The Still of the Night'' by The Five Satins), it’s<br />
tough to imagine what his reaction would be to this soundtrack,<br />
so stuffed with overused hits <strong>—</strong> “Sweet Dreams,” “Tainted Love,”<br />
and so forth <strong>—</strong> that it chugs along almost like a jukebox musical.<br />
There are some bright spots here and there. Weisz’s take on the<br />
twins may lack nuance <strong>—</strong> Jeremy Irons’ performance remains<br />
untouched <strong>—</strong> but it makes up for it in campy exuberance, which,<br />
accompanied by some devilishly funny writing and a strong<br />
supporting cast, helps keep things gliding along. Particular<br />
standouts include Jennifer Ehle’s razor-witted Rebecca Parker,<br />
the caustic investor the Mantles have to beg for funding for their<br />
birthing centers, and Ntare Guma Mbhaho Mwine as a writer<br />
digging into the Mantles, stealing every single scene he’s in with<br />
relaxed poise and finely tuned, simmering charm. Where the<br />
show really stumbles, however, is in building its emotional<br />
backbone. Weisz has no chemistry with Britne Oldford, who plays<br />
Beverly’s lover, an issue compounded by the fact that Beverely’s<br />
character has been restructured in such a way as to become an<br />
idealistic husk of what he once was. In the original, Beverly was<br />
the more empathetic of the two, but far less predictable,<br />
susceptible to addiction and psychological breakdown. Elliot was<br />
colder, crueler, and more playful, but defined by a calm<br />
demeanor and a rigid sense of control. Instead, Birch’s version<br />
sanctifies Beverly and transfers all flaws over to Elliot. Out of<br />
everything that frustrates in this Dead Ringers, its oversimplified,<br />
good twin/bad twin dichotomy is most destructive to the heart<br />
of the source material.<br />
By the time you’ve made it to the sixth and final episode, the<br />
incongruities in theme and tone and the sheer number of<br />
abandoned plot threads start to seem like insurmountable<br />
failings. The show races toward its ending with the sweaty<br />
energy of a series canceled halfway through, one desperately<br />
trying to cobble together a satisfying conclusion amidst its final<br />
throes. Following the trend set by every poorly thought-through<br />
deviation from the source material leading up to it thus far, Birch<br />
declines the original’s beautifully cutting closer in favor of a<br />
broader, tackier, and more predictable finale. The muddled<br />
nature of this desperate final bow stands in stark contrast to the<br />
quiet dignity of Cronenberg’s operatic ending, a move that seems<br />
to be at total odds with the warmer, more empathetic approach<br />
toward the Mantles that the series until this point exhibits. Maybe<br />
the most charitable reading here would be that the disjointed<br />
flow from one episode to the next suggests that each should be<br />
seen as improvisations on a theme <strong>—</strong> siblings, parents, class,<br />
motherhood <strong>—</strong> and yet, as poorly as these work as a whole, they<br />
seem even more wanting in isolation. The ultimate takeaway<br />
here is that, tempting as it may be, trying to xerox the dark<br />
alchemy of Cronenbergian narrative is certainly<br />
a fool’s errand. Cronenberg’s discordant themes, at once<br />
excessive and elegant, aren’t threaded together but instead<br />
violently fused; the final, imitative product that is this Dead<br />
Ringers mini-series is a fender-bender enervated by caution,<br />
whereas the real deal was an expressway collision, its potency<br />
crawling up your spine <strong>—</strong> glass, metal, and protruding flesh. <strong>—</strong><br />
IGOR FISHMAN<br />
12
FILM REVIEWS<br />
BEAU IS AFRAID<br />
Ari Aster<br />
Joaquin Phoenix’s first scene in Beau Is Afraid takes place in his<br />
therapist’s office, setting the story in motion while also<br />
presenting a roadmap of sorts for everything that follows.<br />
Phoenix plays the titular Beau, a forty-something-year-old virgin<br />
with truly unfortunate levels of male pattern baldness and a<br />
prominent spare tire (the weight swing between this and his<br />
performance in Joker, only a few years ago, has to be 75 lbs, at<br />
minimum). In the aforementioned scene, Beau and his doctor are<br />
grappling with the prospect of traveling out of town to visit his<br />
domineering mother; posing questions that only agitate Beau<br />
further (“do you ever wish that she was dead?”) from behind a<br />
Cheshire Cat grin, the doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson)<br />
sends Beau off with a prescription for a new anxiety medication,<br />
replete with terrifyingly commonplace side effects (“If you start<br />
to feel warm or have an elevated heart rate, that’s bad”). Given<br />
this framing, one could view everything that happens in this film<br />
thereafter as the result of an adverse reaction to Beau’s new pills,<br />
but that would be far too prosaic a read on director Ari Aster’s<br />
bugfuck odyssey. Instead, Beau Is Afraid aspires to do no<br />
less than dramatize an American Psychiatric Association<br />
textbook’s worth of phobias and stressors <strong>—</strong> large, small, and<br />
yet-to-be-classified. The film is something like the Terminator,<br />
only it’s in relentless pursuit of that elusive trigger that will send<br />
the viewer into a full-on panic attack.<br />
Living in an under-furnished, third-story apartment in the sort of<br />
urban hellscape only found in Fox News fever dreams, Beau steps<br />
over dead bodies lying in the road, outruns mentally ill vagrants,<br />
and absent-mindedly wanders past floor-to-ceiling vulgar graffiti<br />
and warnings about brown recluses in the building. And this is all<br />
to get back to an abode that looks like the kind of space single,<br />
middle-aged men rent out shortly before hanging themselves. It’s<br />
the type of place where residents are menaced by a nude serial<br />
killer (a news report helpfully clarifies that the suspect is<br />
circumcised), and the local citizenry proceed to congregate in<br />
zombie-like hordes in the middle of the street. And this is Beau’s<br />
safe space: the place he’s being guilted into leaving for a<br />
weekend visit with his emotional-terrorist, titan-of-industry<br />
mother, Mona (played by Patti Lupone in present-day scenes, and<br />
Zoe Lister-Jones in flashback).<br />
13
FILM REVIEWS<br />
For much of the film’s masterful first hour, we watch Beau<br />
attempting to navigate cascading inconveniences that conspire<br />
to derail his trip. The water in his apartment has been shut off;<br />
an irate neighbor keeps sliding passive-aggressive notes under<br />
his door in the middle of the night, asking Beau to turn down the<br />
music when no music is even being played; a slept-through alarm<br />
clock makes Beau late for the airport. Then someone steals<br />
Beau’s house keys right out of the lock <strong>—</strong> after he scampered<br />
back inside for only a few seconds to grab his dental floss, a<br />
fitting character note <strong>—</strong> leaving even the man’s inner sanctum<br />
vulnerable. It seems reasonable, then, that Mona will be forgiving<br />
of him delaying his trip by a few hours so that he can call a<br />
locksmith. She is not. The film continues on like this, building<br />
indignity on top of indignity, reaching a crescendo when Beau<br />
receives horrifying news from home, in the least comforting way<br />
imaginable, shortly before being run into by an RV while running<br />
naked through the streets (his distended and severely swollen<br />
testicals occasionally jostling into the frame). And that’s when, as<br />
the expression goes, things start to get weird.<br />
Beau Is Afraid is the eagerly anticipated follow-up from Ari Aster<br />
(Hereditary, Midsommar), who, after only three feature films, has<br />
emerged as the most breathlessly hyped name in A24’s stable of<br />
in-house directors. Up until now, a genre filmmaker specializing<br />
in tightly-controlled, large-canvas squirm-fests, Aster abandons<br />
overt horror here (although there’s no shortage of shocking<br />
violence and unsettling moments) and doubles down on his pet<br />
theme of the lasting harm parents inflict upon their children.<br />
There’s something upsetting for Beau to fret about even in the<br />
most innocuous of places <strong>—</strong> for example, the cozy suburban<br />
home he’s taken to convalesce at by a way-too-chipper Nathan<br />
Lane and Amy Ryan. But, invariably, the film works its way back<br />
to the codependency and sexual dysfunction instilled in him by<br />
his mother at a young age. Aster’s previous films were legitimate<br />
hits, and Beau Is Afraid carries itself with the swagger of an artist<br />
comfortable burning through whatever capital they’ve amassed<br />
in service of chasing an undiluted vision. That extends to the<br />
film’s elephantine runtime (just a hair under 180 minutes) and<br />
comparatively large budget, but also to its disquieting framing of<br />
motherhood, sexuality, the human body, and the music of Mariah<br />
Carey. It’s an expansive, occasionally turgid film that seems<br />
designed to test an audience’s patience, particularly during a<br />
longish digression where Phoenix, on the run, stumbles upon a<br />
roving theater troupe that’s set up camp in the woods. It’s a<br />
confounding detour smack dab in the middle of the film, blurring<br />
the line between performer and audience, reality and metaphor,<br />
live-action and animation. To what end it serves remains unclear<br />
other than that it’s of a piece with the film’s Kaufman-esque pop<br />
surrealism and the director’s “who are you to say no to me?”<br />
mandate.<br />
Maddeningly inscrutable by design, Beau Is Afraid <strong>—</strong> with its<br />
nightmarish Freudian imagery, “better living through<br />
pharmaceuticals” thematizing, and nods to both Judaism and<br />
Kafka <strong>—</strong> is all but begging to be solved (Internet explainers and<br />
crowd-sourced Reddit threads are due any minute now).<br />
Interpreting what it all means may not actually be worth the<br />
squeeze, but that’s almost incidental when put up against the<br />
film’s surface-level pleasures. There’s the precision of the<br />
filmmaking, with its emphasis on vertical compositions <strong>—</strong> the<br />
film is playing on IMAX screens in select markets for good reason<br />
<strong>—</strong> and building risible gags entirely through production design,<br />
set dressing, and throwaway props (e.g., an early scene finds<br />
Beau microwaving a TV dinner that boasts a flavor profile<br />
