Category Archives: Saturday Matinee

Saturday Matinee: Killer of Sheep

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By Mr. Arkadin

Source: The Silver Screen Oasis

“You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man. Start learning what life is about now son.”

Killer of Sheep is that rare film that eschews plot and story lines for human experience. The movie opens in the past with a reprimand to young Stan, and to us as well. We join Stan in the present, his wife and children in the seedy Watts section of Los Angeles. We will live with them for only eighty-three minutes, but in this short time, director Charles Burnett will present us with life in all its flawed beauty. What we learn is up to us.

The origins of KOS are well known. While studying at UCLA, Burnett began making ample use of the universities film lab and equipment. Dismayed by Blaxploitation film, which dealt with stereotypes (most of them criminal), Burnett drew inspiration from Neorealism and the work of Vittorio De Sica whose work explored the lives and emotions of the everyday man. Non-actors fill most of these roles in true De Sica fashion. Burnett had originally envisioned a three film series about Stan and his wife, but limited funds and equipment use (UCLA wanted their lab back) has only left us with a small portion of Burnett’s epic.

Raising a family in deteriorating Watts, Sam is a man of much mileage who has long since run down. Despairing of personal hopes and dreams, he works at a nearby slaughterhouse where cool detachment has become his way of life. For Stan to admit his total desperation would be suicide. Instead, he is a sleepwalker doing the things he must to survive. Insulated and isolated, Stan is almost unreachable by those who love him.

Burnett got his start in photography and much of KOS is just that—pictures and music. We are observers of a certain kind of life here and perhaps the most touching thing about this film, is the fact that Burnett trusts us with his vision. We walk around his neighborhood taking in the sights, making up our own minds about what we see. Many of these wordless scenes can be viewed as small vignettes or parables that attempt to explain black life as a whole: A child laying under a train while another playfully steals his shoes, Kids jumping across rooftops heedless of danger, or Stan’s lonely dance with his wife as they are unable to connect physically or emotionally.

If pictures tell stories, Burnett’s choice of music provides context and commentary on his social backdrop. Sheep hanging in the slaughterhouse suggest it is “A Mean old World” (Little Walter) indeed. Paul Robeson’s “That’s America To Me” underscores the harsh reality that the American Dream is only a fantasy for the impoverished. Earth Wind and Fire’s “Reasons” is a record played by Stan’s child who sings along while Stan’s wife puts on makeup, arranges her hair and dress for her man who has long since lost interest. Burnett shows his genius here by cutting between the two rooms, showing us daughter and mother listening to the same song, which has a different meaning for each of them. When Stan’s wife looks in on their child it’s a bittersweet moment. Here is a little girl singing along to an adult-themed song about love. When Stan’s wife appears in the frame we wonder if she is the embodiment of what this child will become. Will her fate be the same as her mother?

Although the movie has its share of bleak moments, if Stan were merely a miserable man, this wouldn’t be much of a film. His refusal to admit his situation (“We ain’t poor! I give stuff to the Salvation Army!”) belies his inability to climb out of it. A man can live without many things, but honor is not one of them. There’s also humor in Stan’s son, who is always in trouble (he likes a little bit of cereal with his sugar and milk), Stan’s adventure buying the used motor, or the gang drinking in the windowless car. There is a tenderness as well. Stan loves his daughter. She is the only thing that can still touch his heart. When he plays with her, you know that beauty and love still exist for him—even in the darkest places of his soul.

Although Killer of Sheep owes much to De Sica and the Neorealist movement, it is fundamentally different in the fact that there is no crisis that changes Stan’s outlook. In Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Umberto D. (1953), crisis creates change. KOS provides no such easy outlets and we are left pondering hard questions with no easy answers. At the end of the film Stan’s circumstances haven’t changed, but he has. His view is not one of acceptance or understanding, but determination.

As Stan drives the sheep to the killing floor, we realize there is no hope for his situation. It’s for his children that he does these things now, in hopes they will leap across the void that separates these separate American existences. Is he a defeated man? Perhaps. That’s a question Burnett wisely leaves in our hands, rather than moralizing. Stan might not have the stars to play with nor the moon to run away with, but he has some things money cannot achieve—namely his community and the love of his family.

