Lost River (2014)

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dir. Ryan Gosling. bad movie

Imagine if Sean Astin were to say, “after acting in three ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, I’m certain I can write/direct my own ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie,” and then his friends reluctantly had to be in the movie when he actually made it, because that’s what friends are for, but then none of them gave him any helpful criticism at any point during the production, because it turned out they aren’t good friends, and in the end the low-quality pastiche vanity-cringe version of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies made by Sean Astin was a surprise to absolutely no one involved, and then I have to watch it in the bath on New Years Day, and have to keep moving the mouse to see how much time is left. Now imagine this whole scenario again, but with a movie made by Ryan Gosling after starring in Drive (2011), Place Beyond the Pines (2012), and Only God Forgives (2013). Now that you’ve pictured me watching Lost River (2014), be released from having to watch it yourself.
With the fantastic “evil worm” character actor Ben Mendelsohn really trying to singlehandedly make a movie out of it.

Under the Silver Lake (2018)

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dir. David Robert Mitchell. Recommended.

I got sick of movies for a while in 2019 by slamming the A24 back catalogue trying to establish a clear idea of what “an A24 movie” is. There are a ton of bad ones, and they get worse when you become overly-aware of the A24ish ways they’re bad together. While Moonlight is the clearest instance of what “the A24 form” seeks to and can sometimes achieve, Under the Silver Lake most completely epitomizes “A24 movie” as a form in itself. If you want to watch just one movie to contextualize and frame Midsommar, First Reformed, The Florida Project, The Lobster, Eighth Grade, Swiss Army Man, The End of the Tour, The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, Life After Beth, and about 60 other “quirky” but formally very similar movies from the last decade, here’s your rosetta stone.

There’s a lot to dislike about Under the Silver Lake, but as a distant, agnostic viewer who loves when obsessive craft meets ramshackle chaotic-weird, I loved it. The basic plot is, an unlikeable loser “fail son” in LA gets involved in a Rube Goldberg conspiracy/mystery (basically because he’s bored slash trying to get laid), and the conspiracy/mystery spirals into further and further fields of ridiculousness that are ultimately never resolved.

The movie is absolutely jammed with meta-tactics to encourage and cultivate a conspiratorial reddit-sleuthing viewing and interaction – for instance tons of stuff appears in the movie in literal code that requires internet community detection – but in the end none of this stuff is essential or really matters to the movie itself, even if it is there for the very-online people who want to engage with it – an audience the movie seems to slyly but clearly equate with its “fail son” main character. In this way the movie is about a kind of person it’s also directly addressing, and a critique of behavior that it’s also actively encouraging: this feels formally novel and highly contemporary to me, to the point of being shocking, considering its resonance with the ways fucked-up online slime pits like 4ch*n or q*non manifest irl. If you want to watch a movie “about” how an internet-diseased 24 year old Anthony Comello could end up irl gunning down a “gambino family” crime boss, here it is, this is the movie.

Under the Silver Lake is also encyclopedic in its references to every piece of LA noir that came before it – almost every shot functions as non-stop nerdy homage to some other movie. This restless self-awareness, nakedly wrestling with pre-internet influence-worship, while trying to synthesize exactly that influence to tell a contemporary for-the-internet story, in digital instagram color, while also fully anticipating and working any kind of expected critique or viewing back into the movie: These are the calling cards of “A24 movie.”

I personally don’t care about “interpreting clues,” “fan theories,” “getting the references,” or “canons,” so it seems possible that the extent to which I enjoyed this movie may have had to do with the extent to which I wasn’t in its crosshairs; also the extent to which I can maintain safe distance while watching a movie about an asshole. (If you are the movie’s target, or if you can’t or don’t want to maintain such a distance, I certainly don’t have any judgment of that, but would worry that you’ll find this movie to be annoying or trolling.) I love an ambiguous sprawl of a movie, with a lot of characters, environments, ideas, modes, images, and tones – I wish there were more messy maximalist movies that override and melt narrative, making a soup that becomes something else entirely, unafraid of being gross. In this sense this movie is clearly kin with the likes of Southland Tales (2006), the LA movie I feel it would double feature with best.