combination of Irish and Hawaiian cuisine). For the sort of<br />
person who can roll with it, there's a queasy yet intoxicating<br />
discomfort to the way the film takes pliers and a blowtorch to the<br />
viewers’ last nerve, eliciting waves of shame and purposeful<br />
befuddlement from every new scenario Beau stumbles into. And<br />
then there are the heavily-stylized, outsized performances. On<br />
one end of the spectrum, you have Phoenix, his Beau so<br />
paralyzed by fear, humiliation, and conflicting instruction that he<br />
all but slides into catatonia. On the other end, there’s Lupone’s<br />
character: a sucking wound of self-justification, pettiness, and<br />
the desire to manipulate an adult son she still treats like a child,<br />
earning the actress honorary status in the Jewish Mothers Hall of<br />
Fame. The film’s ambitions and demonstrable craft aren’t<br />
14
FILM REVIEWS<br />
redeeming in and of themselves, and certainly don’t absolve the<br />
film of its lumpiness, its narcissism, or some of its more juvenile<br />
tendencies, but the more off-putting qualities aren’t inherently<br />
disqualifying either. And there’s a bit of a perverse thrill in<br />
something this unaccommodating being unleashed on audiences<br />
probably expecting the latest iteration of “elevated horror.” In the<br />
end, Beau Is Afraid is something like a long therapy session: it’s<br />
expensive, self-indulgent, and should have probably remained<br />
private. But there’s also a morbid fascination in observing it, and,<br />
ultimately, the mother’s probably to blame. <strong>—</strong> ANDREW DIGNAN<br />
DIRECTOR: Ari Aster; CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy<br />
Ryan, Parker Posey; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: April 21;<br />
RUNTIME: 2 hr. 59 min.<br />
EVIL DEAD RISE<br />
Lee Cronin<br />
The latest installment of the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise,<br />
opens with a sequence that will be instantly recognizable to<br />
longtime fans of the series. Under the opening credits, an unseen<br />
force propels itself, at breakneck speed, through a foggy forest,<br />
across clearings and creeks, hurtling itself toward an<br />
unsuspecting victim. It’s really a bit of cheeky misdirection: the<br />
ominous, quickly moving presence is a small drone being piloted<br />
by an obnoxious frat boy type, tormenting a young woman who’s<br />
just trying to read by the lake. This smartly undercuts the tension<br />
before things start to get grizzly, about five minutes hence, while<br />
at the same time putting its own spin on one of the more familiar<br />
visual tropes of these films. It’s also just a little bit clever <strong>—</strong> a<br />
quality that’s otherwise in short supply in a film that, while<br />
suitably gory and proficiently made, lacks any real sense of<br />
invention or personality.<br />
That woods-set prologue notwithstanding <strong>—</strong> the film eventually<br />
circles back to how we even ended up there and who these<br />
anonymous victims are, and in a decidedly perfunctory manner <strong>—</strong><br />
Evil Dead Rise differentiates itself from its predecessors by<br />
setting its deadite mayhem not in a cabin in the woods but rather<br />
in a dilapidated apartment complex in Los Angeles. It’s not quite<br />
putting Jason Voorhees in outer space, but for a franchise that<br />
leans so heavily on the isolation and vastness of the wilderness,<br />
moving the action to an urban center rife with<br />
modern amenities is an admirable upending of the formula. We’re<br />
introduced to touring guitar tech and absentee cool aunt, Beth<br />
(Lily Sullivan), who pops in to visit her older sister, tattoo artist<br />
Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her three children on a dark and<br />
stormy evening. Beth has only just learned she’s pregnant, and,<br />
whether she’s willing to admit it or not, she’s looking to Ellie to tell<br />
her everything’s going to be okay. However, she finds in Ellie a<br />
woman at her wits’ end; she’s been abandoned by her husband<br />
and the father of her kids while frantically trying to find a new<br />
place for everyone to live as the building, which is falling down<br />
around them, has been scheduled for demolition in a few weeks.<br />
With Beth never being around to offer emotional support to Ellie,<br />
cracks have emerged in their relationship, which lends the visit a<br />
bit of an edge (Ellie even has the cruel habit of dismissing her<br />
little sister’s career by calling her a groupie).<br />
Speaking of cracks, a literal one opens up in the basement,<br />
triggered by an earthquake (it is Los Angeles, after all).<br />
Undaunted by the shaky foundation or the notion that venturing<br />
into unlit, subterranean chambers is how one-third of all horror<br />
films begin, Ellie’s eldest child and amateur DJ, Danny (Morgan<br />
Davies), climbs down into an abandoned bank vault where he<br />
finds a spooky yet familiar book (bound in human skin, penned in<br />
blood, featuring incantations and horrifying illustrations… you<br />
know the drill) and, even more germane to his interests, some old<br />
records. Against the wishes of younger sisters Bridget (Gabrielle<br />
Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher), Danny brings the book and the<br />
vinyl upstairs and plays the record on his turntable. Hoping he’s<br />
found an obscure beat he can sample, Danny instead is greeted<br />
by a hundred-year-old recording of a priest translating the “Book<br />
of the Dead,” and in the process unleashes an ancient, evil spirit<br />
into the apartment building, setting the stage for a long night of<br />
demonic possession and ultraviolence.<br />
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground),<br />
Evil Dead Rise doesn’t so much resemble Sam Raimi’s seminal<br />
1981 film The Evil Dead or either of its two sequels as it does the<br />
dozens of disposable horror films produced under Raimi’s<br />
production shingle, Ghost House Pictures (which mostly churns<br />
out films in the 30 Days of Night, The Boogeyman, and The Grudge<br />
franchises). Gone is any sort of hand-tooled ingenuity or reckless<br />
disregard for the safety of the actors <strong>—</strong> the Raimi films, with<br />
their Three Stooges-inspired violence and a tendency to put star<br />
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Bruce Campbell through the wringer without the benefit of a<br />
stuntman, often had more in common with the Jackass movies<br />
than your typical horror film <strong>—</strong> replaced with photo-realistic<br />
gore, CGI effects, and a cobalt and gunmetal gray color palette. In<br />
other words, the film is slick-looking and hits its marks, and<br />
when a possessed character begins masticating a wine glass,<br />
shards of glass poking through their esophagus as they swallow,<br />
it’s genuinely disgusting. As it is when another character has a<br />
cheese grater raked across their calf, and yet again when<br />
someone has one of their eyeballs sucked out of their skull. Is it<br />
scary, though? Viewers' mileage will vary, but the more important<br />
question is whether any of this is especially fun. The answer,<br />
regrettably, is no.<br />
Evil Dead Rise is under no obligation to match the punch-drunk<br />
energy of the Raimi films <strong>—</strong> honestly, good luck even trying <strong>—</strong> but<br />
its absence does underscore just how generic and kind of joyless<br />
this all is. It’s yet another well-lit tour of an abattoir. The sisterly<br />
angst and anxiety over Beth becoming a mother are only<br />
introduced to give assorted possessed characters something to<br />
taunt the living over <strong>—</strong> although the latter does allow the film to<br />
replicate the Ripley and Newt dynamic with Beth and Kassie,<br />
complete with lifting chunks of James Horner’s iconic Aliens<br />
score for its action finale. Nor is there much inspiration in the<br />
high-rise setting: the earthquake knocks out the power and cell<br />
reception, and takes out the elevator and stairs so that the<br />
characters might as well be stranded in the middle of the woods<br />
for all that the change of venue matters (you’d think some of the<br />
tenants on the lower floors might try and investigate all the<br />
shotgun blasts). Instead, Evil Dead Rise mostly gets its kicks by<br />
sneaking Easter Eggs into the film, some of which are more<br />
thoughtful (a gardener’s truck in the parking garage is attributed<br />
to Dr. Fonda’s Tree Surgeon, a simultaneous nod to the<br />
prominence of chainsaws in the franchise, malicious trees, and<br />
even the actress Bridget Fonda who cameos in 1993’s Army of<br />
Darkness) than others (Sullivan randomly repeating one of<br />
Campbell’s catchphrases by telling a deadite “come get some”<br />
before blasting it with a shotgun).<br />
If there’s a saving grace to the film, it’s Sutherland’s performance.<br />
An Australian performer, like nearly everyone else in the cast<br />
(watching all the actors fighting a losing battle with their<br />
American accents is often more diverting than the story), the<br />
actress best known for TV’s Vikings does some of the best<br />
physical acting in recent memory. A tall, spindly beauty in a red<br />
Farrah Fawcett blowout, the actress <strong>—</strong> who’s the first to be taken<br />
by the evil spirit and is ostensibly the primary antagonist <strong>—</strong><br />
spends the film alternating between ramrod rigidity and<br />
contorting her body in inhuman angles, at all times wearing a<br />
deranged perma-rictus (the actress spends much of the film<br />
staring into a peephole lens, the fisheye effect only further<br />
distorting her face). In a film where everyone and everything is<br />
so dreadfully grim, Sutherland, finding a middle ground between<br />
Mommie Dearest and Joker, comes the closest to capturing the<br />
anarchic spirit of the films in whose footsteps it follows. Why so<br />
serious, indeed? <strong>—</strong> ANDREW DIGNAN<br />
DIRECTOR: Lee Cronin; CAST: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland,<br />
Morgan Davies; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.<br />
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TRENQUE LAUQUEN<br />
Laura Citarella<br />
“Trenque Lauquen, Argentinean director Laura Citarella’s third<br />
feature, shares with that film not just its production outfit El<br />
Pampero Cine, but also two of the film’s leads, Laura Paredes<br />
and Elisa Carricajo. (Llinás also has a producer credit.) Granted,<br />
four hours is a ways off from fourteen, and instead of Llinás’<br />
