Two for Tuesday
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Author Archives: Reid Mukai
Saturday Matinee: The Elephant Man
RIP David Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025)
The Elephant Man (1980) is not often considered one of David Lynch’s masterpieces, though it’s one of his most critically acclaimed films, having been nominated for eight Academy Awards and winning a BAFTA Award for Best Film. It also happens to be a film of great personal significance because it was my first David Lynch film experience.
Though only six, I still remember seeing a daytime screening with my mom and being disturbed yet fascinated by the stark black and white imagery and lead character (played by John Hurt and loosely based on Joseph Merrick). Though I may have been too young to follow the plot, the film’s emotional journey and compassionate message left a lasting impression.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: The Legend Of Billie Jean
What Went Right With… The Legend Of Billie Jean (1985)?
By WWRW
Source: What Went Right With
The 1980s were a crap time for politics and economics but in terms of entertainment, the decade was responsible for some great movies, especially those geared toward kids and teens. Most ’80s movies like Back To The Future and Breakfast Club are well known, then there’s the second-tier which includes not-so-famous-but-still-recognisable stuff such as Flight Of The Navigator and WarGames. But then there’s the section below that; films that have now become cult classics because the mainstream were either unaware or too snobbish to watch them when they were first released. The Legend Of Billie Jean is one of these forgotten gems; it has nothing to do with the classic Michael Jackson song, but it’s a fantastic teen film that’s unfortunately underexposed and underrated, even to this day. Starring Helen Slater (Secret Of My Success, Ruthless People) and an early role for Christian Slater (Heathers, Young Guns) (no relation by the way) the story is about sister and brother Billie Jean Davy and Binx Davy played by Helen and Christian respectively. After Binx’ beloved Honda Elite scooter is vandalised by local bullies, Jean asks the alpha bully’s father for $608 to repair it. It seems however, that being a prick runs in their family as the dad, Mr. Pyatt, will only hand over the money in exchange for sexual favours, which of course leads to refusal, and ends in an unintended shooting. Billie Jean, Binx, and her two friends then have to go on the run but infamy and fame go hand-in-hand with being an outlaw…
The Legend Of Billie Jean is all about how role models and heroes are made. Like Alex Rogan in The Last Starfighter, Billie Jean lives in a trailer park and isn’t someone who anyone would look up to. But, as she stands-up for what’s right and becomes a fugitive in the process, she becomes an inspiration to all teenagers and is even helped by them to evade the cops. Billie Jean is asked to autograph a newspaper, her Joan Of Arc-inspired haircut is copied by local teens and her image is adorned on t-shirts, caps, posters, frisbees, bumper stickers, and even airplane banners as she becomes the “legend” in the title. You could see this as a comment on how consumerism and capitalism is an unavoidable by-product of causes and activism, but that’s not the message here. This film is a precursor to the overrated Queen & Slim whose narrative essentially did the same thing but stereotypically and depressingly rather than upbeat and uplifting as is the case here. Unlike Queen & Slim, The Legend Of Billie Jean doesn’t just focus on the original “crime”. Whilst on her Texan Riviera outlaw odyssey, Billie Jean rescues a kid from his abusive father, and thus becomes a genuine hero akin to Supergirl.
Set in the height of summer in Corpus Christi, Texas, the cinematography isn’t Do The Right Thing (which made relatively cold days look blisteringly hot) and the direction isn’t something that stands-out either (although there’s a Larry Cohen-esque interviewing of what looks like real people in “Ocean Park Mall”). That being said, the look and feel is appropriate to the setting and the target audience. In terms of cast, Helen Slater is great as the principled lead character and her friends are an oddball mixture which includes Yeardly Smith (Maximum Overdrive) who most people will know as the voice of Lisa in The Simpsons. Richard Bradford is particularly believable as the rapey Mr. Pyatt who then sets-up a stall to sell Billie Jean merch, and the always likeable Peter Coyote plays the cop who isn’t just out for blood but the one bloke who’s looking to discover what really happened. Keith Gordon (Dressed To Kill, Christine) also plays a pre-Pretty In Pink love interest across the class divide.
Being an ’80s teen movie, there’s the obligatory mall scene (the fictional Ocean Park Mall is shot in Sunrise Mall in Corpus Christi which is sadly now closed), our protagonists somehow use toy walkie-talkies long-range, and there’s inept cops chasing but never catching our heroes. In terms of soundtrack, this isn’t a John Hughes movie so the music is a little bit ropey and too “old” for the intended target audience (Pat Benatar instead of Simple Minds) but that being said, now that almost four decades have passed, even crappy pop music of the day sounds tolerable.