When new life comes to the neighborhood, it grows at the personal cost and sacrifice of others to sustain and nurture it. We see this in the death of the sheep and perhaps the death of Stan’s hopes and aspirations, which are unfulfilled. Stan does have hope for his children, and this hope has returned him to the human race and drives him on. These things, like the sugar that sweetens his son’s cereal, temper his life and help him to see that perhaps his journey on this earth is not so bitter after all.

Watch Killer of Sheep on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/killer-of-sheep-henry-gayle-sanders/18383114

Saturday Matinee: The Sorcerer and the White Snake

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By Vern

Source: Vern’s Reviews

After I watched DR. WAI IN “THE SCRIPTURE WITH NO WORDS” for the specific reason that it was a Jet Li movie directed by Ching Siu-Tung, I realized I should watch the more recent movie that fits the same description. THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE (2011) is another fantasy martial arts romance, outlandish in a different way than the other one because it’s based on a Chinese legend about animal demons.

Li plays the titular sorcerer, a truck trying to carry explosives across a shaky rope bridge, and of course Whitesnake play themselves, performing many of their hits as well as debuting songs from that year’s album Forevermore. At least I assume that was what Ching intended, but he caved to the bean-counters, so instead Li plays a skilled Buddhist demon hunter called Abbott Fahai, and early in the movie we are abruptly confronted with the sight of two beautiful human lady torsos with scale-covered breasts and giant snake body lower halves, rolling around sexily on top of each other. It’s one of those things where I’m kind of icked out by it but also very happy for whatever number of people there are out there who are into snake ladies and are sorely underserved by mainstream cinema. Merry Christmas, you pervs.

Anyway, they seem to be going at it, but I guess they’re supposed to be sisters frolicking. The green snake is Quingqing (Charlene Choi, THE TWINS EFFECT, TWINS MISSION) and the white snake is Susu (Eva Huang, KUNG FU HUSTLE, DRAGON SQUAD). They’re spying on some humans climbing a mountain to find herbs, and Quingqing decides to go play a prank on them – appearing in giant snake form to hiss at young herbalist Xu Xian (Raymond Lam, SAVING GENERAL YANG), scaring him so bad he falls off the mountain into the water.

Susu has a conscience and/or thinks Xu Xian is a cutey, so she switches to human form and resuscitates him in the form of a romantic underwater kiss. And then it becomes a thing where she comes into civilization in human form and courts him, but he rejects her at first, thinking he’s in love with this person he doesn’t quite remember who saved his life. (Rather than tell him “That’s me, stupid” she knocks him into the water and does it again.) Tagging along, Quingqing befriends Abbott Fahai’s assistant Neng Ren (Wen Zhang, THE GUILLOTINES, THE MERMAID), who luckily is bad at using his little dial that detects demons.

Well, maybe not lucky, because he doesn’t notice the ENTIRE BOAT FULL OF LADY BAT DEMONS that Quingqing casually points out to him. This leads to one of the better action sequences, when the Abbott flies in and leapfrogs across a succession of boats, including several canoes that are mid-air after being launched by a big wave. He and Neng Ren battle a swarm of humans with with bat wings as well as a more monstrous digital character. That part seems kinda like a Hong Kong take on VAN HELSING.

Xu Xian and Susu end up getting married, but he doesn’t know she’s a snake demon, and those type of secrets are not good for marriages. So the scene where Fahai attacks her and she turns into a snake and he sees it is kind of like somebody walking in on their wife straddling some dude. Luckily he forgives her, but only after accidentally stabbing her with a magic dagger (you know how it is) so it becomes a quest to get a rare magic root that will heal her.

The style of the movie is a little schizophrenic. Much of it has a very clean digital look that seems chintzy compared to Hollywood movies. For example, in the opening scene Abbott Fahai and Neng Ren step out into a blizzard and battle an ice harpy (Vivian Hsu, THE ACCIDENTAL SPY) and it’s all extremely green-screeny, with an FX-based battle where Li and his doubles are spinning a staff around and doing moves, but the frame drops, flying and ice beam FX make it seem like it’s pretty much an animated movie. (It’s also one of those movies that is very clearly designed to take advantage of 3D.) But then it cuts to some beautiful actual locations, and the lantern festival sequence looks like a huge set on a soundstage – it kind of feels like a Disneyland ride, which is a compliment.