intentionally incomplete stories, Trenque Lauquen comprises<br />
elliptical fragments which do, finally, offer some semblance of<br />
unity. But it is characteristic of Citarella’s approach that many<br />
of the film’s chapters are told from the perspectives of different<br />
characters and vary wildly in tone. ” <strong>—</strong> LAWRENCE GARCIA<br />
[Published as part of <strong>InRO</strong>’s NYFF 2022 coverage.]<br />
DIRECTOR: Laura Citarella; CAST: Laura Paredes, Ezequiel<br />
Pierri, Rafael Spregelburd; DISTRIBUTOR: The Cinema Guild; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 4 hr. 20 min.<br />
GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT<br />
Guy Ritchie<br />
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant notably marks the first feature that<br />
has included the eponymous filmmaker’s name in the title itself,<br />
a rather curious development as the film is the least Guy<br />
Ritchie-esque movie in his entire filmography. Indeed, the final<br />
product plays more like the director’s attempt at aping the style<br />
of Peter Berg, a slab of right-wing militaristic propaganda that<br />
manages the miracle of making Lone Survivor look subtle in<br />
comparison. Perhaps an even more stunning discovery is that<br />
The Covenant is entirely a work of fiction, its far-flung story of<br />
the brotherhood’s bonds forged in the hells of combat so<br />
relentlessly cliched that it seemed all but a lock for<br />
based-on-a-true-story status. That makes the script, courtesy of<br />
Ritchie and co-writers Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson, nearly<br />
impossible to forgive in both its mind-numbing predictability and<br />
<strong>—</strong> to be quite frank <strong>—</strong> outright stupidity.<br />
Jake Gyllenhaal, in pure paycheck mode, stars as John Kinley, a<br />
Sergeant Major of the American Army who, in the year 2018, is<br />
stationed in Afghanistan, where he and the various members of<br />
his troop are hunting down Taliban-deployed IEDs. The various<br />
soldiers under Kinley’s command are introduced with on-screen<br />
text, and in such quick succession that it is all but impossible to<br />
make heads-or-tails of who is who. Not that Ritchie is remotely<br />
interested in these men, as most aren’t even afforded a single<br />
character trait <strong>—</strong> although, in fairness, one of them does like to<br />
eat and talk about food. Entering this tight-knit group is Ahmed<br />
(Dar Salim), a no-nonsense Afghani interpreter with whom Kinley<br />
forms an eventual bond because they are both stubborn and,<br />
damn it, they have to respect that in one another. But a raid on<br />
an IED manufacturing plant soon leaves the entire troop dead,<br />
save for Kinley and Ahmed, who must travel by foot over<br />
treacherous terrain to reach base as they are relentlessly hunted<br />
by the Taliban.<br />
It’s at the halfway point in the film that Kinley becomes injured to<br />
the point of catatonia, with Ahmed dragging <strong>—</strong> and, with the<br />
eventual aid of a wagon, wheeling <strong>—</strong> Kinley’s lifeless body over 50<br />
miles to safety, an impossible feat that the film devotes less than<br />
fifteen minutes to detailing, opting for a series of montages (set<br />
to a bombastic and ultimately oppressive score courtesy of<br />
Christopher Benstead) that robs the movie of anything<br />
resembling tension while also completely neutering Ahmed’s<br />
Herculean task. Cut ahead seven weeks, and Kinley discovers<br />
from the safety of his home in California that Ahmed is #1 Most<br />
Wanted on the Taliban’s kill list, a fact that has forced the<br />
interpreter, along with his wife and newborn baby, into hiding.<br />
The remainder of The Covenant focuses on Kinley’s attempts to<br />
locate Ahmed and his family and secure their safe passage to<br />
America, with Sergeant Major ultimately traveling to Afghanistan<br />
once more in the name of brotherhood, because, of course.<br />
The film’s first hour is certainly no great shakes, but it feels like a<br />
downright masterpiece in comparison to the dire second half,<br />
which mostly consists of Gyllenhaal delivering a lot of<br />
long-winded monologues about the importance of paying back<br />
debts while doing his best to look as tough as possible, which<br />
amounts to a dedicated monotone delivery and a catalog of<br />
dead-eyed stares. Much like Ritchie’s last feature,<br />
Mission:Impossible-wannabe Operation Fortune, The Covenant is<br />
completely devoid of any of the stylistic tics that once marked<br />
the director’s work. Some might view this as a sign of<br />
maturation, but such an argument is DOA when the alternative is<br />
just some shaky cam and a palette of browns and grays that<br />
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have been bleached and color-corrected within an inch of their<br />
life. Oh wait, Ritchie does this one thing where the camera slowly<br />
zooms in on someone when they are speaking, then it slowly <strong>—</strong> or<br />
sometimes even quickly <strong>—</strong> zooms out again within the same<br />
shot. Spielberg, take notes. Jokes aside, the director utilizes this<br />
move to the point of unintentional comedy, repeated ad nauseam<br />
across the film’s runtime.<br />
Faring no better is Gyllenhaal, who delivers what might be the<br />
worst performance of his career, an approximation of machismo<br />
that feels forced by half. Salim at least brings some much-need<br />
gravitas to a sorely under-written role, but there is no depth to be<br />
found in the characterization, simply archetypes that exist in<br />
service of some good old-fashioned, “America, fuck yeah!” But<br />
wait, maybe there is actually more to this movie. After all,<br />
on-screen text at the film’s end states that Afghani interpreters<br />
who were abandoned upon the U.S.’s withdrawal from the country<br />
in 2021 are still being hunted by members of the Taliban, who see<br />
them as traitors. Perhaps Ritchie is attempting to shed light upon<br />
a horrifying consequence of American imperialism and the<br />
military-industrial complex, using and disposing of those<br />
individuals whose lives the U.S. was supposedly there to protect.<br />
Scratch that: the end credits also include lots of photos of<br />
nameless <strong>—</strong> and in most cases, faceless <strong>—</strong> American soldiers<br />
posing with who we are to assume are Afghani interpreters.<br />
There are even a few smiles here and there. That this all scans<br />
just as profoundly hollow and borderline insulting as everything<br />
else that preceded it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.<br />
Indeed, there is nary one to be found in this particular Covenant,<br />
Guy Ritchie’s or otherwise. <strong>—</strong> STEVEN WARNER<br />
DIRECTOR: Guy Ritchie; CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim,<br />
Alexander Ludwig, Antony Starr; DISTRIBUTOR: United Artists; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.<br />
CHEVALIER<br />
Stephen Williams<br />
In July 2020, The New York Times published an article by<br />
composer and music composition professor Marcos Balter that<br />
criticized the notion of calling Joseph Bologne “Black Mozart.” A<br />
versatile genius and all-time classical music great in his own<br />
right, Bologne could do better than be reduced in comparison to<br />
an “arbitrary white standard.” Director Stephen Williams’ latest<br />
outing, Chevalier, opens with a concert scene written to<br />
essentially argue that very thing. Bologne, embodied dutifully by<br />
Kelvin Harrison Jr., saunters onstage after Mozart concludes a<br />
song, asking to join him in a duet. He promptly steals the show,<br />
to the crowd’s amazement and Mozart’s consternation. As biopics<br />
go, Chevalier isn’t particularly revolutionary stuff, but there’s a<br />
sincerity in its desire to function as a character study and a<br />
celebration that pushes it past flatly generic territory.<br />
Bologne is the son of a wealthy, white French planter and an<br />
enslaved Black woman. His father dumps him in an academy at a<br />
young age, demanding his son pursue excellence while<br />
abandoning him and the disgrace that he represented. By the<br />
time Harrison Jr. steps into Bologne’s shoes, he’s already a<br />
burgeoning virtuoso and friend of Marie Antoinette (Lucy<br />
Boynton), his sophistication a shield and his arrogance<br />
notorious. When he sets his sights on the vacant conductor<br />
position at the Paris Opera, he taps Marie-Josephine de<br />
Montalembert (Samara Weaving) to sing in the lead role.<br />
Meanwhile, revolution is brewing in France, and Bologne learns<br />
that, while his gifts may elevate him, they aren’t enough to earn<br />
him equal treatment.<br />
Chevalier is fittingly operatic in style, its Paris setting elaborately<br />
curated, the exteriors sun-drenched, interiors candlelit. The<br />
soundtrack kicks in on cue, and the penchant for rotational slow<br />
pans creates an atmosphere that, while never feeling prestige,<br />
has an occasional woozy elegance. And everyone seems to be<br />
having fun in their roles, the period characters always<br />
immaculately dressed, trading barbs Bridgerton-style. But at the<br />
end of the day, Chevalier really is a star vehicle. Bologne is the<br />
only character the script cares to fully realize, and Harrison Jr.<br />
reliably commands in the role. Whether Bologne is poised,<br />
pensive, or pained, Harrison Jr. is diligent in his performance, his<br />
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motions deliberate, the range in his voice a weapon. It’s a<br />
tightrope act that could almost be confused for clunky, with how<br />
overt the performative intent can feel, yet it works, both because<br />
Harrison Jr. can be charismatic as hell and because his<br />
approach rings true to this title character: a talented man<br />
embroiled in internal scrutiny in an effort to exist in a world that<br />
reviles him. Bologne is a difficult genius, blessed to be singular,<br />
cursed to be solitary.<br />
Throughout all of this, the specter of the French Revolution<br />
hovers. Characters remark that France is changing <strong>—</strong> proles are<br />
talking about democracy, women are talking about equality,<br />
Black Parisians are publicly visible. Chevalier ties Bologne’s<br />
struggles and ultimate self-actualization with the Revolution’s<br />
radical, liberating promise. It’s certainly not the strongest<br />
subtextual incorporation, perhaps because these threads don’t<br />
significantly connect until it’s time for his climactic middle finger<br />