This is the second movie by the guy who made It Follows, itself also “a good A24 movie” and a movie that I like, but which is dollhouse-sized by comparison. Can’t wait to watch whatever his next one is.

Eagle vs. Shark (2007)

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dir. Taiki Waititi

New Zealand “this small town sucks”/”losers who can’t be loved”-type sadsack twee comedy starring Jemaine from Flight of the Concords, which I watched out of Taika Waititi completionism. The vibe here is kind of like a more minimal Napoleon Dynamite – a “school play”-like miniature leaning into “awkwardness” to compensate for a total lack of chaos energy. The movie is about as sharp as a marshmallow, but it’s sort of a nice break from the constant shouting, spilling, and running around that packs later-era American Pie-indebted or Apetow-related airplane foods like Blockers or Booksmart.

Feature: there’s a scene where the like “computer whiz guy next door” is trying to get his browser open, and he’s plagued by fake movie-style porn “popups,” which he sort of struggles to assert control over and calm about in front of his friends. I love seeing “caught with porn on my laptop” anxiety expressed on-screen, because it’s so obviously a resonant cultural fear, but also because the way it’s inserted into movies is always such an extreme reach. Has anyone since the 90s really had “a virus” where browser popups continuously open?! Anyway I love that this scenario “pops up” every once in a while – I mentioned it in the Wild Hogs review too – please let me know if you ever run across other instances of it.

xoxo (2016)

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dir. Christopher Louie

Garbage netflix movie about a budding DJ who gets a gig at an edm festival, apparently made for people who have never participated in an organic non-commercial underground music community of any kind, but who have been to or understand big festivals as a place to periodically party in an ecstatic/anonymous/cathartic way. The movie is bad primarily because the script is absolute garbage, but it’s difficult to imagine any rewrite that would result in something good, given the generally bleak consumer-escapist perspective on youth the movie takes broadly. What’s good about the “good” rave movies I’ve seen is that they’re about rave as a site for taking masks off, and the communities that orbit and facilitate that as an urgent, valuable, central thing – the rave as real life. XOXO is a movie about a form of uninvested partying that seems to be about putting masks on: the rave is just a fun dream, and normal life is the reality, and hey, we all gotta get up and go back to work on Monday. Extremely Sagat vox: “funk dat“

Definitely has that paint by the numbers Netflix curation feel: their data told them they needed an EDM movie of their own and so by god, they bought one.  Six or so not particularly connected characters make their way to and then through a festival, shooting for something of an EDM Dazed and Confused.  This proves to be way too ambitious for the skill set of this director (Dazed and Confused‘s form is end-boss level in terms of difficulty), and the movie never finds any real relevance in the characters or much to say about the experience besides “vague friendship is good,” or “music is good” style platitudes.  It’s kind of an open question as to whether EDM is going to prove useful in the future to understanding our current times – the movie is pretty up front about its opinion that it’s something you get into before you head off to business school, or while you’re taking a vacation from your high-paying Silicon Valley job.  Since EDM is shown as the shadow of what the characters are taking a break from, I hate to say it, but I think those areas are where understanding of our current world will live when looking back. The movie even seems to back this idea up through the one character who’s a rave culture lifer. He’s a bitter crank at war with himself, and utterly miserable in comparison to the college-age kids shown to be consciously dipping in temporarily.  Don’t do subculture too seriously kids: it can have long-term detrimental effects. With all this said, I have something of a soft spot for this film, as it contains the line “I was thinking about putting an LFO after the drop” – a delightful bit of nonsense pulled from almost-there electronic music making terminology that’s proven to be a good mind-clearing mantra for me, when making music on my own.

Party Monster (2003)

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(wr./dir. Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato)

This has been low on my “rave movies to watch” list for a while now; it got queue-bumped via Waltpaper’s new Club Kids book just coming out.

This movie tries to float telenovela-level production quality and an apparently insufficient budget to do justice to the source material’s costuming, set, & era requirements on Himalayan-peak levels of campiness and bizarre casting (Culkin; Sevigny; Seth Green; John Stamos; 90s procedural law show The Practice’s Dylan McDermott). The total effect is something like if there were such a thing as a bad Gregg Araki movie shooting for “novelty movie.”

I’m pretty sure the novelty factor is why Culkin said yes to this one; novelty, schtick-y, anti-stardom stuff that’s still “about” the idea or dream of celebrity distorting beyond its limits seems to be his thing. Not a critique: I feel that Culkin’s “I’ve got Home Alone money so I’m gonna just do my thing & be me” approach is lovely, even when the results aren’t for me, and especially because they’re so obviously primarily supposed to be for him. Imagine if every celeb acted this way, instead of trying to continue accumulating power or building a brand; I don’t know that pop culture would be any better, but it would certainly be weirder.

It’s important to note that the “monster” part of Party Monster is way over-sold – the killing that occurs here is a minor part of the story. What this “is” is a bad movie about drug problems, not a bad movie about an evil murderer club kid, just like Trainspotting is not a movie “about” a baby that dies due to negligence. If you’re interested in anything else Party Monster is ostensibly about, it’s a pretty disappointing pass; there are better movies on all fronts. For “young people with an NYC heroine problem,” see Heaven Knows What (2014); for club movies Human Traffic (1999) or Beats (2019); for club-adjacent “crazy” movies Vibrations (1996); for young, queer, and partying during the apocalypse, I know I’m always talking about it, but Araki’s Kaboom (2010); for young, queer, outcast, and dancing in NYC, Paris is Burning (1990); etc. What Party Monster does have is “Macauley Culkin and (suddenly halfway thru the movie) Chloe Sevigny as vamping drug addicts taking a bath together,” and “Macauley Culkin constantly burning a pouting Seth Green.”

Ad Astra (2019)

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(dir. James Gray)

Here’s the serious “Acadamy Awards”-facing version of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017), a “daddy issues in space” movie about how “being the greatest” means you’ve probably also succeeded at being the worst, with Chris Pratt prestige-upgraded into Brad Pitt, and Kurt Russell prestige-upgraded into Tommy Lee Jones, who plays daddy.

This time around, Brad Pitt has to get from earth all the way to Neptune to deal with daddy, who is doing some bullshit out there that’s causing a planetary catastrophe back home. (Brad’s the only man for the job, etc. etc.) The structure of the journey is very fun – a sort of space-planes/space-trains/space-automobiles where Brad Pitt has to get from earth ➡️the moon ➡️Mars ➡️Neptune, with a lot of inexplicable, weird little adventure asides and details sprinkled in at the first three stops. But you might as well turn it off once Brad gets back off Mars, where the interesting space stuff (and the movie’s internal sense of “space movie plausibility”) abruptly ends, and it settles into wack Hollywood theater about fathers and sons. It would be stone cold simple to write a better, completely standalone movie about just this movie’s concepts for Mars, the moon, or commercial space travel, which is deeply frustrating, because it means this movie has a load of good ideas that are left unexpanded in favor of a big cornball act three.

When I talk about Ad Astra I get so riled because of how close it got to being incredible without getting past being normal, which means I’m inevitably gonna end up rewatching it. As a coda here I’ll add that I’m due to rewatch Interstellar (2014) – curious to see whether I still feel that that movie is the high water mark for 2010s “serious space movies” or if I’ve just been saying so for long enough now that I convinced myself.

Shoplifters (2018), Our Little Sister (2015), Hana: the tale of a reluctant samurai (2006), I wish (2011) (all wr./dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

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Pretty excited to keep working my way thru the Kore-eda filmography in 2020, his movies were consistently among the best I watched in 2019, and there are still like eight or nine more that he wrote/directed out there.

Between these and Still Walking (2018), they all seem to be ensemble movies “about” family or group dynamics during moments of broader transition, with a huge range and depth on both the visual and character levels, overlaid on an idiosyncratic approach to plotting that’s “slow” and unpredictable and dramatically rich. They’re so good that I’m spacing out my viewing, saving them for special occasions. A very rough comparison might be, imagine a good Altman movie, but with a more deeply-felt and focused attention on slightly fewer characters, and set in (mainly) contemporary, heavily-articulated quotidian situations, and without any “movie style” antagonists.

Shoplifters seems to be the clearest entry point and the hardest-hitting, and I’d recommend it to really anyone trying to watch “an actually-good movie” any day of the week. From there I’d say Hana‘s retelling of “the 47 Ronin” (which doesn’t focus on the ronin really at all) feels like the most straightforward expression of the storytelling modality at work across these movies, and might work as a kind of key to them, and Still Walking is the finest. But again they all seem to be great and I can’t wait to keep going here.

Heaven Knows What (2014)

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Watched this one in the bath. If like me you found Mandy (2018) to be insufficiently and insincerely engaged with real darkness, then consider this harrowing piece of “young street people addicted to heroine in midtown” vérité, starring/written by Arielle Holmes for the Safdies, who met Holmes during early work on Uncut Gems in midtown, where she was spanging, and they correctly decided she “should be in movies.” A no-way-out nightmare movie that operates in the borderlands between “fiction” and “documentary,” matching “actors” with “non-actors playing themselves,” crossing the immediate, direct anti-logic/anti-meaning of addiction and on-the-street desperation with the insular privacy and psychodrama of abuse, loneliness, and doomed/dooming love. Typically great Safdie sound design, and with everything shot at high zoom levels from a distance, to ultra-claustrophobic, wobbling effect. Imo an incredible NYC movie, and roughly the evil opposite of Skate Kitchen (2018), which I’d recommend as a palate cleanser. For abyss-starers only.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

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1: No gods no franchises / The Matrix yet again

Welp, due to the vast influence of me and Davey’s movie blog, they’re putting Keanu Reeves in The Matrix 4, John Wick 4, Bill & Ted’s 3, Point Break 2, Bram’s Stoker Drac2la, Devil’s Ad2cate, and many, many other continuations of stories everyone thought were done.

Unfortunately this is a gross misreading of at least my half of the blog; I thought I was being pretty clear about my distaste for both nostalgia and the cultural hegemony of preexisting stuff. I like when a narrative’s core is still unknown, when actors are transforming into new characters, and the surprise and adventure of image and sound describing the unfamiliar for the first time. If familiarity and continuity were my thing I’d be blogging about TV.

Why more Matrix in 2020? I’ve certainly seen plenty of “we’re in The Matrix today, so a new The Matrix is R E L E V A N T”-type posting… but I dunno. Sure, we live in a world with 2.41 billion facebook accounts, and a burgeoning global surveillance industry, but The Matrix doesn’t seem like an apt or mature metaphor for either of those things. My guess is that it’ll be “about” social media, but that we’re getting it now because the Matrix has always been about “conspiracy theories,” “deep fakes,” and “fake news.” My basic prediction is that it’s gonna be a terrible movie.

The silver lining to the endless maelstrom of franchised-out new-old-stuff is that every new-old thing immediately offers a reason to poke around in the archive. For example, even though thinking about M Night Shyamalan’s movies makes me grind my teeth, Glass (2019) could at least be viewed as an occasion to dig into the last 30 years of Bruce Willis, or for exploring a caffeinated hypothesis about how Shyamalan’s particular middlebrow fake-serious mode prefigures the A24 era – how The Monster (2016), The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), The \\\///\\\///itch (2015), It Follows (2014), Midsommar (2019), and A Ghost Story (2017) (all A24) all seem to have been made by people who saw his movies when they were young. Which is all to say, I used the news of the new Matrix to do some re-watching.

2. A cinema of big wild failures

The Wachowskis haven’t written/directed a movie with the influence or popular success of The Matrix since. Their work in the intervening years includes The Matrix‘s sequels (both 2003), Speed Racer (2008), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Jupiter Ascending (2015). All of these movies are ridiculously grand, frequently ridiculous world-building projects, where the purpose of each world is threefold: as a stage for inventive action sequences; as a place to worship genre aesthetics; and as bargain-basement Philip K Dick thought experiments, that register at about the level of Keanu saying “whoa.” The Wachowskis make big, wild failures. I’ll add that I’m not hating here: I love all of these movies specifically because that’s what they are. Speed Racer and especially Cloud Atlas are Moulin Rouge-level bonkers – they’re not “good movies” at all, but the jaggedly stylized ways they’re great make them more urgently view-wanting than most other movies made this century. If you’re watching a Disney Star Wars movie this year, do yourself a favor and wash it down with a Wachowskis movie.

The Matrix is the only regular-successful “good movie” entry in this filmography because it’s the only one that shows any kind of restraint. That’s only because it’s the only one made with a sub-hundred million dollar budget ($64 million) – enough cash to finish the project, but not enough to overwork it into oblivion. The sequels are a mess precisely because they recede into the byzantiums that giant budgets ($150 million apiece) have allowed the Wachowskis to generate since. They’re like black midi movies: virtuosically and even astonishingly overwrought at the production level, but murky (and even corny) at the level of “being a movie.”

3: Case study: Jupiter Ascending

Consider Jupiter Ascending (2015; ~$200 million budget), a painfully pointless The Matrix-style movie the Wachowskis made sixteen years after making The Matrix. This time, the people of earth don’t realize that they’re being harvested by rich interstellar vampires, and that cosmic capitalism and politics are raging invisibly around them with maximum stakes. The situation on the ground is managed by alien repair crews who keep regular humans doing earth stuff through the assistance of Men in Black-brand memory wipers and Dark City/deus ex machina-brand tech for fixing damage to cities incurred during action sequences. Okay, sure.

Somewhere on a microscope slide in the cosmic milieu is Mila Kunis, playing a janitor named Jupiter in the earth city of Chicago, where her work is shown to suck and be boring. But then she gets drawn into an inheritance plot where she (100% coincidentally) has to go to the planet Jupiter, because she’s a reincarnated interstellar oil baron or something. Channing Tatum plays a supporting role as the disgraced angel soldier werewolf bodyguard, doubling as a romantic interest on the apparent basis of his being dutiful and muscular; his half of the movie is repeatedly having to prevent Mila Kunis from falling to her death, being assassinated in a doctor’s office, marrying a creep, and so forth.

The piled-on Wachowski approach and its many billable hours are evident from the moment the production company logos appear on screen: Even these have little gilded curlicues of After Effects flair. The best part of the movie is a jutting aside when Mila Kunis needs to go to the space DMV, where the Wachowskis switch from the movie’s default “cyberpunk/space opera/glam court intrigue” modes right on over to “steampunk/hell-bureaucracy/Santa’s Workshop.” Sure this is a really bad movie at the plot level, and at points is a CGI mess, but I have to emphatically underline that it includes at least those six style modes as it proceeds through its brutal paces. Even though it’s all completely insubstantial there’s so much going on here.

Eventually Mila Kunis wins a climactic victory in a fire-themed boss battle and goes back to hanging with her family in Chicago, but there’s no indication as to whether she was able to dismantle the system of interstellar vampirism that threatens the planet, beyond the immediate matter of disrupting that system’s main family’s inheritance game. But that’s a The Matrix movie for you: The Matrix doesn’t end with any big conclusive resolutions, it just ends with Keanu flying around. And that’s exactly what Mila Kunis does here too.