The Legend Of Billie Jean has an unrealistic and idealist narrative; it’s a feel-good adventure rather than a depressing drama. It could also be seen as a Feminist film whether it was originally intended to be or not. Like a reverse of The Goonies or Stranger Things, the girls outnumber the boys here. With the female lead sticking-up for her brother as well and fighting against a male sexual assaulter, plus a screenplay that isn’t shy about menstruation, if it was made today, critics would be slobbering over it as it ticks all their boxes in regards to female empowerment. That being said, on Rotten Tomatoes, The Legend Of Billie Jean is rated at 40% which makes it sound like a sub-par, throwaway flick which it quite clearly isn’t. I think mainstream critics need their heads testing or need to recognise that their reviews were wrong. After all…
Fair Is Fair.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Neptune Frost
By Robert Daniels
Source: RogerEbert.com
“Neptune Frost,” the dense Afrofuturist film from co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, holds many resplendent identities at once: It’s a musical; it’s an intersex narrative; it’s a technological allegory espousing anticapitalist and anticolonialist views. It’s a collective dream coated in a blue lacquer dancing on the edge of something unrecognizable, something wholly transcendent. And it arrives with an exceptional display of bravura.
The film’s nimbleness, marked by a brazenness suggesting creators who allow their imaginations to be the moth that reaches for the stars, is apparent from the jump when the camera pans across the graveled gray and orange ridges of a mine. One of the miners, Tekno, beholds a chunk of coltan, the metal used to power our cellphones and other high-tech electronics, only to be summarily struck to death by the butt of a soldier’s gun. His grief-stricken brother Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse) cradles him as the other workers, accompanied by drums, with shovels hitting the ground for additional percussion, dance in mourning. This incident causes Matalusa to flee the mine, and a waking dream guides him to another dimension.
A similar, parallel vision, following the death of their aunt and a traumatic experience involving a pastor, pulls Neptune (Elvis “Bobo” Ngabo) away from their Rwandan village through the backroads of a country in upheaval. “I was born in my 23rd year,” explains Neptune in the film’s opening narration. And it’s not until Neptune transforms (this time played by Cheryl Isheja) that we figure out what exactly this ambiguous, yet potent line means.
Neptune is an intersex hacker exploring and disrupting binaries. They arrive in that other dimension, a village fed by a mysterious power source, to find Matalusa. There they discover a band of rebellious Black folks, such as Memory (Eliane Umuhire), Psychology (Trésor Niyongabo), and so forth who want to transform the world away from domineering colonialist powers, away from a totalitarian government known as the Authority, and out from one age into another. “Neptune Frost” demands your attention. Uzeyman’s luminous cinematography caresses black skin under blue and purple lights, allowing this talented group of actors to play to every corner of their innate beauty. The ingenious costumes by Cedric Mizero—a collection of wires, knobs, and hard drives—range from motherboard chic to a lightweight yet richly colored fabric that is elegant. The musical numbers, fusions of singer-songwriter Williams’ Afropunk style with atmospheric drones owing to Sun Ra, spring from the group so organically you immediately become fluent in their dynamic rhythms, moods, and tones.
While the artistry does dazzle, you never forget that “Neptune Frost” is a movie dedicated to the cause of liberation: a liberation of stolen resources and Black folks, and a freedom of the body. I found myself enraptured by the scenes of community building, of Africans bound together by a love for each other and a hope for the future moving toward revolutionary ends. The scenes of dance and happiness in this dimension, hidden away from white eyes (for the time being) is soul filling. In this ecstasy, in spite of an outside war-torn world, Neptune and Matalusa commit not just to the cause but to their shared spirit. Their bliss is idyllic, and therefore short lived. But it’s their willingness to challenge the Authority, through their romance and the acting of hacking, that serves as a battle cry against governments unwilling to serve their people.
While the logic guiding “Neptune Frost” is difficult to follow, this isn’t the kind of work you can sleepwalk through. It pushes the viewer. There are no wasted plot points, no unnecessary pieces of dialogue or needless landscapes. Every texture contains a million little stories. It is humbling to see two filmmakers so curious, and so creatively playful as to invite messiness and brilliance. In all its so muchness, “Neptune Frost” is a reminder of cinema’s infinite storytelling possibilities.
Watch Neptune Frost on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/neptune-frost
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
The Critical Surrealism of Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
By Andy Hageman
Source: Film Obsessive
There’s a new film by Miguel Llansó that is sheer originality and brilliance: Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway.
If you’ve already seen Llansó’s 2015 film Crumbs, you’ve experienced the cinemastery of which he and the teams he assembles are capable. If you’ve not yet seen Crumbs, well, then, this review holds two surprises for you.
The brilliance of Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway comes from its capacity to combine a radically eclectic selection of cultural aesthetics and tropes with a distinct vision and a theoretical political acumen. It’s a kind of pastiche with depth and texture. It’s cinema from an alternate universe in which David Lynch is an avid reader of Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Naomi Klein, and where Ethiopia holds a powerful place in the social imaginary.
I think it’s justifiable to claim that Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway is practically unparalleled in recent cinema for its capacity to synthesize total zaniness with provocations to analyze geopolitical histories, the present, and future. And I say provocations because the film leverages its zaniness to lead spectators into critical avenues concerning espionage, biopolitics, gender dynamics, and technocultures of economics and repressions, all without providing particular answers or positions on these. Like the characters caught up in the increasingly bizarre tangles of worlds in the film, spectators are barraged with mysteries that compel us to work on them yet promise to keep developing and eluding total comprehension and resolution.
This is critical surrealism; hyper-pragmatic absurdism.
The story centers chiefly on CIA Agent D.T. Gagano (Daniel Tadesse)–his mission, which evolves and glitches as the film proceeds, and his relationships. Early in the film Gagano and his colleague, Agent Palmer Eldritch (Augustín Mateo), are tasked with entering a VR world to terminate a computer virus called “Soviet Union.” The virus has been attacking the ad system of a major platform called “Psychobook” with diabolical results such as Chevrolet advertising videos being replaced by videos of Stalin playing chess. When the agents and others are inside the VR world, their avatars are depicted as people with black masks over their heads and ridiculous two-dimensional paper masks with eye-holes in the pupils, and their movements are an unsettling stutter-stop motion as if they’re clunky clockwork bodies.
Agent Gagano’s mask is the face of Richard Pryor, in what I like to imagine is an allusion to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and in many ways the aesthetic sensibility of the VR world is on a par with Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return—but with a Stalin avatar that battles with a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other. Adjacent to his mission, Gagano navigates his romantic life with Malin, a woman nearly twice his size who dreams of opening a world-class kickboxing academy even as she supports Gagano’s dreams of opening a pizzeria. By the way, there’s something wonderful and intriguing about Gagano’s pizza obsession. What would in most movies be a comedy shtick is, in the hands of Llansó’s direction, an element of political economic and historical critique as well as a detail that reverberates throughout the story arc, as in the key intervention of three kung-fu masters named Spaghetti, Ravioli, and Balthazar.
As the story moves forward, synced with an amazing jazz soundtrack, by the way, Gagano’s consciousness is apparently transferred to a portable tv set, and the figure of Jesus, who is also Roy Mascarone (Guillermo Llansó), reframes the whole mission by claiming that a mysterious green gooey substance known as “The Substance” is the real enemy of all people. It’s here to colonize all people of Earth. Finally, while there’s so much more to try and capture, I feel like I need to mention the persistent presence of the fascist leader, Batfro (Solomon Tashe), who dons a Batman costume that’s a near match to the one Adam West donned in the 1960s Batman tv series. I add this detail here because there’s a crucial juxtaposition late in the film between Jesus’s claim about The Substance and the inclusion in the mise-en-scene of a 1974 Batman-cast Public Service Announcement concerning gender and labor that sparks lines of interpreting Batfro and the film’s critique(s) as a whole.
At this point in time when it’s easy, almost overwhelmingly so, to feel suffocated by the predominance of reboots, extended franchises and universes, and vigorous attempts at post-ideological sanitation of political implications (Yes, I’m thinking of Stranger Things 3 here and its stunning capacity to swerve away from doing anything with its ready-made architecture of a 1980s shopping mall with a secret Soviet Union base in its basement), Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway is a testament to the resistance and resilience of avant-garde cinema. To the future of political acumen connected to a bonkers sense of humor.
The film is a deeply weird, fun, and original contemporary addition to Chaplin’s City Lights and John Carpenter’s They Live. I can’t recommend strongly enough seeking out a screening near you or streaming it once it becomes available, and let Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway drive you beyond the current limits of your perspective on living on planet Earth today.
Watch Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/612125/jesus-shows-you-the-way-to-the-highway?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed
After the Crash 