I love the unashamed way movies like this present their mythological reality – it’s so different from the west, where artists fear straying from realism and the literal. Ching, of course, has no such hangups. Not long after he’s given us “Yes, they are sexy half lady/half snakes who can turn into a snake or a lady, fuckin deal with it, buddy,” he also has a computer animated turtle, rabbit and mouse just walk in (upright, but they’re regular animal sizes and not humanoid at all) and start talking, like it’s normal. I wasn’t sure if they were also demons and could turn into people, but they never did, so I decided they were just animals. The mouse continues to be a major character throughout the movie, treated as a peer with the demons and humans. (He should get a spin-off buddy movie with the puppet rat mutant from DR. WAI.)

Apparently there’s some part I didn’t pick up on with a “Chicken Devil” played by the great Lam Suet. I don’t know if this means I wasn’t paying enough attention or if it’s one of those Easter eggs. They don’t have Easter in Buddhism, though.

The story spends more time on the melodrama of the young lovers than on the Abbott, but Li’s performance is good and it’s a pretty interesting character. Rather than killing demons he catches them in little pots like he’s an ancient Ghostbuster, and he keeps them imprisoned in his pagoda, with the promise that if they meditate and improve themselves they can be freed. This seems pretty enlightened at first, but when we meet the snakes we realize that it’s still unfair to assume that every demon is evil and deserving of this kind of punishment. They’re just creatures trying to live their lives, and they should be able to slither around doing what they want, they shouldn’t have to hide out at Midian or something to be safe from guys like him. So, while being well-intentioned, he sort of becomes the antagonist.

And SPOILER due to these events he does learn that his attitude toward demons has been too rigid. I like that it ends on a sweet little character moment – Fahai throwing Neng Ren an apple and talking to him as a friend even though he’s been turned into a bat-demon.

Much of this movie looks beautiful, and some of the stuff that looks cheesier is bizarre enough to still be appealing. But there are definitely points where the digital look is off-putting to me. I can imagine myself being much more drawn into its operatic emotions if it was one of those soft-focus ‘90s Hong Kong fantasies like THE BRIDE WITH THE WHITE HAIR. (I guess I’ll have to check out Tsui Hark’s GREEN SNAKE, a 1993 variation on the same legend.) Still, I gotta respect a movie with the line, “Before I met you I meditated for a thousand years, but those thousand years were worth less than a moment with you.” That’s some passionate love shit only a snake demon could say. I bet you don’t get that in, like, a Nicholas Sparks movie. (I don’t think I’ve seen any, though, so correct me if I’m wrong.)

Watch The Sorcerer and the White Snake on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/15557900

Saturday Matinee: Prisoners of the Ghostland

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PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, Leave Sanity at the Door

Nicolas Cage. Sofia Boutella. Sono Sion. Need we say more? Yes.

By Eric Ortiz Garcia

Source: Screen Anarchy

More than 30 years after his first film, Sono Sion has established himself as a brilliant, prolific and chameleonic director.

In the past decade alone, you can find some of his best work: a hilarious tribute to guerrilla filmmaking and 35mm, with yakuzas, samurais and martial arts, Why Don’t You Play in Hell?; brutally violent and sordid films, Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance; dramas alluding to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Himizu and The Land of Hope; a crazy hip hop musical, Tokyo Tribe; and an emotional kaiju and Christmas film with catchy rock songs, Love & Peace.

On the other hand, Nicolas Cage became one of the most prolific Hollywood actors, finding in recent years memorable roles in genre cinema that, beyond subversive, are absolutely delirious. Mandy and Color Out of Space are enough to forget his abundant jobs-for-hire.

Considering that, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono’s highly anticipated English-language debut starring Cage, is insane. Truly insane.

Sono has excelled in building his own worlds. When I interviewed him in 2015 about Tokyo Tribe, he revealed that he wasn’t interested in using real locations in that city, because he wanted to “make up a whole fake world.” Prisoners of the Ghostland, one of his productions with the biggest budget, isn’t contained in that regard. Its two main universes – or rather, prisons – come to life and are wonderful madness.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Western and his return to samurai cinema, two genres that he feels affection for like his contemporaries: Miike Takashi (Sukiyaki Western Django) and Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill, Django Unchained). A group that shares influences: Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, Sergio Corbucci, Bruce Lee, Fukasaku Kinji, Fujita Toshiya, among many others.

In Sono’s “Old West”, West and East coexist, the mystique of the cowboy and the samurai. In fact, it’s set in “Samurai Town.” The iconic sheriff is an obese, long-haired Japanese cowboy, an Elvis Presley fan. The town’s true “boss”, the Governor (Bill Moseley, in a performance to remember), is a “gringo” with a Southern accent who runs a geisha place. He’s accompanied by his favorite heavy: the skilled samurai Yasujiro, played by Sakaguchi Tak himself, “Bruce Lee” in Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and more recently the protagonist of Crazy Samurai Musashi, the exciting and bloody one-take sequence based on an idea by Sono.

The hybrid and extravagant iconography extends to the town, practically an alternate universe where all kinds of people live together regardless of age (there’s a good number of children). It’s a clash between the traditional and the modern: a classic Western/Oriental town adorned with electronic signs, with interiors worthy of a stylized futuristic movie. Well, the Governor travels in a modern car! It’s the cinema of cool at its most striking expression.

Who better to lead the cast than an actor with a perfect understanding of this type of cinema? Is there a better vehicle for Cage than a film where his character is described as “so cool, so badass”?

The actor has been enjoying himself big time. “Personally I find his stylish performances extremely enternaining,” said Richard Stanley when I interviewed him about the Lovecraftian Color Out of Space, “they say it’s campy and over-the-top, that how can you make a serious but pretty fun movie. That’s just what I love about Nic, he’s capable of being funny and serious at the same time.”

Cage maintains that style in Prisoners of the Ghostland, bringing the classic unnamed antihero to life, although unlike those almost silent figures in the Spaghetti Western – Kurosawa Akira’s samurais were a big influence for Leone– Nic held nothing back. The movie is full of hilariously absurd dialogue and moments. It’s a territory that Sono dominates: just remember the hilarious yakuza leader secretly in love with the daughter of his rival, famous for a jingle that the criminal continues to dance, in Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

The plot of Prisoners of the Ghostland is quite simple: the Governor’s “granddaughter”, Bernice (Sofia Boutella), has disappeared; she’s actually a prostitute who managed to escape from her “prison.” The man with no name is imprisoned in Samurai Town and could regain his freedom if he fulfills the mission of bringing Bernice back.

The sequence that exposes the conflict is an extremely enjoyable display of the iconography around Cage’s character. The best example? The high-tech suit that threatens to blow the antihero to pieces if he treats Bernice badly (a comment from Sono about the supposed “misogyny” of his cinema?), or if he doesn’t fulfill the mission in the allotted time by the Governor.

Ok, maybe that doesn’t sound that crazy, how about adding a couple of explosives to the protagonist’s testicles? And we know that Sono wouldn’t add that detail if it wasn’t going to… explode at any moment!

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Mad Maxian post-apocalyptic film. A world in ruins with old mannequins everywhere, a recurring figure in Sono’s filmography, as in Exte: Hair Extensions and in that twisted crime scene in Guilty of Romance. At the center of the stage is a crumbling tower topped by an immense clock, owned by a defunct nuclear empire.

After the Fukishima nuclear disaster in 2011, Sono hasn’t stopped showing concern about it in his cinema. There’s Himizu with its characters who lost everything and went on to live in destitute circumstances. In The Land of Hope, the director imagines that an earthquake and a tsunami cause a new nuclear catastrophe in another area of Japan. It’s a harsh criticism of the actions of the government and of the population with little memory, who forget the pain of ordinary people whose life will never be the same again.

In The Land of Hope, Sono thought of the threat of radiation as inherent in his country. Then, in Love & Peace, he used the frenzy for the imminent Tokyo 2020 Olympics (which haven’t happened yet, of course) as a reflection of a country that has forgotten Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Not for nothing the filmmaker continues to insist: the mythology of Prisoners of the Ghostland, explained in a stylized dreamlike sequence, is another comment on this topic.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is made up of a lot of elements. This post-apocalyptic world, and its background, is a hybrid. To avoid exploding into pieces, Cage’s character must enter a mythical land of ghosts, inhabited by figures distinguished by their distinctive samurai armor; they wander among men dressed in prison clothes, whose leader is a monstrous type, antagonist halfway between horror and exploitation.

The fate of those who cross the road of ghosts is the nuclear ruins. There’s no way out of this place, where an extravagant but well-meaning tribe lives. Some of these characters –like the charismatic Rat Man, a fanatic of vehicles and fuel-gatherer– might very well inhabit a fantastic adventure in a galaxy far, far away. In Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono again turns his attention to the outcast; to children who have grown up without water or clean air, to ghosts that end up representing the aftermath of worldly horror, nuclear horror.

Prisoners of the Ghostland was filmed in Japan because Sono suffered a heart attack during its pre-production and, although the Japanese auteur doesn’t appear among the writers, the theme of reincarnation and redemption drives the film. Cage’s character is initially painted as a criminal of the worst kind, worthy of the Wild West of Corbucci. One of the ghosts that haunt him is an innocent Japanese boy, who had the misfortune of witnessing a disastrous bank robbery in which many of the characters and elements present in the story participated.

Prisoners of the Ghostland follows the man with no name until he earns the right to appear as a “hero” in the end credits. It’s an always insane absurdly entertaining redemption. Cage doesn’t stop, not even when he has to give the motivational speech as the “chosen one” that will make the impossible possible.

This is a quite violent film, although without reaching the most brutal, horrifying and controversial Sono of Cold Fish; there are stylized duels, sword thrusts, bullets and, of course, blood spurts. Prisoners of the Ghostland is absolutely bonkers and one of the most satisfying efforts by the great Sono Sion.

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Watch Prisoners of the Ghostland on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100041245/prisoners-of-the-ghostland

Saturday Matinee: Junk Head

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By Niels Matthijs

Source: onderhond.com

It must’ve been two or three years ago when I first heard about Takahide Tori’s Junk Head [Janku Heddo]. I didn’t need more than a single screenshot to know this was a film that was going to be right up my ally. Several years and countless geo-locked film festivals later, I was finally able to watch it. Junk Head is one of those rare films that actually managed to surpass my initial expectations, Tori’s passion project is an absolute wet dream for fans of stop-motion and sci-fi, with gleaming bonus appeal for those who have an appetite for the weird and creative.

To brand this film a passion project is in fact a gross understatement. Takahide Tori is an interior decorator by profession, who started this project in 2009 without any of the formal training needed to tackle a project like this. What’s more is that he started this journey all on his own. It took him about 4 years and an endless amount of YouTube tutorials to create a 30-minute short. After garnering the vocal support of some big industry names (Guillermo del Toro being one of them), additional funding and a little outside help pushed him to make a 115-minute version, which was later trimmed down to the 101-minute cut that is currently making the rounds.

Reviewers have cited many influences when writing about Junk Head, the most prominent (and interesting) one for me is Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame (coincidentally Nihei is an architect turned mangaka). But where Nihei’s first masterpiece is all about rising through a superstructure, Junk Head’s hero is descending into an underground one. And sure enough, the creature design borrows happily from H.R. Giger, Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk roots peek around every corner and names like Lynch or Cronenberg make for sane analogies, but when all is said and done, there’s nothing really quite like Junk Head out there.

The plot is set in a distant future. Mankind has lost its ability to procreate, a human-created species has revolted and developed a separate society underground. When a virus wreaks havoc on the surface, an expedition is launched to study how this newly developed species procreate, in an ultimate but somewhat desperate attempt to save humankind. The human delegate immediately finds himself in a pickle and as he travels deeper and deeper underground, his chances to complete his mission diminish with every step taken. Instead, his journey becomes an ultimate struggle for survival.

It’s difficult to overstate the visual grandeur present in Junk Head. Looking at the lushly decorated, detailed and expansive sets, Hori surely benefitted from his experience as an interior decorator, but even then it’s hard to believe what he accomplished here. The camera work is insane, the art design superb, the stop-motion animation on point. It’s crazy to think most of it was done by a single guy, but even without taking that into account Junk Head still looks mighty impressive. Not counting some CG work that was added at a later stage, this is true craftsmanship from start to finish. The style is extremely coherent though, which is great if you love this kind of gritty and ugly bleakness, those hoping for a more colorful and jolly universe better stay clear.

Though Hori’s visual accomplishments may be the obvious standout, it’s worth noting that he also took almost all the sound work upon himself. From the actual score, to the sound effects and character dubs (which aren’t in a decipherable language, but do feature distinct voices), it’s all done by Hori himself. And while this may have been out of necessity, the quality of his work is once again exemplary. The electronic score is very fitting, adding oodles of atmosphere, the voice acting is fun and distinctive and the sound effects are spot on. