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Harms in March 2019

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Roar

Watched this for a third(!) time, my feelings on this move are well documented but Mandy who was watching it for the first time said it was the worst movie she’s ever seen :/

Crouching tiger Hidden Dragon

Damn dude, this still rules.  When I first saw it I was more of a film snob and really focused on the writing and beautiful cinematography, now that I’m older and dumber I focused primarily on how dope the fight scenes were.  And they are so dope.

Captive State

Very grim unique movie resting on the premise that if we were invaded by aliens that people high up in power structures would quickly sell everyone out in order to maintain any amount of hierarchical advantage they enjoyed previously. Told meticulously from the perspective of the human terrorist sect, with lots of nuts and bolts operational stuff.  Structurally really interesting, has a second act composed of a huge looping detour that meets up with the main story for the third. Quietly smart, not wearing it’s brain on top of it’s head a la Arrival other ‘thoughtful sci fi’ movies, a genre that (as I predicted *toot toot) has been obliterated by our current state of affairs.  

Memoirs of a Geisha

Didn’t finish this movie so this isn’t really a review.  I would just like to point out though, that it came out in 2004, was produced by generally progressive guy Steven Spielberg, and although set it Japan has a primarily chinese cast speaking english for the whole movie.  Apocalypto was made in 2006, by extremely unchill Mel Gibson, featured a cast of Native American and Indigenous Mexican actors and was spoken entirely in the indigenous Yucatec Maya language.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

I kinda think the filmmaker Alex gibney is bullshit tbh.  Dude knows how to make a documentary but he just kinda picks sensational hit non-fiction books, lets them do all the heavy lifting and research, then basically films them afterwards.  Maybe I’m way off on this one but it just seems like it’s his M.O. between this and Going Clear. As far as the movie goes though, it’s fun. Elizabeth Holmes is a wild lady who is fun/scary to look at and ponder and I, like a seemingly large subset of America am enjoying these tales of flim flam artists trying to maintain a constructed reality while it crumbles around them.

Captain Marvel

After initial reviews said it wasn’t good I drew a hard line in the sand saying that I was not going to see it.  Then someone asked me if I wanted to see it, so I went. Guess what?  It’s another totally fine and fun Marvel movie.  More of the extremely “do you like these movies?  Then you’ll like this one” vibe. Samuel L Jackson really cruises with a great energy, the Skrulls are super funny and the main one has an Australian accent which rules, and there’s a cute cat.  Not as distinctive and good as Thor:Ragnorak and Black Panther but miles better than Avengers: Infinity War which honestly, totally sucked.

The Matrix
Used it’s twentieth anniversary as an excuse to revisit this movie I haven’t seen in since it came out.  Not the most philosophically interesting Keanu Reeves action movie from the 90s (that would be Speed) or the best Wachowski siblings movie (that would be Speed Racer). Holds up as a pretty entertaining watch until post ‘I know Kung fu’ sequence where it starts to drag and turn into a real bummer, though it does have for my money it’s best scene at the very end of the movie (Keanu absentmindedly fights Agent Smith with one hand, then flexes reality after beating him).  Unfortunately we’re currently living in something of a post truth/reality society so a lot of the Matrixs gentle riffs on big ideas don’t seem as much fun anymore, and drawing a line from q supporters to anti vaxxers to this movie isn’t a stretch.  Pairing that with an extremely slick ‘cool’ sequence where two people walk into an office building and kill everyone in sight with machine guns, because “they’re not real people” and you’ve got a recipe for a troubling vibe in 2019. It’s heavy a real touchstone movie, and if we’re still here in 20 years I’m looking forward to checking in with it again to see how deep those ripples went.

Us (2019)

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Us is the movie Jordan Peele made after the era-defining Get Out (2017). The movie’s not that scary, but that’s fine; it looks good, and there are some good performances, and a couple funny jokes. But mostly, this one rides a “who Deserves to win” twist that’s effectiveness seems contingent on whether or not you’ve already considered what people Deserve generally, irl. If you’ve 1. thought about your social position and resources, and found that a violent revolution by (say) an invisible underclass that wants what you have enough to kill you for it (out of basic desire, but also to satisfy a sense of justice) is in some way understandable, or 2. thought for any amount of time at all about the deeply arbitrary nature of what body, year, and X/Y coordinate your consciousness was embodied in, then 3. there’s not really much else going on here. Us is a tableau on ultraviolent circumstances where everyone is in a bad place, with no explanation provided, no accountability, no lesson, definitely no justice, and no antagonist. Therefore: what, exactly?

If you’re as suspicious and distrustful of power and its pursuit as I am, you probably find it as false a choice in your own life as onscreen over “who the victim is” here. The question isn’t “which one of these families Deserves to escape,” because it’s both, duh; “we’re Americans.” And while I don’t “believe in” violence, I also don’t know that I believe institutional justice exists at all, and can relate to the irrational impulse to make an ugly and evil mark that stems from the powerlessness of that feeling. Which is to say, the main annoying tragedy of this movie is that it looks at a symptom, but never up at its cause; whoever Deserves whatever justice is not present in the movie. Instead all you get is an irrational false-choice survival struggle between bit players. This is a movie that’s supposed to be “about” ethical responsibility, but it’s just people commonly screwed by an invisible third party killing each other. That’s not fun or interesting to me; it’s what so much of regular life already just is.

If the movie really wanted to say something true and dark about “who is a Real Person and what they Deserve,” it would’ve ended with the mass murder of the replicants by military helicopters, as they stood exposed in their long line. But that larger point about the absolute safety and true ownership of violence by real power goes completely unmade.

Get Out was one the best recent films about race while also being a horror movie, with airtight connections between message, plot, and even sources of audience tension. Us takes a step back and is more of a funhouse-style horror movie with a loose metaphor floating in the background that’s entirely optional to your enjoyment of the movie.

Us’s opening 20 minutes have a real hangout feel, something that Get Out’s deliberately lean structure couldn’t accommodate. We get to know the Wilson family and their dynamic while they’re on vacation in Santa Cruz, a period of the film that’s positively breezy, which I would watch a whole movie of.  Eventually red jump-suited nightmare doppelgängers pop up and ruin the vibe. What follows is a kind of 80s/90s low-stakes dream-logic horror, punctuated with ample comedic respite to let the audience reestablish a baseline and relax.  Think Phantasm, or Nightmare on Elm Street, or even C.H.U.D., both of the latter of which Us shouts out in its opening shot. This isn’t the scariest movie – it has a lot of haunting imagery, but it’s more interested in having a good time. (Probably my favorite “scary” imagery was just a beach scene shown from the perspective of someone who just really doesn’t like the beach; kind of a deep summertime blues vibe.) If we were living in a period devoid of scorched earth horror films I could see this bumming me out, but we’ve had plenty of great genuinely scary and disturbing movies recently so I found it refreshing to see the film operate take a casual approach in this respect.

It’s also nice to see horror of this kind presented so well.  Horror movies like this often have a kind of workman-like quality to their actual construction, due to budget or the Barton Fink problem (“What’s all this egghead crap?!”). Since Peele has some serious filmmaking chops and a lot of fire behind him, we get to see what this style of film could be like with serious polish applied to wild ideas.  Some of these wild ideas work, some are a tougher pill to swallow. The world-building in Us doesn’t really stand up to much logical scrutiny, which is maybe an unfair standard to hold a film of this genre pedigree to, but I think that’s the kind of issue you’ll get when you make a movie that’s of such high quality in other areas.  The central metaphor the film is pushing is also lacking for most of the film, and while a great last minute twist does a lot to elevate and reframe it into something a lot more interesting, it also kind of plunks it into “I’ll have reevaluate on rewatch” territory.

While watching, though, I wasn’t really bothered by any of these bits which I feel are lacking now. It’s an extremely fun and generally good-natured movie, and it’s a lot funnier than I think it’s been getting credit for – I had more or less no idea it was funny at all before watching. While a lot of attention has been focused on Lupita Nyong’o’s wild double performance (using a very odd vocal trick for her doppelgänger; I saw it in a pretty live theatre, but when she first spoke, it got completely silent), everyone gives great performances, especially Winston Duke as “useless dad.” Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss are both great as well, and have something of an insane comic chemistry? All of which is to say I had a really nice time and left the theater feeling really relaxed, light and invigorated. While I gotta say that these feelings probably don’t bode well for this being a future horror classic, it does bode well for it being a really fun great movie, which I’d highly recommend.

(The cover image on this post contains a Robert Beatty sample and a Margaret Wise Brown sample.)

Apocalypto (2006)

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Apocalypto starts with an indigenous tribe being enslaved by Mayans. Their village is destroyed, and they’re dragged in bonds to the city, passing sights of mining, deforestation, and open sewage. They’re taken up to the highest point of the city where a member of the tribe, Jaguar Paw, gets free; then he runs down the mountain back to the jungle chased by his captors.  Speckled throughout is a wild tableau of extreme violence and emotionally visceral moments. Fans of heads getting caved in, heads getting chomped by jaguars, heads getting rolled down stairs, or heads sitting silently impaled atop spikes should know that there are few films that deliver head destruction with such gusto.

All of this is portrayed in an unsettlingly bloodthirsty manner while still feeling painful to the viewer, something of a trademark in Mel Gibson’s films. Much like in The Passion of the Christ (2004) you get the sense that Mel strongly believes in both meting out and receiving punishment. Unlike Passion which is fairly static in terms of movement (Christ walks slowly up a hill while getting torn to pieces for an hour), Apocalypto uses the framework of an action movie to make a film about societal and personal inertia that through the presence of its movements and themes, becomes an almost beautiful statement composed of transcendental brutality.

Apocalypto bakes its theme and movement into its structure, a rare thing in action movies, but another strong contemporary example is Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).  I like to think of Fury Road‘s structure as a rubber band – Furiosa pulling against societal restraints with such accelerating power that her whole world has to stretch with her. Once she realizes that she can’t break free, the tension on the rubber band is let loose and she snaps back towards the society that formed her with all the force built by her journey remaking it completely.

Though Apocalypto also embeds large portions of its meaning in it’s movement and structure, it possesses a much more cynical take on civilization and the fruits of exertion. Here the family is sacred, but beyond that, people are only capable of consuming one another. So while Jaguar Paw does move and pull the world with him, first dragged in chains up towards civilization then running free towards the jungle and the civilization’s eventual destruction, he isn’t able to change anything.  He regains his family, and gains insight into what civilization can be based on his experience traveling through the Mayan city. This gives him the wisdom to avoid what the film shows in its final moments.

I strongly disagree with Gibson’s central premise here, of an endless cycle of linear decline and destructive consumption, and subscribe more to Fury Road’s elastic view of history. I also recognize there isn’t a great deal of separation between Gibson’s personal life and his art, both chock full of abuse and anti-semitism (no opportunities for anti-semitism in this one, though it generally seems impossible for him to make a film without long stretches of insane levels of suffering and violence). Apocalypto‘s intensely surreal focus on its central premise and undeniable driving force make it a film I just can’t shake though, and to say otherwise would be dishonest. When I found out we were going to review this movie I realized that I’ve been slowly picking away at it in my head over the years since I first watched and that most of the review was more or less written.  There’s not many movies I can say that about, but for better or worse Apocalypto is one of them.

Apocalypto‘s a jungle exploitation action movie with nonstop bizarre, lurid violence made by a notorious Hollywood racist, but it’s also chock full of beautiful cinematography, and rides on one of the tightest, most kinetic narratives I’ve seen in a movie in a while… despite a bad script. The Amazon in hyper-saturated digital green looks great – the slow zooms into the understory make similar images on film in better movies look positively funereal by comparison. Yet they’re nonetheless the better movies.

Consider the script, deployed in Mayan, in service to surface-level verisimilitude that’s supposed to be “awesome” but that you’re definitely not supposed to look at too closely. I appreciate and endorse the idea that spoken language itself can and should be used to advance a film’s overall style agenda – that the affect of the sound of words can be more important overall to the world of a movie than “understanding what the characters are saying” (cf. Chewbacca). But you still need a good script if you’re trying to tell a story with language, and Apocalypto‘s is such that I had the feeling that the movie would be better with subtitles off. Compare with The Duellists, where Harvey Keitel’s bizarro Brooklyn accent positively rings out in uncaring conflict with the end of the 18th century – the disjunction fares better there because the script is actually pretty good. When I showed this text to Davey, he said his favorite line in the movie happens when a tree almost falls near a Mayan, and the Mayan yells, in Mayan Pacino-mode, “I’m walkin’ here!”

The narrative, on the other hand, is a there-and-back-again where the main guy gets dragged to the top of a ziggurat, gets saved by a deus ex machina, and then runs the whole way back. Structurally it’s super effective – the whole front half is like a spring tensing, setting up references and signposts, and then the back half is explosive movement back past a distorted version of everything that came before. I found it amazing and disorienting that this aspect of the movie was so well-constructed while the script itself was so throwaway.

In total I file this under “I don’t recommend it but I’m glad I watched it.” If you want “native man in a native-language-only mythical running movie,” Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) is a way, way better Inuit take on this model; for “power/violence/desecration in a hell reality” you might as well go all the way to Salo (1975); for Amazon mindmelts, I still like Embrace of the Serpent (2016). But if you feel this ButRic video (which remixes the movie’s best scene) as much as I do, and can stomach a gnarly curiosity, you might want to follow the feeling.

Candyman (1992)

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In Clive Barker-based movies, the monster’s a tragic/haunted Morpheus who sometimes has to kill or haunt dreams or torture or whatever to get their point across to some Keanu. These Morpheus characters in Barker are glum, professional, and pleasureless, but love to feel seen and understood. Barker movie plots often bracket the story to just this: Keanu’s disbelief/fear/curiosity eventually giving way to Morpheus’s red pill.

How this works is super consistent on a staging level. Here’s a Keanu inside the Matrix, surrounded by regular people doing normal stuff, and dear god is it boring, drab, and filled with petty behavior. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some more vivid world hidden behind it, where a Keanu can have a true purpose? Keanus are always in luck, because the Matrix always has a sketchy hinterland (a cemetery in Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) (1990); a locked attic room in Hellraiser (1987); an abandoned subway line in The Midnight Meat Train (2008); a graffiti-crushed housing project’s hidden room in Candyman), which is always inhabited by or leads to some kind of Morpheus (the Nightbreed; Pinhead; Mahogany; Candyman), who always eventually reveals a Keanu’s real place within the super-reality. Sometimes the super-reality is better, other times worse, but Keanu always ends up joining Morpheus in it, not defeating him; that’s never Keanu’s job.

Candyman is a pretty drunk rendition of all of this stuff. The super-reality its Keanu gets drawn into is one of cyclical fated reincarnation, that feeds on fear, sacrifice, and vengeance… or something. Candyman is a slave’s son, who invented a way to make shoes, and was a popular painter, but he got into an interracial marriage, and had his painting hand cut off by racists, who replaced it with a hook, and then covered him with honey, so he got stung to death by bees, and then the racists burned him, and because it was on the site of this housing project, he haunts it to this day… I guess. The editing and plotting are exactly this confusing too, and the middle “psychological thriller” portion where the Keanu is killing people (“but is it actually Candyman?”) is totally unconvincing; we know the Matrix is never “maybe just in Keanu’s head,” that it’s for sure definitely Candyman.

So what else do we get, other than some awkwardly-handled race stuff, a harsh 90s-exploitation rendition of “a housing project” and “poverty,” and some very arbitrary ghost rules around who gets comeuppance and when? A few great, bizarre images, and a gothic “obsessed love”/”burn the world” vibe not unlike Wuthering Heights (1992). Conceptually Candyman has nothing on Hellraiser – the mysterious alien presence of the cenobytes and the contours of an extra-dimensional realm of unknowable pleasure and pain are just way more fun to think about to me than the harsh, bleakly regular stuff here – but Candyman somehow manages to be more engrossing to actually watch. Maybe check back in on The Matrix (1999) first, and pair it with as many other Barker movies as you can handle – to me their effect is strongest and most interesting when they’re considered in aggregate, as instances of a platonic “Barker movie” form. Or for maximum flavor just check out Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) and move on.

I don’t really believe in spoilers for a 27 year old film but this review goes well beyond vague plot points. If this is scary to you, the short review of Candyman is check it out, it’s great.  

Candyman is about a white grad student named Helen who summons a ghost by saying his name five times while looking in the mirror.  Candyman is the spirit she summons, a black man from 1890 who was killed by a white mob for fathering a child with a white woman. He’s full of bees and has a hook for a hand and lives in an abandoned room in the Cabrini-Green projects. This room can only be accessed by climbing through the bathroom mirror in a layout that mirrors Helens apartment that was a housing project that’s been turned into upscale condos.  Candyman steals a black baby, kill her middle class black friend, and gets her locked up in a mental asylum telling Helen that if she ‘believes in him’ that it’ll all end.  The movie ends with her crawling through a burning mound of garbage made by the residents of Cabrini Green with the stolen baby in her arms, saving the baby but dying in the process.  Horror movies from the late 80s early 90s tended to be unique if they had even a hint of intentional subtext but Candyman bucks the trend and has actual text out the wazoo.

Admittedly, this is pretty dicey territory for two white dudes from across the pond to take on.  The original Clive Barker story is set in Liverpool and is about class, a more quintessentially British preoccupation.  As much as I would have loved to see Candyman navigate a classic Upstairs Downstairs type of situation, moving it to the Chicago projects raises a lot of questions about who gets to tell these stories. While Candyman is told from a white perspective and would have benefited from an African American writer and director (something which we’ll get in the upcoming Jordan Peele produced remake/sequel) this movie by no means enters Dances With Wolves territory, and can be chalked up to people doing the best that they could with the resources they had at the time (i.e. a studio system that would balk at financing black films).

The movie can be read as a story about how we can make communities invisible or abstract  when the idea that they’re made of people becomes inconvenient. While Helen is wandering willy nilly through Cabrini-Green, something she is able to do because she pretends to be a cop, she doesn’t seem super interested in the conditions of the building or the people living in them.  That a woman was brutally murdered in the room she’s investigating is a distant concern compared to the idea that it maybe has a connection to an urban legend and would make good fodder for her grad school thesis. The baby Helen saves in the end? It was her fault Candyman stole it in the first place and when she dies it reads more as penance for her creating the problem than the heroic act of a white savior.  Honestly there’s a train of thought I could follow that the ending is arguing for reparations. If this seems a little wild for a film that also features a toilet full of bees, let’s just say there’s a lot here to chew on and many different ways the bite can break down. If you’re looking something cerebral that works on multiple levels that’s also a straight-up horror classic then check it out.

Tommy Tricker & The Stamp Traveller (1988)

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Tommy Tricker is a children’s film about a society ordered on the basis of stamp collecting.  This is a world where all ages can identify a rare stamp on sight, and where everyone is constantly grifting and wheedling to get ahead to improve their collection.  Tommy Tricker is a young scam artist who excels in ripping people off by using stamps. The movie spends a lot of time building up Tommy Tricker’s character, only to pull a real switcheroo and have the actual lead character be some kid named Ralph who gets into black stamp magic and is granted the power to get animated, shrink down, and travel on a stamp. This takes him to both China, and more notably Australia, which has funnier stereotypes.

Though there are plenty of wild, inexplicable moments, these are pretty well-balanced with a lot of grind, where you’re watching the movie manage its pieces in a fairly normal way while you’re waiting for the good stuff.  While there is a specific type of thrill when you realize for instance that Ralph’s parents don’t seem to know or care that he has been missing for weeks, followed by Ralph’s father’s blood-curdling scream when he suddenly appears in front of them, I found sadly that these moments were eclipsed by the grind getting to them.

I definitely don’t believe that good art necessarily has be connected to how well it achieves its intentions.  We have plenty of master classes in greatness achieved by creating a desired effect, but the rarer and potentially more powerful finds are the movies where you’re called on to create a “house effect” of your own, transforming a bunch of ill-considered choices into a meaningful and enjoyable experience.  Tommy Tricker toes the line into this kind of experience, but unfortunately the movie’s ability to coast by as a just-good-enough children’s film handicaps it. This innate understanding of a simple form keeps it from getting to the heights of a Roar, or The Room, or one of Neil Breen’s films, etc., movies where the allegiance of their intentions can have more in common with a reflex test at the doctor’s than a carefully-made plan.

There are some very inspired moments. The depth of attention Tommy Tricker pays to stamp collecting is bonkers, and everything in Australia is great, and the film operates on a different level – a highlight here is when a character “driven mad by having all of his zoo animals poisoned” chains Tommy Tricker to a didgeridoo in a pen with a bunch of “lying kangaroos.” On the whole though, I feel like this one is strictly for the curiosity heads. The movie’s director made another film called The Peanut Butter Solution, which while i think has some of the same problems as this one, I’d recommend more as it has a deeper, wilder undercurrent that comes from subbing out stamp collecting for prepubescent body horror. While there can be transcendence in ignorance of form and quality, this film as a whole reminded me of watching a meandering improv set, one that has moments of brilliance and a strangely singular tone, but is ultimately buried under a cloud of directionless noodling.

Rock Demers produced 22 movies in the “Tales for All” series between 1984 and 2004. I’ve seen “Tales for All” #2, Michael Rubbo’s The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), maybe ten times and I absolutely recommend it. It’s a character caper with seriously convoluted plotting, endless, strange non-sequiturs, and a visual humor that casually edges as readily into the slapstick as the nightmarish; its “fully-realized but completely mysterious world”-mode connects it to everything from The Room (2003), to Nightbreed (1990), to Peewee Herman, to Paper Rad. The most accurate description of the movie I have is: It’s fun to ask people to watch it, and then ask them to describe it to you. “Tales for All” #7, Tommy Tricker & the Stamp Traveller, is Michael Rubbo’s second contribution to the series (of four total), and I loved this one too.

Tommy Tricker takes place on a planet Earth similar to this one, except that all people are inordinately interested, each for their own reasons, in stamps or the mail. Many people collect stamps for their beauty, or to take pride in their rarity; others deal stamps as a speculative commodity; some have pen pals; one guy tries to commit mail fraud. There’s also a small hobo subculture of people who travel the earth by casting a spell that embeds them on a stamp for the duration of its mail-time, to be transformed back into a person on arrival.

The basic plot, unifying an episodic collection of on-location hijinks shot throughout suburban Canada, Australia, and China, is that a kid trades his hothead Dad’s coolest stamp to Tommy Tricker, and eventually figures out that he can use stamp travel to get to Australia, where he suspects he’ll be able to recover a book of extremely rare stamps, which he hopes to bring home to mollify Dad… got that? As in The Peanut Butter Solution, there’re so many unnecessary details, quirks, asides, and unanswered questions that I’m tempted to go ham and add a second post listing my favorite fifty, and possibly a third with a deep dive on the rules, physics, and various implications of stamp travel. (Me, on stage in a dark and silent auditorium, addressing no one: “And I will, if anyone is actually interested.”)

I found the movie notably more coherent on rewatch. I’m reminded that as a kid I’d view movies by “having them on,” and familiarity with the characters and “what happens” would become both assumed and total throughout all parts of a viewing, such that any given movie’s scenes could be watched in any order, partially, and so on. I appreciate that Tommy Tricker feels structured to anticipate this immersed, kid-style repetitive viewing mode, and I enjoy the particular kind of confusion it creates for me, as an adult viewer, who now sits down and watches things straight through, and usually just once.

Harms February Watchlist

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It was a Feb and there were a lot of movies:

Out of Sight  

I didn’t really like this movie the second time around, good performances across the board but the dialogue never felt as sharp as I felt it should be.  Had a tough time with the cross section of fun criminal action and the rape-y sub- and fore-text. Movie has a lot of drift but not a lot at the center.

Oceans 11

Couldn’t figure out if this was a rewatch or something I was seeing for the first time.  The dialogue snaps, the performances are great, and the heist is good as hell.

Paddington 2

Last time I watched this with the wife she fell asleep in 5 minutes. Had better luck, with her getting to the climactic train chase before she hit the Z’s.  No real revelations from the 3rd(!) viewing but still good. Realized that I think about the husband hurling his pregnant wife stomach-first towards revolving doors in Paddington part one on a weekly basis.

Old Man and a Gun

Really beautiful breezy film about a dude who expresses his love of life through robbing banks and breaking out of jail.  In my memory of the film every scene is at sunset which isn’t the case but gives you primer on the lense I remember it through. Robert Redford’s last film, it works as an end of an era piece and as a thank you to the world for letting him do what he loves.  One of the nicest breakdowns of passion I’ve seen in a while: doing what you love (robbing banks) will have consequences (going to jail) but if you treat dealing with the consequences (breaking out of jail) with the same passion that you do the things you love (robbing banks), pretty soon you’ll be robbing banks again (doing what you love).  I’d be remiss to not mention that Sissy Spacek is in it as well, and she’s incredible.

High Flying Bird

Super compelling and sharp film with a bonkers performance from André Holland.   Thought about it a lot for about a week after but having a tough time thinking of anything to say about it now, nothing wrong with a movie burning bright and fast though and I would still recommend it.

The Meyerowitz Stories (new and selected)

High marks for this Baumbach beaut.  Incredibly funny movie that’s got a lot to say about the wake of “being an artist”, but is mostly a well drawn portrait about the invisible lines that connect family, for better or worse.  Lots of good scenes of Adam Sandler trying to park in Manhattan.

Deadpool 2

Watched again because I wanted to see what Mandys take on Deadpool was; her take: “Deadpool is not annoying he’s just a regular man.”  Realized that one of the reasons these movies work for me is that when his mask is off he never smiles and always looks like he’s in pain while he compulsively jokes.  

Dude Where’s My Car

Ended up watching this one due to a game of high stakes movie selection chicken with Dani B.  Has some funny bits but basically terrible. Rented it from the library and picked up a copy of Straw Dogs at the same time in an attempt to throw the librarian off the scent.  

Alita Battle Angel

Had a very nice time watching this deeply imperfect movie in the theatre.  A lot of what’s good besides the character of Alita you can find in the backgrounds and edges if you’d like my expert opinion on how to watch.  Great crowd scenes, often populated by several dads roaming freely, or ‘loose dads’ of which there are presumably a lot 500 years from now. Pretty much every character and performance in the movie is a waste except for the motion capture performance for Alita by Rosa Salazar which is weirdly super compelling.  Lots of robo dismemberment and cool super violent future sports round this bad boi out into a winner.

Ant Man and the Wasp

I basically like all these movies and this one isn’t an exception.  Michael Pena is super funny, lots of stuff gets shrunk down or embiggened, and an ant plays the drums.  It’s not Black Panther, it’s a run of the mill fun Marvel movie. I dunno man we’re all adults here, at this point in time you should know if this is your cup of tea or not.

Incredibles 2

I loved the character design in this movie, there’s a kind of marriage between the doll like construction and hyper expressiveness that really worked for me.  Otherwise it’s a totally good well-constructed movie that I didn’t care about while watching.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

Watched on Valentines day as a part of a cultural exchange program with the wife where she watches a horror movie in October and I watch a Rom Com in February.  Julia Roberts at the height of her powers, playing a character that’s imminently unlikable transformed into peak likability by her crystal clear performance. It’s tough to name another actor who is as good as Roberts at conveying a character’s inner life through constant small touches. She’s as well gracious enough as an actor that she steps back to help Rupert Everett steal every scene they’re in together.  The scene where he leads the family in singing “I say a little prayer” is an all-timer, both for its expression of joie de vivre but also for how he completely takes her apart while doing it. Giamatti later shows up and gives her sage advice, which sealed the deal for me.

Star Wars – The Last Jedi

Watched this again on the anniversary of my brothers death, who loved Star Wars but didn’t get to see it.  A strange movie that I think is more laudable for its weighty themes than for the movie itself. I realized while watching that a big reason these most recent films aren’t that great is that while the original Star Wars trilogy was a conversation between George Lucas and what he loved as a child, mashed up with a heaping of interrogation into Joseph Campbell’s mythic archetypes, the newer films are mostly a conversation with how we feel about Star Wars.  I do think this one finds the right themes to elevate, and find the last third to be very moving and thematically complicated in a way most blockbusters aren’t, but understand what it’s missing which is the ability to tell a new story (weirdly, also one of the largest themes in the film). I wish I’d gotten to talk with Jonny about it, but can’t so instead I’ll just cherish my memory of him spoiling the ending of Rogue One for me with such speed and lack of guile, that I was both completely taken aback and extremely impressed.

Behind the Curve

Documentary about flat-earthers which had a very empathetic and kind angle on them.  I always felt like it was odd that I hadn’t run across more flat-earthers in the noise scene but after watching this movie I got a pretty good idea of how it’s a pretty complete scene in of itself, which seems like it could be pretty fun to be a part of if you’re interested in believing the earth is flat.  Has a lengthy subplot where flat-earthers do scientific experiments that continually prove the world is round, which is very nice. Strong possibility that I’ll be ashamed of watching this film in 9 years or whatever, when we elect a flat-earther as president.

Recent bubul movies part 1

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We decided we’re gonna do periodic recaps of the movies we’ve been watching, so here’s everything I saw since my movies 2018 post; Davey’s list in a separate post shortly.

Recommended

Burning (2018) – tonally on-point Korean adaptation of a Murakami short story, about typical Murakami male-oriented takes on topics like cooking dinner, sitting in silence, being isolated but horny, and “the unknowable.” basically a slob gets a crush on a girl, who ends up with a snob, then disappears. every single scene has a twist or flourish of some kind, and the movie has a twist halfway through, giving it a micro/macro wriggling quality which I felt was formally impressive and satisfying in a way that the story itself maybe isn’t. I don’t like Murakami’s writing very much but did feel that it was majorly elevated by such an aggressively stylized but faithful rendition in movie format. Shoutout Pat for recommending!

Phantom Thread (2017) – I loved this one, a Daniel Day Lewis “never stop working and never leave the house” movie with an amazing script that’s cozy and jammed with detail. Recommended.

Roar (1981) – mindblowing; we wrote about this

The Rules of the Game (1939) – incredible OG that def doesn’t need my endorsement. Robert Altman said “I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game.”

Tommy tricker & the stamp traveller (1988) – watched this twice this week, expect more about it

Worth watching

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – we wrote about this last week

A Simple Favor (2018) – Davey and I had a long email exchange abt this one that maybe we should distill and post – a highly plastic and absolutely demented Paul Feig suburban thriller, recommended to anyone who likes mutant “wtf even is this” movies that are way too broken for their genres, in the vein of Grown Ups 2 (2013). Recommended(???????).

The Duelists (1977) – we wrote about this one. Bumped to “Recommended” as a double feature following Barry Lyndon.

The old man and the gun (2018) – Robert Redford ruled (RIP) and he’s well-deployed here; Casey Affleck is as good as ever at being listless and depressed (cf. Manchester by the Sea (2016)). this movie’s slightly overcooked and high-budget in a way that feels “awards”-oriented to me, but is still fun and cute. with Tom Waits, who seems to be riffing off-script, Danny Glover, yet again in old-timer mode, and a regal Sissy Spacek as “the girlfriend.”

Support the girls (2018) – fun new Andrew Bujalski restaurant movie with a strong ensemble centered on Regina Hall. recommended, tho not as good as his best-of-decade last one, Computer Chess (2013).

Everything else

Adjustment Bureau (2011) – Matt Damon is trying to run for office and also kiss some lady he met in a bathroom; the angels-as-bureaucrats insist he choose one. plays like a less visually interesting, less dangerous Dark City (1998). a PKD adaptation; it’s bad.

Black Rain (1989) – ugly Ridley Scott movie with Michael Douglas as a racist asshole cop in Osaka. Not recommended.

(Cock) Blockers (2018) – I didn’t realize that John Cena and Channing Tatum were different people until Davey corrected me, which explained why this was not as good as I expected it to be

Crooked House (2017) – not great, not terrible Julian Fellowes murder mystery with a legitimately bonkers ending. unlike his best stuff (Gosford Park (2001)) it’s a bit bleak and not very fun.

Deliverance (1972) – we wrote abt this

The Duchess (2008) – Kiera Knightley gets into a bad 18th century marriage with Ralph Fiennes and has to figure out ways to persevere. Featuring tons of huge wigs, and at least a couple shots of carriages rolling up to mansions.

Good Manners (2017) – Brazilian “newborn baby werewolf” movie in the same pocket as Let the right one in (2008), but a little more twee and a little less goth

The favourite (2018) – I liked it and it’s a great period movie with the always-killer Rachel Weiss pitching a perfect game, but it’s got a “Lanthimos in Hollywood” feel that I found a little sad, it’s not his best one. Hopefully there’s a resurgent interest in Hot Fuzz (2007) now that everyone in America knows who Olivia Colman is, and in Dogtooth (2009) now that everyone knows who Lanthimos is.

Galaxy Guardians 2 (2017) – pretty boring Chris Pratt daddy issues movie. I didn’t realize Chris Pratt was different from Ryan Reynolds until Davey told me, when he read this post’s draft.

IJ raiders of lost ark (1981) – the best part of this is the Karen Allen bar scene, it’s otherwise pretty much a montage of typical Spielberg obstacle courses, chases, spills, and mini-games. Imo this whole franchise is “just okay”.

Minority Report (2002) – stars a supercomputer you control by dancing around with a nintendo powerglove, that reads data off of glass floppy disks, and is operated by cornball later-era Tom Cruise, completely misreading the movie and trying to make every scene Mission Impossible-style urgent and physical. a PKD adaptation; it’s bad.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) – absolute waste of time Agatha Christie adaptation, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, in what Jeff calls the “what a cast!” genre. nobody is good in it. for “train book made into a weird dumb movie,” “take” The Polar Express (2004).

Night Moves (1975) – I watched this after we watched Roar to get a better sense of what Melanie Griffith’s life on film had been like so far, and… she’s kinda in an exploitation role in this one too. Night Moves is a bleak Gene Hackman noir, but not as bleak as Chinatown (1974), not as noir as The Long Goodbye (1973), and not as Gene Hackman as The Conversation (1974), but is still pretty good.

Paddington 2 (2018) – the best Wes Anderson movie in ages

Skate Kitchen (2018) – nice relaxing movie about teenage girls skating the lower east side and being young, for some reason featuring Jaden Smith. shoutout Bennett for recommending!

Smuggler (2011) – a Katsuhito Ishii (Redline, Taste of Tea) movie. it’s got some good stuff in it but is overall a bit like an unfun, unpleasant side story in the John Wick universe.

Spiderman spiderverse (2018) – I had fun watching this but don’t remember a single goddamn thing about it

Taj mahal travellers on tour (1973) – watched this at Spectacle, tho it’s widely available (ubuweb; youtube). a painter’s-eye camera follows Japan’s OG delay jammers on european/asian tour, fully 30 years before Double Leopards et al popularized touring USA basements with this style during the Bush era. untranslated, and with a Don Cherry sequence where his interview is completely obfuscated by a Japanese overdub, it’s pure image and sound with occasional English stage-setting placards. super beautiful and dialed-in in the mode of Crystal Voyager (1973), and in a “languid, abstract images foregrounding jams” mode not unlike Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968); strongly recommended if you like that stuff, guaranteed extremely boring otherwise.

subUrbia (1996) – watched this to accompany A Scanner Darkly; it appears to be the “forgotten” Linklater movie or at least the only “100% definitely bad” one. Giovanni Ribisi is an angsty “writer” teen who’s friends with racist assholes and, somehow also, a riot grrl; they hang out together drinking behind a Texas gas station until Parker Posey shows up in a limo with their old high school classmate. It’s like a worse Mallrats (1995), is not to be confused with Penelope Spheeris’s excellent Suburbia (1983), and is not recommended.

Vanity fair (2004) – we wrote about this

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) – typically bad & plastic Netflix-produced movie, this time abt haunted art that attacks art world stereotypes. aptly starring Jake Gylenhaal, the least-organic screen presence in movies.

Venom (2018) – love Tom Hardy and will watch him in anything but I didn’t like this as much as everyone on the TL; it seemed like an absolutely normal superhero movie to me.

Cabin Boy (1994) – we wrote abt this.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

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This is 3. a “Keanu in the matrix” movie, 2. a Linklater “friends partying and riding around” movie, and 1. a Philip K Dick adaptation:

1. I was 23 when A Scanner Darkly (2006) came out, and remember being disappointed by it, not having any idea what it was supposed to have been about. How could partying with your friends be ugly, unromantic, and desperate? Where do good times ever ride a precarious death-wave of paranoia and addiction? That certainly wasn’t how things were in my dilapidated punk house.

But damn, rewatching this, it felt clear that I didn’t get it because I just hadn’t experienced adult doldrums yet, or seen my reflection in the desperation, powerlessness, and chaos that flow beneath it, or understood the temptation to withdraw from the world into something small, selfish, and strange. This haunted, lonely “my shitty dream is real”-quality is, for me, the main characteristic of Dick’s writing, and Linklater “nails it.”

2. I like Linklater’s “friends partying and riding around” movies – Dazed and Confused (1993), Slacker (1990), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – because I too like partying with my friends and riding around. These movies remind me how my friends make me feel more like myself.

A Scanner Darkly is unique in this group because nobody’s having fun and the situation’s bad. Keanu’s depressed; his drug friends are trollish, unpleasant, en route to the bottom. The movie opens with Rory Cochrane (the stoner dude in Dazed & Confused) with hallucinated bugs pouring out of his hair, furiously itching. Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior (both annoying “bad boy” actors, both here as annoying wastoids) are in drug-bender dangerous behavior/conspiracy mode, and Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder claims to be too coked-out to bear human contact. Prescient Alex Jones cameo too… woof.

All of Linklater’s buddy movies (including this one) are regional, of a time, and zoomed into a small group of people, and they all do the same trick of flipping that, to be from anywhere, timeless, “archetypical.” Whether anyone “likes” Linklater, I think, has to do mainly with whether his “archetypes” are relevant to their experience, and the extent to which they “agree” with what he ascribes to them. Mostly he does this for sunshine-y stuff, but here’s an absolutely bleak and negative one to think about. What if he’d made more movies in this tonal range?

3. There’s an early scene I found surprisingly moving where Keanu narrates the situation so far. It shows him remembering an earlier point in the house with his wife and daughters, in which he hits his head on a cabinet, and says:

“How’d I get here? The pain – so unexpected and undeserved – had cleared away the cobwebs… I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… nothing would ever change, nothing new could ever be expected, it had to end. And it did…”

It cuts to the present, cluttered, dingy state of the house, and he continues:

“Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

I love the vibration between “I got bored and decided to give up my family, and here’s where it got me” (into a hell zone), and the broader PKD setup, where Keanu is doomed, has no agency, and never sees the full picture anyway. He’s a cop, tasked with surveilling himself and his friends (unbeknownst to them), but his boss is pretending to be his girlfriend (unbeknownst to him), and the entire operation is made to feed his addiction and paranoia intentionally, grooming him for sacrifice to some other purpose entirely beyond his awareness. You don’t get a darker “Keanu in the matrix” movie than that.

Richard Linklater is someone who I’ve grown to admire more and more as a filmmaker as I’ve gotten older.  He has a curious ability to zero in on the mundane spaces where you wouldn’t find the traditional story beats in a movie, expanding them to bring in realities you don’t often see represented in film.  This is especially pronounced today, where it seems like entire film types have been “perfected:” notice the easy-going structural, tonal homogeneity in Marvel films, or any time you’re watching a film that has the same lines from so many other films in the past, like an echo of an echo of a movie.  Linklater’s able to sidestep all of that, opting instead to give attention to and elevate moments that are typically mundane and neglected, though hyper-shared. Playing to this strength, A Scanner Darkly could have been really interesting, but unfortunately Linklater uses it as an excuse to experiment by trying to adopt some of PKD’s strengths instead.  The results lead me to believe, that Linklater is lacking in Fake Fake energy.

It’s been a while since I read A Scanner Darkly but I remember thinking it was good but not one of his best.  But if there’s one area where the book has an advantage it’s that the whole thing wasn’t ding dang rotoscoped. There’s a specific feeling you get from Phillip K Dick’s novels, where you feel like you’re way too deep in whatever plot or system he’s got you trapped in – Linklater might have thought that filtering the whole film would have stuck you in this valley of mysterious structure, with the unusual technology doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The issue is that for a film to really get into your head, you should never see the hand that’s crafting it, and the rotoscoping is a heavy hand spread across the entire film.

The movie wouldn’t have worked without the rotoscoping either, unfortunately.  Way too much time is spent with Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson’s characters, both of whom seem to sense that this is their opportunity to experiment as well. They’re seemingly locked in a contest to see who can torpedo this film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, each blasting off acting solos completely disconnected from what’s going on.  They also highlight the limitations in the tech by using lots of “big faces” (shades of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where the unreality was used to much better ends). Winona Ryder fares better, but is cursed with an extremely thin character. Keanu Reeves ends up being the most watchable and compelling, his minimalist acting style clashing the least frequently with the animation, occasionally even cutting through the fog and connecting emotionally, but with no one to play off.  I’m a huge booster of Keanu’s work but I’ll readily admit that that’s really not where you want him to be; he excels in creating connections and servicing the story, but isn’t a real “carry the movie” kind of actor. It should be noted that in his band Dogstar, he’s the bassist, which is his pocket in acting as well – creating structure and form, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a movie about a nationwide drug crisis that’s slowly killing the US, A Scanner Darkly felt weirdly non-relevant.  The carefree attitude it uses to portray crippling addiction b/w the driving creative force of the film being experimentation (and not addiction) doesn’t really play as well in a time that in some aspects closely reflects the world it depicts.  Nevertheless the movie weirdly comes together in the last ten minutes or so. It begins to quote from the book’s more memorable passages while Reeves’s character’s life falls apart, trained into addiction by one system of control and then sent off to work creating the root of his addiction, in a ruse of being cured. The rotoscoping gets more interesting and ends up creating a somewhat mind-out-of-body experience here, by subtly tweaking the effect we’ve gotten used to, causing deep confusion in the mind’s eye.  The movie ends with the afterword from the book where Dick lists all the names of the people he loved that were addicts coupled with what they lost, both an extremely sad and beautiful moment. Then the screen fades to black, jaunty music plays, and cast and crew are shown in font that wouldn’t look out of place in a show on Nickelodeon.

The Duellists (1977)

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Ridley Scott’s first film The Duellists is a deep dive into the dueling subculture prominent in the French military of the early 1800s.  It’s almost entirely about two guys: Armand (Keith Carradine) is pretty ambivalent about the whole dueling thing but continues to participate because it’s more or less the thing you did back then. Carradine brings a really nice laid back vibe to proceedings, complete with California accent and something of a light Wiley Wiggins vibe.  The other guy, Gabriel (Harvey Keitel) brings a heavy Harvey Keitel vibe and Brooklyn accent, which gives the film a real nice “East coast vs. West coast” feel. There’s lots of great early 1800s fashion, a fact underlined when the sparse narration refers to “the passing of 5 years and a change in military fashion,” after which cute braids are replaced by large hats.  Which is to say, the film is both very concerned with period trappings and not taking itself too seriously.

After the initial duel is kicked off, we follow both men through the years as Gabriel continually looks for new opportunities to get into duels with Armand.  According to military rules they can only duel when they aren’t actually actively at war, and are the same rank. This leads to a beautiful recurring gag: we see Armand at ease, learn his rank, see him have a conversation where someone mentions that Gabriel was recently promoted to the same rank, see Armand find out Gabriel’s in town, and then see him get roped into a duel.  And the duels are great, escalating in weaponry and danger, and full of good duel jokes, a style of humor I was barely aware of before this film, but of which I now crave more.

In between the many duels are portraits of the life of a French soldier in the early 1800s, snapshots which run the gamut from having a pipe with your buds, talking about how cool it is that you’re going to war (so you don’t have to fight a duel with Gabriel), to freezing to death in Russia.  There’s a kind of underlying madness to all of them, which helps make Armand’s obligation to keep dueling even though he’s just not that into it plausible. This is a world where there are rules to be followed that are designed to stave off the world’s brutality and chaos, even if those same aspects are the byproducts of the rules themselves. This is perfectly illustrated in a moment where Gabriel is told to walk west at the beginning of a duel and he quickly scans the sky just to make sure he knows exactly where due west is before heading out, neatly saying everything the film is telling you about its “rules over life” mentality in a wordless moment.

In terms of films about two dudes, one who can’t get enough of dueling the other, and another who is just not that into it anymore, The Duellists delivers big time.  It’s got a pretty strong “one or no duels is probably enough” message which we could all use, but more importantly it’s a super funny weird-ass period piece that features Harvey Keitel wearing cute braids.  Great film for those of you consumed with vengeance or deeply exasperated by the people seeking it.

Sometimes someone makes something that too closely and uncritically borrows or even openly steals from someone else’s idea. This is “bad” in two ways – it’s bad for the original, which the derivative cheapens thru lesser repetition, and it’s bad for the derivative, because strongly-foregrounded influence obscures whatever unique material might actually be hiding in there. Ridley Scott has made 25 movies, but his first one here is stone-cold Barry Lyndon (1975) worship straight off the rip. Made just two years before, that movie’s influence is absolutely present and unsynthesized here, in a manner that in painting, comics, or fiction, would read as hackish and embarrassing in the worst and most obvious way.

I happily found the results much more complicated here. Barry Lyndon is an optically mind-blowing but dramatically unconcerned piece of source material, and Ridley Scott is a decent stylist who tries to make popular movies with oomf and pizazz. So on one hand, The Duellists is super interesting and strange when viewed with its relationship to its inspiration directly in mind: The zoom-outs, the narrator, the Nora Brady appearance, the occurrence of the word “chevalier,” the lighting, cinematography, and even character voicing are all at least a full grade below, but the sum it manages is “bizarro remix,” not “wack bite;” it’s definitely “in conversation,” an uncanny illumination of what sets Barry Lyndon apart from pretty much everything. And on the other hand, The Duellists is a period story with oomf and pizazz that’s fun and funny and not like Barry Lyndon at all.

In that movie, we have an absolutely opaque Harvey Keitel (inexplicably in full Brooklyn mode, though in Napoleon’s army in the late 18th/early 19th century) picking a fight with Keith Carradine over some bullshit, and insisting on resolving it with a duel. The duel keeps getting interrupted and punted to a later date because one or the other guy keeps getting too injured to continue dueling, but without dying completely enough for the fight to be resolved. Carradine understandably gets super bummed every time Keitel pops back up to finish the engagement, and man does he keep popping back up over the course of changing circumstance and rank. The duel goes on for 16 years. No lessons are learned and nothing changes.

My favorite part was how nice the the sword-fighting felt. The sabres have a danger and weight that feels unusually rare, to the point of making me feel alert to how choreographed and risk-free sword-fighting usually looks on screen. There’s a part where a chunk of Carradine’s shoulder is hanging off, and another part where he nervously sneezes; both great. There’s also a gruesome “winter hellzone Russia death march” scene that’s got a Dreams (1990) / Marketa Lazarova (1967) vibe, with everyone staggering around wrapped in burlap and clutching themselves, which I always love to see.

I tried to get a better, non-Lyndon-oriented feel for this one on a by watching Black Rain (1989), Scott’s “Michael Douglas as a complete asshole NYC bad-boy cop in Osaka” movie (extremely bad), and The Duchess (2008), an unrelated 18th century peerage movie with an emphasis on gorgeous wigs where Kiera Knightley gets into a bad marriage with Ralph Fiennes (who I love and am probably about to watch in Wuthering Heights (1992)) (not bad but not great). But I’m already over word count here so I’ll abruptly conclude with the basic verdict that The Duellists is a relatively very good period movie (though it’s not the best one as much as it tries), as well as a relatively very good Ridley Scott movie, and that I would like to see a supercut of all period drama scenes where “a carriage rolls up to a manor house, and someone gets out of it while the servants watch expectantly.”

Roar (1981)

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Most writing online abt Roar is largely “what a crazy production”-focused. The movie is “about” Dad writing/directing/starring in & forcing his family to be in a movie abt how living with big cats is beautiful & chill, when the irl fact is that it is not, as evidenced by the numerous, frequently gruesome injuries sustained by cast and crew. The banner factoid is that Speed (1994) director Jan de Bont needed 120 stitches after he was “scalped” by a lion working as cinematographer on this one. So on one level the movie is a lurid curiosity – a manipulatively-edited but absolutely transparent document of an abusive, violent, lived bad idea. This is clearly manifested on screen by everyone except Dad being constantly “not acting” terrified of the mortal danger they’re clearly in, as the jaunty soundtrack plays on. I don’t put on movies just to watch fucked up documents of irl suffering, so if it feels like that’s the unavoidable way you’d end up viewing this one, probably pass.

But if you can get past that, there’s a hugely hypnotic dreamtime energy very much on deck here. The movie’s central predicament is more harrowing and strange than any “animal threat” movie I can think of – a family find themselves stranded at Dad’s river research treehouse (because Dad forgot when they get to the airport), and they are somehow 100% unprepared for the realization that the treehouse is dripping with lions – which is presented as a fun misunderstanding? In terms of non-stop alien habitat and stalking threat, there’s more wild stuff here than any animal doc I’ve seen, including Grizzly Man (2005), but none of it is grounded by anything like a plot or character development. Instead you get two classic nightmares paired and stretched to feature-length: Dad trying to get home on time but making impossibly slow progress, the family endlessly running away inside a house but never getting anywhere. There’s also a “Dad’s best friend” character who repeatedly, disbelievingly tells Dad he’s crazy and the situation is way too dangerous (the only relatable perspective in the movie, presented as demented comic relief), and a barely-there subplot about poachers (a lion kills them).

The “plot” at the treehouse is looping, edge-of-sleep horror presented as straight-up family fun comedy, where the family members repeatedly hide, run away, endlessly lose track of and find each other, fall asleep, wake up surrounded by lions, run away, fall asleep again… now it’s day, now night, now day… they run up to the roof, fall off into the water, are inexplicably dry again in some new room, then back up on the roof falling in, then running up, again, and again, and again… as lions are continuously surging through all openings, pressed tightly together as they trample thru the treehouse’s small rooms, destroying furniture, smashing down doors, hanging from rafters, swatting and sniffing, and every vehicle is meeting its doom – at least three boats and a motorcycle get sunk, tigers playfully knock over cyclists, the car catches a flat – and anything humans get inside of, such as a barrel, icebox, cabinet, or locker, is knocked over and smashed by lions, all proceeding as if it’s totally normal hijinks, a comedic misunderstanding that “the lions are actually our friends,” with a jutting, unexpectedly beautiful, distant shot of Dad riding his bike across the plains at sunset and singing to himself, Fitzcarraldo-level demonic in his lack of concern or actual urgency around his family’s obvious mortal danger. When he gets home, everyone’s fine, and the movie pretty much just ends. Forget fakes like Mandy (2018) or whatever; this is the true bonkers psychedelic reality-melter material, what my own actual anxiety dreams are in fact regularly like. And I do for sure put on movies that go to that space and  strongly recommend this one to anyone else who does too.

Roar is perfect.  The story of a man late to pick up his estranged family from the airport quickly spirals into the fun zone when they show up at his home to find him gone, and replaced with 50-60 or so untrained lions, tigers and jaguars.  Over the course of the next 90 or so minutes we get to experience a cool world where large cats party in houses, on boats, on skateboards, and in the wild, while humans bide their time hiding in refrigerators and running for their lives. The film also stars a cool elephant who acts as something of a boss character for the family each time they try to make a break for it.  While this scene is playing out, the father, portrayed as something of a way less competent Grizzly Man for big cats, goes to the airport, realizes his family is not there, then makes his way back to house.

Though it can seem like the set up for a horror movie on paper, Roar is aimed at the family – boasting a PG rating, inappropriately uplifting music playing while the family is being hunted, and adorable baby lion footage to shore up its bonafides.  Contrasting this happy go lucky vibe with the near constant mauling of everyone on screen creates an incredibly deep reality chasm, a delightful zone where we as the viewer can let go of everything we think we know about human behavior.

This kind of unreality gives a nice texture to the near-constant violence hoisted on the cast by the gaggle of playful lions.  Roar has the reputation of being the most dangerous movie ever made, with something like 70-100 injuries incurred over the course of its 11 year production.  It’s all on the screen as well, bringing a visceral realness that contrasts powerfully with the actors’ performances, not so much remarkable for the believability they bring to their roles, but that they are able to believably affect artificiality in the midst of footage that otherwise can feel very dangerous and very real at all.

This purity of vision lifts Roar above being just a particularly rowdy nature documentary or pseudo-snuff curiosity.  A large part of the joy it creates was feeling the waves rippling through the film made by the rapid oscillation between “this is a movie” to “these animals do not care that this is supposed to be a movie.”  Intended or not, this deeply bakes the themes of nature versus man’s ambition into the film, and intended or not, Roar makes a very compelling case for man’s overall helplessness and folly. The end result is one of the funniest, most insane movies I’ve seen in a long time, and everyone should see it.