to the established order that wronged him. Because of this, the<br />
ending reeks of Hollywood-ified great man theory veneration, the<br />
sort that takes viewers out of the film and reminds them that<br />
they’re watching a par-for-the-course, crowd-pleasing biopic.<br />
Then the credits roll, and we learn that once Napoleon took<br />
power, most of Bologne’s works and records were turned to ash.<br />
That’s when Chevalier’s raison d’être becomes clear: crafting a<br />
reliably rousing tale about a long-forgotten figure deserving of a<br />
myth to enshrine his legend. <strong>—</strong> TRAVIS DESHONG<br />
DIRECTOR: Stephen Williams; CAST: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Samara<br />
Weaving, Lucy Boynton; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.<br />
GHOSTED<br />
Dexter Fletcher<br />
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted is a high-concept romantic action<br />
comedy with movie stars and a decent budget that, were this<br />
2005, would presumably have the potential to be both a hit and a<br />
tabloid item, in the vein of something similar to Mr. and Mrs.<br />
Smith (minus the whole meta matrimony stuff, of course). Now,<br />
these movies still get made despite social media claims to the<br />
contrary, but they’re nearly always relegated to streaming and,<br />
just as often, complete garbage. Fletcher’s film, then, isn’t really a<br />
throwback to the summer movies of the 2000s so much as Apple<br />
TV+’s foray into an emergent genre best described as “Netflix<br />
drivel.”<br />
Reuniting two of the stars of Netflix and the Russo brothers’ The<br />
Gray Man, Ghosted sets up a contentious meet-cute between Cole<br />
(Chris Evans) and Sadie (Ana De Armas), quaintly orchestrated in<br />
the farmer’s market where Cole sells his family’s wares. The pair<br />
spend a whole day together, culminating in a sex scene that<br />
reminds why comparing a film to music videos used to be<br />
pejorative. But afterward, Sadie vanishes, leaving all of Cole’s<br />
many text messages unread. As Cole’s hip younger sister explains<br />
<strong>—</strong> for audiences unacquainted with the modern parlance of the<br />
film’s title <strong>—</strong> she has ghosted him. Her reasons are made clear<br />
once Cole stalks her to London and is promptly kidnapped by<br />
supervillains: Sadie is an über-competent CIA assassin. She<br />
saves her one-night stand from his demise, and Cole is<br />
subsequently dragged into a half-baked bit of international<br />
espionage.<br />
OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN<br />
Rebecca Zlotowski<br />
“Other People’s Children is told entirely without the expected, more dramatic (louder) moments. Music cues rise or cut in earlier<br />
than expected, a whole scene can fade to black, or a conversation won’t be audible until it’s in the aftermath of conflict. This<br />
strategy gives the characters privacy, and lends more weight to the subtleties of performing reflection rather than action.” <strong>—</strong><br />
SARAH WILLIAMS [Published as part of <strong>InRO</strong>’s Sundance 2023 coverage.]<br />
DIRECTOR: Rebecca Zlotowski; CAST: Virginie Efira, Roschdy Zem, Chiara Mastroianni; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.<br />
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Theoretically, this isn’t an awful setup. After all, horny men falling<br />
into spy hijinks is a Hitchcock staple. Even the undesirability of<br />
the two leads shouldn’t be much of a problem: yes, Cole behaves<br />
like a needy, desperate creep and Sadie kills dozens of men<br />
without a second thought, but a good rom-com can make easy<br />
work of overlooking the most tragic character flaws. The magic<br />
of the genre is often in how sexual tension and charm overcome<br />
the irrationality of a potential relationship and its circumstances.<br />
Evidently, the filmmaker and his leads are simply not up to that<br />
task. Fletcher directs with a listlessness befitting<br />
cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s flat images, composing his<br />
shots without creativity or even seemingly any attempt at style.<br />
Evans and De Armas, in return, meet the director and the<br />
material at that level <strong>—</strong> these are objectively sexy people who<br />
have proven charming in the past, but it’s impossible to find<br />
chemistry in their sleepy performances. Evans’ work here, which<br />
consists of half-assed charming smiles and tossed-off quips,<br />
makes the case that if Marvel hasn’t outright destroyed cinema, it<br />
has at least drained the actor of his remaining personality and<br />
energy. De Armas, meanwhile, never seems comfortable in her<br />
role, even as she plays her third spy character in the past three<br />
years. She’s as lackluster with the film’s dialogue as she is with<br />
its action scenes, a far, far cry from her movie-stealing<br />
performance in No Time to Die. And were it not for the film’s third<br />
parties loudly and constantly pointing it out, the sexual tension<br />
supposedly bubbling beneath their bickering would go completely<br />
unnoticed.<br />
On the other hand, half of the time Ghosted doesn’t even seem<br />
interested in the rom or com of the romantic comedy it’s failing<br />
to sell, and instead gets too wrapped up in its lame spy thriller<br />
MacGuffin hunt. In fact, there’s far more action in the film than<br />
there is sex or kissing, and it’s all somehow even less exciting<br />
than the romance, as many of these setpieces are just blurs of<br />
CGI and stunt doubles set to a series of needle drops<br />
indistinguishable from the playlist at a middle school dance. One<br />
extended car chase sequence is set to “My Sharona,” while, for<br />
some reason, the climactic shootout makes use of the egregious<br />
“Uptown Funk.” But the worst offender is a brawl on an airplane<br />
set to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” Interesting, because<br />
Pitchfork once reviewed a Jet album with nothing except a video<br />
of a chimp pissing in its own mouth. Ghosted inspires roughly the<br />
same enthusiasm. <strong>—</strong> CHRIS MELLO<br />
DIRECTOR: Dexter Fletcher; CAST: Chris Evans, Ana de Armas,<br />
Adrien Brody, Mike Moh; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; STREAMING:<br />
April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.<br />
PLAN 75<br />
Chie Hayakawa<br />
As its title would have it, Plan 75 has a broad purview over the<br />
implementation and implications of its alternate, near-future. In<br />
this future, set in Japan, citizens 75 years and above are not only<br />
permitted, but actively encouraged to opt for euthenasia as a<br />
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way of alleviating the nation’s aging problem. The state-funded<br />
euthanasia program, curtly titled “Plan 75,” is neat, sumptuous,<br />
and deeply professional: for the price of free, and even with a<br />
thousand US dollars as monetary incentive, participants enjoy a<br />
few tele-counseling sessions (capped at fifteen minutes each), a<br />
couple of warm “deluxe” meals, and, on D-Day itself, the dignity of<br />
performing one last service to their country by donning a small<br />
gas mask at one of the designated centers and slipping slowly<br />
into quiet, untroubled sleep. But despite its sociological<br />
dimensions, Chie Hayawaka’s debut is a deeply personal study of<br />
those affected by the program, whether as provider, patient, or<br />
loved one. Plan 75 marks its relevance with a masterful and<br />
well-calibrated narrative of the individuals who live and persist<br />
within, and often despite, the workings of dystopia.<br />
Belying the courtesy of many a consult between management<br />
and prospective candidates is a clinical valuation of life and<br />
purpose. The bulk of applicants who sign themselves up for<br />
euthanasia are retired, live alone, and do not have or see their<br />
children much, and so are discharged by and large from purpose.<br />
This statistic makes up the starting point of Plan 75, but it does<br />
not consign the film itself to clinicality. If anything, the stoic,<br />
weathered faces of the elderly serve as ciphers for… it’s anyone’s<br />
guess <strong>—</strong> distress, resignation, humiliation, and perhaps a<br />
smattering of pride may color their cheeks as they make the final<br />
arrangements, either in solitude or with friends. Michi (Chieko<br />
Baisho), a septuagenarian recently laid off from her job as a hotel<br />
cleaner, contemplates doing so only after her landlord evicts her<br />
and she cannot find alternate accommodation. Hiromo (Hayato<br />
Isomura), a young Plan 75 bureaucrat, encounters his estranged<br />
uncle filing an application to die. Their pathways barely intersect,<br />
but underscoring them both is a pathos that shirks histrionics for<br />
quiet honesty.<br />
This honesty is further bolstered by Hayakawa’s decision not to<br />
mount an overly theoretical examination of Plan 75’s macabre<br />
cultural consensus. Such an examination could work elsewhere,<br />
perhaps, but implanting it here would likely risk caricaturing the<br />
motivations and lived experiences of its characters. Instead, the<br />
film shores up their humanity against the detached gaze of<br />
social engineering stretched to its utilitarian conclusion, even<br />
depicting the travails of Maria (Stefanie Arianne), a Filipino<br />
caretaker who signs up to dispose the bodies and possessions of<br />
the dead as a means to support herself and her ailing young<br />
daughter. Amidst these otherwise unformed portraits of a moral<br />
epidemic come two sobering realizations: that collective<br />
loneliness easily cascades into conformity, and that this<br />
conformity is closer to home than expected. Inspired in part by<br />
the real-life massacre of nineteen care-home residents in 20<strong>16</strong><br />
and the comments made by Yūsuke Narita <strong>—</strong> an economist and<br />
Yale University professor <strong>—</strong> on the prospect of mass suicide, Plan<br />
75 may proffer too few satisfying resolutions for some and too<br />
casual a fictionalization of contemporary demographic<br />
projections for others, but its humanist renderings of an<br />
otherwise apathetic world are accomplished and deeply moving.<br />
<strong>—</strong> MORRIS YANG<br />
DIRECTOR: Chie Hayakawa; CAST: Chieko Baishô, Hayato<br />
Isomura, Stefanie Arianne; DISTRIBUTOR: KimStim; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.<br />
CARMEN<br />
Benjamin Millepied<br />
A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance<br />
performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic<br />
tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic<br />
and electrifying film that nonetheless struggles to locate a<br />
governing artistic cogency. Very loosely inspired by Georges<br />
Bizet’s seminal opera, Millepied’s film takes more spiritual than<br />
material inspiration from that work, recalculating its narrative to<br />
befit our present age. In an intoxicating opening sequence, a<br />
woman dances on an empty stage set in the middle of a barren<br />
and dusty Mexican desert. A car penetrates the scene, two<br />
gun-toting men hopping out to demand the whereabouts of a<br />
she. The woman defiantly finishes her dance, and is promptly<br />
shot in the head. Nearby, Carmen (Melissa Barrera) hears the<br />
gunshots, understands her mother is dead, and continues on her<br />
trek to and across the U.S. border. Meanwhile, Aidan (Paul<br />
Mescal), a marine who seems to be struggling to adjust to<br />
non-deployment, heads out into the dark to commence his first<br />
evening of volunteer border patrol duty. When a gung-ho buddy<br />
reveals his motivations to be purely homicidal, Aidan intervenes,<br />
saving Carmen’s life and tethering the two as marked fugitives.<br />
And so, off they go, headed to Los Angeles, where Carmen hopes<br />
to find freedom and a connection to her past.<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
impressive technical work at minimum, and suggests Millepied<br />
understands how to use the visual medium to both enhance and<br />
coalesce with the art of dance. As a whole, however, coherence is<br />
somewhat wanting. Take one of the film’s final such numbers,<br />
which finds Aidan in an underground, bare-knuckle brawl in a<br />
desperate bid to earn money. Britell’s score here moves into<br />
decidedly more propulsive territory, with Aidan engaging in<br />
bloody, brutal melee and a circle of observers dancing in a kind<br />
of modified krump style, all while The D.O.C. (as the evening’s de<br />
facto emcee) gravelly raps, “Beat his ass, get him / Kill his ass, kill<br />
him.” It’s a thrilling sequence in its own right, but one that feels<br />
somewhat inorganic, not in any kind of artistic or aesthetic<br />
conversation with the film’s earlier dance numbers. Still, modern<br />
cinema would be a better place were more directors to take risks<br />
the way Millepied does <strong>—</strong> though an even bolder film would have<br />
dispensed with dialogue entirely <strong>—</strong> and the director ends his film<br />
with its most moving moment yet. Mescal at last joins Barrera in<br />
dance, his limitations conjuring the profound, flawed humanity at<br />
the root of Carmen, earning its tragedy and signing the film off in<br />
an absolute place of grace. <strong>—</strong> LUKE GORHAM<br />
DIRECTOR: Benjamin Millepied; CAST: Melissa Barrera, Paul<br />
Mescal, Elsa Pataky, Rossy de Palma; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony<br />
Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.<br />
DRY GROUND BURNING<br />
Joanna Pimenta & Adirley Queirós<br />
“The social and political environment Queirós and Pimenta are<br />
depicting certainly demands this wide-ranging<br />
experimentation. Indeed, I have never seen a film quite like Dry<br />
Ground Burning. At the same time, it often feels like multiple<br />
films in competition, different filmic approaches stitched<br />
together and, to some extent, rejecting the graft. This refusal<br />
to form a whole, the inability to ‘get the picture as one would in<br />
a more expository documentary, is absolutely endemic to Dry<br />
Ground Burning and its fundamental project. This means that,<br />
to an extent, usual criteria don’t apply here.” <strong>—</strong> MICHAEL<br />
SICINSKI [Published as part of <strong>InRO</strong>’s TIFF 2022 coverage.]<br />
DIRECTOR: Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queirós; CAST: <strong>—</strong>;<br />
DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper Film; IN THEATERS: April 14;<br />
RUNTIME: 2 hr. 33 min.<br />
THE POPE’S EXORCIST<br />
Julius Avery<br />
Director Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist announces its<br />
particular tenor right from the opening scene, as Father Gabriele<br />
Amorth (Russell Crowe) arrives by moped to the site of a possible<br />
demonic possession, his black robe billowing in the breeze, and<br />
ends with the brutal shooting of a pig, its blood and brains<br />
splattered across the faces of the unfortunate witnesses.<br />
Marketing material for The Pope’s Exorcist have made the movie<br />
look deadly serious, a slight sheen of prestige to be found in the<br />
presence of Academy Award-winner Crowe. Yet the final product<br />
is anything but, a tale of dastardly demonic derring-do with<br />
tongue planted firmly in cheek. That this is “based on true<br />
events” is par for the course for these types of films, but Father<br />
Gabriele Amorth was indeed a real person, and the official<br />
exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from 1986 until his retirement in<br />
2000. The Pope’s Exorcist is even adapted from two separate<br />
memoirs detailing Amorth’s experiences in the demonic<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
possession game, and one has to wonder how he would react to a<br />
movie that features him repeatedly taking swigs from a flask and<br />
washing his sweaty pits with holy water <strong>—</strong> pious as he is, he does<br />
at least say a Hail Mary before that last transgression. So yes, this<br />
priest is a bit of a rapscallion, bellowing “Cuckoo!” while walking<br />
around Vatican City and chasing after large groups of nuns, all in<br />
the name of a laugh. But there’s nothing funny about evil, and<br />
Amorth is appalled when a new group of senior advisors within<br />
the Church try to tell him how to do his job. The heartless<br />
bureaucrats are slashing jobs while refuting the existence of evil,<br />
a curious detail to include in a film set in 1987, although one<br />
would be hard-pressed to determine the exact era, so<br />
unconcerned is the end product in such trifling details. (But hey,<br />
The Pope’s Exorcist is woke to the evils of corporate capitalism!)<br />
The Pope himself (Franco Nero), however, is on Amorth’s side, and<br />
there are certainly worse people to have in your corner.<br />
Meanwhile, in an abbey in the countryside of Spain, an American<br />
family consisting of mom Julie (Alex Essoe) and kids Amy (Laurel<br />
Marsden) and Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) have arrived to<br />
commence construction on a new home and start a new life after<br />
the car crash death of their beloved patriarch a year earlier.<br />
Henry was present for the event, and was so traumatized by what<br />
he saw that he hasn’t spoken a word since; this tracks when the<br />
film abruptly flashes back to that fateful night for a single shot<br />
from Henry’s POV that consists of the father with a piece of rebar<br />
impaled through his skull. Again, nice touch. Turns out, this abbey<br />
has a storied history of evil, and it isn’t long before the<br />
construction crew has inadvertently awakened a long-dormant<br />
demonic entity that immediately possesses the young and<br />
emotionally prone Henry. Cut to the young boy honking boobs and<br />
smashing heads though porcelain sinks, all while repeating the<br />
word “fuck” more times than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. (Bonus<br />
points for a film concerning exorcisms that is actually rated-R<br />
and leans heavily into that lane.) Amorth is soon called to the<br />
manor, and discovers that this possession may be the real deal,<br />
especially after the demon discusses long-buried secrets and<br />
sins from the Father’s past. He teams up with a local priest by the<br />
name of Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), because dude could use the<br />
help, especially when it’s discovered that somehowboth this<br />
demon and the property are linked to the Church itself, ultimately<br />
exposing its attempt to cover-up its role in the Spanish<br />
Inquisition(!). No wonder Amorth is so sweaty.<br />
The degree to which The Pope’s Exorcist attempts to be both<br />
reverent and critical of the Catholic Church is as compellingly<br />
ridiculous as everything else on display, a story of how individual<br />
goodness can triumph over systemic rot. But lest you think the<br />
movie sounds more serious or profound than it actually is, Avery<br />
is not the least bit interested in anything resembling depth or<br />
authenticity, and thank God for that. Every facet of the<br />
production is consistent in its intentional key of borderline camp,<br />
from Crowe’s voracious scenery-chewing to the cheap-looking<br />
production design to the SyFy Channel-level visual effects.<br />
There’s simply no denying the certain charm of watching an<br />
obvious rubber doll with the voice of Ralph Ineson refer to a<br />
priest as a “panty sniffer.” And then there’s the film’s climactic<br />
showdown, which sees Father Esquibel throw a cross to Amorth<br />
but with the holy relic meant to mimic a gun. Avery somehow<br />
even manages to sneak some gratuitous female nudity into the<br />
proceedings, because of course he does, and also leaves the<br />
door open for 199 <strong>—</strong> yes, 199! <strong>—</strong> possible sequels, with Amorth<br />
commenting that a replacement will be needed somewhere down<br />
the road. The Pope’s Exorcist is exactly what this stale subgenre<br />
needed <strong>—</strong> a blast of gory, goofy fun in a desert of dire solemnity.<br />
Personally, this critic will take ten more entries minimum, so long<br />
as they include even more scenes of the Pope projectilevomiting<br />
blood into people’s faces. Thank God, thank the devil,<br />
thank the demons <strong>—</strong> this movie is good. <strong>—</strong> STEVEN WARNER<br />
DIRECTOR: Julius Avery; CAST: Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto,<br />
Alex Essoe, Franco Nero; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.<br />
SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS<br />
Ray Romano<br />
After Jerry Seinfeld and his "What's the deal?" color commentary<br />
on the silliness of the quotidian struck gold in Seinfeld,<br />
comedians started to habitually appear in comedies and sitcoms,<br />
popping up like dandelions, most of it harmless. But rarely was<br />
anyone or anything as incisively irreverent or eccentric or<br />
intelligent as what Seinfeld and Larry David did. Everybody Loves<br />
Raymond, starring Ray Romano as a version of himself but in<br />
Long Island instead of Queens, is one of these unremarkable<br />
shows that, nonetheless, makes for pleasurable background<br />
viewing, a pleasant concatenation of a decade’s<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
worth of episodes seeping into each other, auto-playing, the<br />
show's regularities <strong>—</strong> Ray screwing up; his mother barging in<br />
bellowing purported wisdom; his Lurch of a brother maundering<br />
through the door, filling the frame, and mumbling morosely; the<br />
perplexed look of Ray's wife Debra's face as she witnesses the<br />
wake of Ray's idiocy, and the way her voice raises slightly with a<br />
loving frustration, jokes eliciting canned laughter and<br />
punctuating the drone of familiar voices enmeshed into genial<br />
vagueness <strong>—</strong> like tiny oscillations mingling in a white noise<br />
machine outside your therapist's office door.<br />
Raymond keeps to the tradition of classic family dysfunction like<br />
The Honeymooners and All in the Family, minus the indelible<br />
characters and sharp insight on a plethora of cultural and human<br />
complexities; its humor is pedestrian and broad, yet there's also<br />
nothing to outright dislike. It's simply not daring enough.<br />
Following in those footsteps, Somewhere in Queens, which<br />
Romano co-wrote, directed, and in which he stars, is likewise<br />
wholly unremarkable, a true case of writing what you know,<br />
playing it safe (or, perhaps, he’s an auteur?). But that's also kind<br />
of fine because it's at least the kind of endearing comedy we<br />
used to get before everything was marketed to pre-teens.<br />
Somewhere in Queens’ writing can, architecturally and verbally, be<br />
sloppy, and the supporting characters aren't all that colorful, but<br />
there's also a genuine sensitivity to familial turmoil and<br />
characters of a certain age reconciling their anxieties. Romano<br />
plays Leo Russo, the kind of guy who asks the videographer at a<br />
wedding to cut him out of the video, a real middle-class mook.<br />
Dominick (Tony Lo Bianco), the Russo family patriarch, owns and<br />
operates the construction company that, naturally, employs the<br />
rest of the family. Leo, the less-loved son, reports to his<br />
self-important brother, Frank (Sebastian Manisalco). Leo is<br />
profoundly petrified that his wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf),<br />
difficult though she may be, will realize that he's a schmuck and<br />
leave. Metcalf always proves reliably wonderful, elevating<br />
everything she's in, from early TV appearances on Roseanne to<br />
the lunatic mother of a lunatic son in Scream 2 to even a woman<br />
with a dilapidated sense of reality who lives in a ramshackle<br />
house in Nowhere, USA and who tells an amnesia-stricken Tony<br />
Shaloub that they married and then proceeds to demean him in<br />
her Emmy-nominated episode of Monk. Here, Angela is a cancer<br />
survivor, and her abrasive pugnaciousness makes her tough to<br />
love, but Leo loves her nonetheless. Their son Matthew (Jacob<br />
Ward), also known as "Sticks" thanks to his lanky legs, is shy,<br />
what you might call awkward, but he’s also a freak on the<br />
basketball court. And lest we forget, ‘70s character actor Lo<br />
Bianco pops up, which is worth a ticket in itself. Admittedly, in all<br />
this there’s an inchoate confusion to the glut of performances,<br />
from Metcalf's stylized histrionics to the minimalism of Romano’s<br />
work, but it doesn’t irk too much. Movies can be messy.<br />
Romano took a while to learn how to act. The early seasons of<br />
Raymond are stifled by his staid, at times almost somnolent<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
CHERRY<br />
Sophie Galibert<br />
“There’s also a certain level of formal stylization at play here, as<br />
Galibert and cinematographer Damien Steck infuse the largely<br />
naturalistic milieu with subtle long takes and an expansive frame<br />
that allows the performers to fully perform. There are virtually no<br />
closeups or choppy shot-reverse-shot cutting here; instead,<br />
scenes play out almost in real-time, with conversations allowed<br />
to ebb and flow and detour. Other flourishes likewise resonate:<br />
Cherry’s visit to her dance troupe involves an actual performance<br />
of their entire elaborate routine, while recurring transitional<br />
scenes show Cherry roller skating blissfully to and fro her various<br />
destinations <strong>—</strong> it would be an obvious stretch to call these<br />
Ozu-ian pillow shots, but they do almost function in the same<br />
way. ” <strong>—</strong> DANIEL GORMAN [Published as part of <strong>InRO</strong>’s Tribeca 2022<br />
coverage.]<br />
DIRECTOR: Sophie Galibert; CAST: Alex Trewhitt, Hannah Alline,<br />
Dan Schultz; DISTRIBUTOR: Entertainment Squad; IN THEATERS<br />
& STREAMING: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. <strong>16</strong> min.<br />
presence; but like Jerry on Seinfeld, the show needs a straight<br />
man around whom the tumult and ridiculousness of the other,<br />
odder characters can wrap like wobbly whorls. Romano is<br />
significantly better in the later seasons, and here, perhaps<br />
enlivened and inspired by Metcalf's stellar work in a tough role, is<br />
actually quite good, subtly woebegone and tender. And in a scene<br />
where he asks the girl who just broke his son's heart if she can<br />
wait three more weeks, just until the basketball season is over, to<br />
end things, Romano finds a kind of vulnerability, a<br />
do-anything-for-your-kids earnestness that lands. Likely, this<br />
represents his best performance outside of The Irishman, in<br />
which the Queens-bred funnyman plays the modest but<br />
important role of a mob lawyer, underplaying the role but with a<br />
spark of life in his step, laced with the pride and pleasure he<br />
takes in his work.<br />
Unfortunately, Romano proves a much better actor than director,<br />
shooting scenes with a mundanity that makes it tough to analyze<br />
because no particular shots are to any degree memorable. There<br />
are movies that are a thrill to write about <strong>—</strong> good films, maybe<br />
even (gasp!) great ones, bad ones for sure <strong>—</strong> but the mediocre<br />
ones, the ones that fail to leave an impression, those tend to be<br />
the worst. Somewhere in Queens is one of those films. There are<br />
no major qualms to document, and the viewing experience is<br />
likely to be better than the reflection period for most viewers. It’s<br />
a fine enough feature to take your parents to so that they can<br />
reminisce about the golden days of the Raymond '90s, but there<br />
simply isn’t enough here to expect anyone to remember much of<br />
this past the day after. <strong>—</strong> GREG CWIK<br />
DIRECTOR: Ray Romano; CAST: Ray Romano, Laurie Metcalf,<br />
Sebastian Maniscalco; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate / Roadside<br />
Attactions; IN THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.<br />
TO CATCH A KILLER<br />
Damián David Szifron<br />
Arriving just 70 seconds into the film, the inciting incident of<br />
Damián David Szifron’s To Catch a Killer might break some kind of<br />
informal record for expediency. It’s New Year’s Eve in Baltimore<br />
(with Montreal none-too-convincingly filling in for Charm City),<br />
and revelers congregate and take selfies at sprawling rooftop<br />
parties against the backdrop of fireworks. Without warning, one<br />
of them collapses to the ground, the whiz of a far off gunshot<br />
muffled by the pumping club music. The same thing happens<br />
again at a balcony hot tub party a few blocks away. Then again at<br />
a nearby outdoor skating rink. A spree killer armed with a high<br />
powered rifle in an elevated location is indiscriminately opening<br />
fire on people, and by the time the shooting is over, 29 are dead,<br />
with the suspect having rigged his perch with explosives and<br />
escaping amidst the chaos. Into the fray rushes beat cop Eleanor<br />
(Shailene Woodley), who runs up a dozen flights of stairs without<br />
an oxygen mask, collapsing at the smoldering, smoke-filled crime<br />
scene, putting herself and her fellow officers in danger, although<br />
not before silently signaling to Special Agent Lammark (Ben<br />
Mendelsohn) to test the apartment’s toilet for trace evidence.<br />
Impulsive and inexperienced <strong>—</strong> Woodley reads as even younger<br />
than her actual age of 31 here <strong>—</strong> Eleanor is of dubious<br />
qualifications to play a central role in the investigation that’s to<br />
follow, but Lammark admires her instincts. She’s got spunk, and<br />
he loves spunk.<br />
The random nature of the victims and staggering body count<br />
calls to mind the Route 91 Festival massacre, and the Las Vegas<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
mass shooting is indeed name-checked here, as are Covid<br />
lockdowns and political extremist groups like the Three<br />
Percenters. All of which is to say, the film is attempting to set its<br />
story amidst our current and endless national debate about gun<br />
violence and a polarized population where angry white men are<br />
isolated and radicalized. The staging of the shooting is arguably<br />
in poor taste <strong>—</strong> the film is attempting to be released in a week<br />
that doesn’t coincide with a high-profile mass shooting, a near<br />
impossible task <strong>—</strong> but all the same, it’s brutally effective in<br />
conveying the pervasive fear of being gunned down in a public<br />
place. To Catch a Killer moves between a series of locations<br />
bustling with humanity, allowing just enough time to scan the<br />
frame in anticipation of whose head might explode in a red mist<br />
<strong>—</strong> Szifron repeats this motif a few times throughout the film,<br />
even in scenes where there is no immediate violence, creating an<br />
unnerving Pavlovian effect. The sequence then concludes with<br />
an evocative shot where forensics teams located around the city<br />
trace the trajectory of the shooter using green lasers, all pointing<br />
toward the same high-rise window just as it explodes with<br />
comic-book villain flourish.<br />
The investigation is led by Lammark, a sour, paranoid G-man who<br />
speaks in rah-rah platitudes <strong>—</strong> the film attempts to<br />
humanize the character by giving him a doting husband, which it<br />
cynically treats as a “gotcha” twist. Stymied by the mayor’s office<br />
which refuses to lock down the city out of fear of losing a multibillion-dollar<br />
development deal, and penned in by his D.C. bosses<br />
who second-guess his methods, Lammark finds himself on a<br />
short leash and unsure of who he can even trust; that is, until he<br />
overhears Eleanor describing the killer in language better suited<br />
for a Tumblr post than a bullpen <strong>—</strong> “Evil is cutting off a bird’s<br />
wing just to see what happens; this guy’s swatting mosquitoes'' <strong>—</strong><br />
and takes a shine to her. Highlighting her mental illness, history<br />
of insubordination, and substance abuse as assets for this case,<br />
Lammark elevates Eleanor to his small investigative team<br />
(alongside Babylon’s Jovan Adepo), hoping she’ll be able to<br />
recognize the scent of another disenfranchised loner before he<br />
strikes again. It’s a laughable conceit, attempting to recreate the<br />
Will Graham-Jack Crawford dynamic of Manhunter, only if<br />
Graham’s prior experience was limited to rousting drunks and<br />
making coffee. The film frequently has to contort itself simply to<br />
justify laying the case at the feet of a shaky greenhorn instead<br />
of, say, an experienced criminal profiler (Woodley, for her part,<br />
comes across every bit as lost as one would expect, never quite<br />
tapping into an alleged reservoir of dysfunction and unique<br />
insight). In the end, the case is broken wide open not by<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
depression as an investigative superpower, but by crossreferencing<br />
bank records… ya know, boring old police work.<br />
Ostensibly a dry procedural, the manhunt for a suspect<br />
converges with a lament for the state of American culture. The<br />
investigation reveals the way military-grade weapons meant for<br />
decommissioning trickle down to specialty gun dealerships, and<br />
the killings themselves only further open up existing fissures<br />
along racial and political lines; the film goes off on a tangent that<br />
concludes with a violent shootout in a pharmacy with white<br />
nationalists that, while thrilling in the moment, is a narrative<br />
dead-end. Szifron, an Argentine director (whose previous film,<br />
2014’s Wild Tales, also opened with a shocking act of mass<br />
violence, although it was played for black comedy there),<br />
attempts to bring an outsider’s perspective to the material, and<br />
clearly has more on his mind than just cheap thrills. You can feel<br />
the film fumbling around for some sort of an explanation for this<br />
decidedly American phenomenon, but it loses its nerve<br />
somewhere along the way, abandoning any kind of stinging<br />
indictment for a wan variation on “hurt people hurt people.” For<br />
all of its superficial nods to racial profiling and conservative<br />
news personalities riling up their viewership, the film ultimately<br />
comes down to a showdown at a farmhouse between the good<br />
guys and a chatty, only-in-the-movies criminal mastermind who’s<br />
at all times several steps ahead of his pursuers. No one expects<br />
a film like this to solve a problem as insidious and culturally<br />
ingrained as gun violence, but it's still an especially abrupt and<br />
disappointing reversion to the same old bullshit. It’s all as generic<br />
as its title implies. <strong>—</strong> ANDREW DIGNAN<br />
DIRECTOR: Damián David Szifron; CAST: Shailene Woodley, Ben<br />
Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN<br />
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.<br />
JUDY BLUME FOREVER<br />
Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok<br />
Since the late 1960s, readers of a certain age have been<br />
discovering and devouring Judy Blume’s books. Are You There<br />
God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume’s breakout middle-grade novel, has<br />
taken up regular space on library and bookstore shelves since its<br />
release. That book, and many of the author’s others, has<br />
operated as the introduction to taboo topics for many young<br />
women (and men, if they’re being honest) <strong>—</strong> masturbation and<br />
sex, religion, divorce, and death, to name a few. This reviewer<br />
had a particular fondness for Starring Sally J. Freedman as<br />
Herself, a book in which Sally, a precocious 10-year-old Jewish<br />
girl, believes Adolf Hitler has moved into a neighboring Miami<br />
Beach apartment. And I wasn’t alone; as many celebrities,<br />
writers, and friends of Blume detail in Leach Wolchok and Davina<br />
Pardo’s new documentary Judy Blume Forever, her impact on the<br />
lives of children and adults over the last 50-plus years is almost<br />
unparalleled in the literary world.<br />
Like Blume’s books, which packed these heavy topics into<br />
bite-sized, digestible pieces for young adults and children,<br />
Wolchok and Pardo’s film boasts a child-like quality. Throughout<br />
Judy Blume Forever, scenes of Blume reading selections of her<br />
writing are juxtaposed with talking heads from celebrities and<br />
fans, as well as Blume’s recounting of the real-life experiences<br />
that influenced much of her work. She reads about Sally J.<br />
Freedman fearing for her father’s death while describing her own<br />
father passing away when she was still young; her adult novel<br />
Wifey, about a woman in an unhappy marriage, was released just<br />
as Blume was divorcing her first husband.<br />
Unlike the titular author’s books, however, Judy Blume Forever<br />
feels overly saccharine and artificial. Sure, her work has had a<br />
massive impact on these people’s lives, but the unending praise<br />
begins to tiptoe into sanctification and feels almost scripted by<br />
the end. The filmmakers also dedicate a large portion of Judy<br />
Blume Forever to the author reading correspondence from her<br />
readers, all of which she has kept throughout her career. This<br />
section proves to be the film’s most affecting thread, but it<br />
likewise can’t escape the sentimental shadow cast across the<br />
entire project. The only real conflict in the film comes when<br />
Blume discusses book banning, and the challenges she faced<br />
during the years of Reagan and the Moral Majority. The end of the<br />
film briefly juxtaposes that censorship to today’s political<br />
climate, but it ultimately foregoes depth and shies away from<br />
actually confronting or addressing the insidious motivations<br />
behind the attempted restrictions.<br />
Blume is such an aggressively endearing presence that it makes<br />
the work of critiquing the film, which is so deeply rooted in her<br />
experience and personality, an unenviable task. There’s just<br />
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FILM REVIEWS<br />
something undeniably and overwhelmingly charming about an<br />
85-year-old woman shouting, “Let’s raise our hands if we<br />
masturbate, everybody!” But at the same time, Blume is an<br />
85-year-old woman, one who has lived a lot of life and isn’t<br />
without controversy or thornier elements (recent comments<br />
about supporting J.K. Rowling, for example). Judy Blume Forever,<br />
made with the full cooperation from Blume, wasn’t ever going to<br />
be the place for such critiques, but one can’t help but feel<br />
disappointed that a film tackling such a bold figure makes the<br />
timid decision to go the hagiographic route.. <strong>—</strong> EMILY<br />
DUGRANRUT<br />
DIRECTOR: Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok; CAST: <strong>—</strong>;<br />
DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Studios; IN THEATERS & STREAMING:<br />
April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.<br />
THE REAL THING<br />
Kōji Fukada<br />
“Fukada makes good on such an abject, confused ennui with<br />
his penchant for antiseptic, digital imagery, a severe flatness<br />
rebuffing any and all conventional beauty. The nearly fatal<br />
meet-cute is brought forth in snatches of static frames, the<br />
parallel editing almost abstract in how it intriguingly saps any<br />
latent excitement from the straightforward fact that a train is<br />
barreling toward our two characters.” <strong>—</strong> PATRICK PREZIOSI<br />
DIRECTOR: Kōji Fukada; CAST: Win Morisaki, Kaho Tsuchimura,<br />
Kei Ishibashi, Shôhei Uno; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement &<br />
MUBI; STREAMING: April 17; RUNTIME: 3 hr. 52 min.<br />
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ALBUM REVIEWS<br />
I’VE IVE<br />
Ive<br />
It’s a glorious time to be a fan of girl<br />
groups. UK trio FLO is paying homage to<br />
TLC and Aaliyah, and they’re poised to have<br />
a massive year; Japan’s XG and SG5 both<br />
have unusually Western pop ambitions;<br />
new and interesting Thai-pop groups are<br />
appearing every day. But when it comes to<br />
the unique joy of watching a group perfect<br />
the vibrant potential of pop music, no one<br />
is flourishing quite like the fourth-gen<br />
K-pop girls. (G)I-DLE, Fromis_9, Itzy, Aespa,<br />
STAYC, Pixy, Tri.be, Purple Kiss, Billlie,<br />
Kep1er, Viviz, Le Sserafim, NewJeans, CSR,<br />
TripleS, Fifty Fifty, and more <strong>—</strong> there’s a<br />
group for every sound and mood, from<br />
electronic badassery to nostalgic love<br />
ballads to chic synthpop to playful<br />
witchery. It’s almost overwhelming how<br />
much great pop music is emanating from<br />
the talented ladies of K-pop, and being<br />
generated by the diverse creative visions<br />
behind them.<br />
current K-pop wave of “reject loud<br />
experimentation, embrace tradition” and<br />
reached almost unprecedented success<br />
by doing so.<br />
To dig into the whole sonics of it, IVE’s<br />
efforts so far have been what you might<br />
call okay-to-good: “Eleven” was<br />
unassuming, and “After Like” felt a bit<br />
rushed and overly derivative after two<br />
years of relentless disco K-pop. But then<br />
there was “Love Dive,” which features<br />
some of the most impeccable sound<br />
design and slow-burn brilliance to come<br />
out of pop music this decade. And<br />
notably, all of IVE’s singles sound like<br />
them, even with only half a dozen tracks<br />
to their name <strong>—</strong> they sing about your<br />
standard teenage crushes, but with a<br />
winking confidence that implies they<br />
have positioned those feelings right<br />
where they want them.<br />
I’ve IVE is the group’s first full album and,<br />
as their first comeback longer than two<br />
tracks, almost doubles the size of their<br />
discography. (Yes, the title is an<br />
unfortunate crime against grammar.)<br />
Although it’s IVE’s first foray into crafting<br />
an extended set of B-sides, the biggest<br />
story here is still the two singles. At first<br />
glance, the whispered, bitchy anti-drop of<br />
prerelease single “Kitsch” feels at odds<br />
with the group’s sound. But a closer listen<br />
uncovers percussion bubbles boasting<br />
the same precision as the verses of “Love<br />
Dive,” and the lyrics about looking<br />
envy-worthy on Instagram fit right into<br />
their established rich-girl aesthetic <strong>—</strong> it<br />
doesn’t matter whether it’s a bug or<br />
In the next few weeks, <strong>InRO</strong> will be<br />
covering new releases from three of the<br />
biggest K-pop rookie groups currently<br />
working. First up is IVE, a six-member girl<br />
group who hit it big with their debut in late<br />
2021 and have only reached higher heights<br />
since. Their first three singles <strong>—</strong> “Eleven,”<br />
“Love Dive,” and “After Like” <strong>—</strong> were all<br />
pleasant, accessible, and vocal-forward,<br />
with production playing a supporting role<br />
to melody and the members’ guiding<br />
charisma. These massively popular tracks<br />
quickly established IVE’s mission<br />
statement as something like “Just make<br />
some good freaking pop music,” and<br />
together with NewJeans, they’ve led the<br />
30
ALBUM REVIEWS<br />
feature that “nineteen’s kitsch” is a<br />
hilariously obvious rewrite of a demo<br />
about being a nineties bitch.<br />
But where “Kitsch” is a breezy introduction<br />
to the era, “I Am” is a triumph. The group’s<br />
previous singles were distinctly fun, but<br />
this latest one is grand. The melodies<br />
challenge the vocalists in new ways,<br />
making each determined, sky-high launch<br />
into the chorus feel earned (“Life is a<br />
beautiful galaxy”), and the production<br />
sparkles with powerful synths and even a<br />
glittering electric guitar in the final<br />
chorus. On a technical level, “I Am” is not<br />
the group’s most interesting track (the<br />
pre-chorus and chorus are just the same<br />
melody repeated), but it’s maybe more<br />
impressive how the girls make it so that it<br />
doesn't matter, generating a stronger<br />
emotional pull here than on any of their<br />
previous releases. Importantly, both<br />
singles make obvious what was previously<br />
mere subtext: IVE’s music is about<br />
watching their own star being born.<br />
I’ve IVE stands at 11 tracks total, and the<br />
B-sides range from interesting to<br />
serviceable. A few stand out as new<br />
territory for the group: namely, the<br />
anthemic chants and minor-key strings of<br />
“Blue Blood” (title reinforcing their<br />
branding), the genuinely cute Disney<br />
Channel pop of “Not Your Girl,” and the<br />
clanging piano chords of “Hypnosis,” which<br />
could have soundtracked a rap song as<br />
easily as it does IVE’s light vocals. (After<br />
playing it straight for a year and a half,<br />
they have the right to be a bit obnoxious<br />
for two minutes.) Elsewhere, “Lips” takes<br />
another prominent piano line in an entirely<br />
different direction, with the same breezy<br />
mood as “Kitsch,” but with a less nuanced<br />
arrangement. (It’s still enjoyable, but you<br />
can tell that the singles on this album<br />
were made to hold up to much more<br />
concerted scrutiny than the rest.) And<br />
then there’s “Shine With Me,” which is a<br />
standard album-closing power ballad, not<br />
much worth any further commentary<br />
beyond that qualification.<br />
The rest of the tracks <strong>—</strong> “Heroine,” “Mine,”<br />
“Next Page,” and “Cherish” <strong>—</strong> all occupy a<br />
very similar sonic space: first, start with<br />
some tasteful percussion, throw in a<br />
gentle synth, and then choose a simple<br />
titular hook to pull things together.<br />
“Mine,” for its part, at least does a<br />
particularly good job at the classic<br />
“mid-tempo pulsing synth” sound, but<br />
“Heroine” has nothing to say that the<br />
other songs don’t already, and could have<br />
easily been cut. They’re all perfectly<br />
pleasant enough, though very much<br />
B-sides, with no capacity to take on a<br />
starring role. And although everything<br />
sounds like IVE’s style of “make good pop<br />
music with a young, chic twist,” the divide<br />
between the big event songs and the ones<br />
always intended to be tracklist filler is too<br />
apparent not to be observed.<br />
For all its ups and downs, IVE’s latest<br />
comeback is the group’s first attempt at<br />
an album statement of any significant<br />
length, which is a considerable milestone<br />
for any rookie group. The results roughly<br />
meet the expectations set by their<br />
previous work, with a clear focus<br />
dedicated to perfecting the handful of<br />
songs that will actually linger in the<br />
public’s memory, while the rest are<br />
handled with similar polish but less<br />
underlying ambition. There’s nothing<br />
particularly novel about the music of it<br />
all, but the project does boast great<br />
singles and solid enough deep cuts to<br />
keep dedicated fans hanging around: in<br />
other words, the classic pop album<br />
dynamic for a group who have dedicated<br />
themselves to the craft of classic pop<br />
music. <strong>—</strong> KAYLA BEARDSLEE<br />
LABEL: Starship Entertainment;<br />
RELEASE DATE: April 10<br />
MICROPHONE FIEND<br />
Zelooperz<br />
At first, it wasn’t necessarily clear how<br />
seriously one should take Zelooperz, his<br />
defining traits being “Internet rap<br />
oddball” and “Danny Brown protege.”<br />
Discovered in the lead-up to his<br />
much-hyped 2014 album Old, Brown<br />
plucked the then 20-year-old rapper out<br />
of obscurity and gifted him the hook on<br />
“Kush Coma,” a standout A$AP<br />
Rocky-featuring track. A member of<br />
Brown’s loosely organized Bruiser Brigade<br />
from then on and up to current day (at<br />
this point, the collective has evolved into<br />
a genuine label), these two Detroit-based<br />
rappers have been tethered to each other<br />
in more ways than one ever since, with<br />
Zelooperz’s signature squawky vocals and<br />
taste for esoteric production (both<br />
knowingly silly and devotedly<br />
avant-garde) echoing the preferred<br />
aesthetics of his mentor. Debut album<br />
Bothic fell victim to dismissive critical<br />
comparisons of this nature, unfavorably<br />
casting it against the still-celebrated Old,<br />
and ultimately looking past its qualities in<br />
anticipation of Brown’s fourth album,<br />
which would arrive a few months later.<br />
Zelooperz seems unbothered by this<br />
narrative, or at least hasn’t allowed it to<br />
31
slow him down, with the rapper/painter<br />
(now 30) only building momentum in the<br />
seven years between Bothic’s release and<br />
now, dropping eight records along the<br />
way.<br />
A new one, Microphone Fiend, which landed<br />
at the start of April, puts Zelooperz at an<br />
impressive nine albums since 20<strong>16</strong>, a<br />
rather remarkable pace for any musician,<br />
even in the hyper-fast streaming era. It's<br />
also remarkable that his output remains<br />
solid and dynamic, Microphone Fiend<br />
offering no particular drop in quality from<br />
the horror-tinged Gremlin, nor the more<br />
freewheeling Dyno-Mite (on which he and<br />
Danny reconvene to trade verses over the<br />
Crash Bandicoot music) <strong>—</strong> both highlights<br />
of this recent rapid-fire release schedule.<br />
On the other hand, Microphone Fiend isn’t<br />
so much better or so much more<br />
distinctive than those other projects (pop<br />
R&B concept album Get WeT.Radio could<br />
at least claim the latter), all of them<br />
decent enough, often amusing, but<br />
generally a few songs short of being<br />
wholly great. Album opener “Climate<br />
Change” kicks things off by sampling<br />
Little Richard’s 1988 Grammy presenter<br />
gig (“And the best new artist is… Me!”), as<br />
if to signal Zelooperz frustrations with<br />
the continued lack of industry respect,<br />
before launching into a jaunty, rolling<br />
Chuck Inglish beat worthy of Chance the<br />
Rapper. His vocal affectations end up<br />
landing somewhere near Chano’s as well,<br />
ALBUM REVIEWS<br />
while still often bringing DB to mind,<br />
operating on a gradient that runs from a<br />
yelp to a bark.<br />
To his credit, Zelooperz never appears<br />
constrained by these seemingly narrow<br />
parameters, challenging his delivery to<br />
adapt to a range of production<br />
possibilities (“Demon n Deities” taking<br />
this to a near experimental extreme),<br />
though really it’s mostly the more<br />
aggressive, hard-hitting beats (“Bustin<br />
Jieber,” “Can’t Fill Your Tank”) that<br />
provoke his strongest performances, as<br />
has often been the case in the past. At<br />
times a charming, elusive figure, at other<br />
times a bit too taken with juvenalia and<br />
“weird humor,” Zelooperz continues to<br />
define his world with Microphone<br />
Fiend without necessarily<br />
making huge progress. Still, one<br />
gets the sense that this record,<br />
like the rest, could be a piece of<br />
a bigger picture. The last few<br />
years have found Zelooperz<br />
collaborating fruitfully outside<br />
and underneath the Bruiser<br />
Brigade umbrella, finding worthy<br />
peers like Earl Sweatshirt,<br />
BbyMutha, Pink Siifu, Fly Anakin,<br />
etc. <strong>—</strong> inspiring artists with<br />
interesting approaches to the<br />
genre. This, in tandem with the<br />
consistent quality of his<br />
projects, is reason enough to<br />
continue to believe Zelooperz is<br />
carving out a notable space in<br />
hip hop right now. <strong>—</strong> M.G.<br />
MAILLOUX<br />
LABEL: Bruiser Brigade;<br />
RELEASE DATE: March 28<br />
32
Photo Credits:<br />
Cover - Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures; Page 1 - Eliot Lepinay/Grasshopper Film; Page 3, 5 -<br />
Grasshopper Film; Page 7,8 - Columbia/TriStar Pictures.; Page 9 -Nikkatsu/Japan Foundation;<br />
Page 10 - Nikkatsu/Criterion Collection; Page 11 - Niko Tavernise/Prime Video; Page 13 - Takasi<br />
Seida; Page 14 - A24; Page <strong>16</strong> - Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures; Page 18 - Christopher<br />
Raphael/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures; Page 20 - Apple TV+; Page 21 - KimStim; Page 22 - Ben<br />
King/Goalpost Pictures/Sony Pictures Classics; Page 23 - Jonathan Hession/CTMG Inc; Page 25 -<br />
Mary Cybulski/Credit of Roadside Attractions; Page 27 - Vertical Entertainment; Page 29 - Prime<br />
Video; Page 30 - Starship Entertainment; Page 32 - Bruiser Brigade; Back Cover - Larry<br />
Horricks/20th Century Studios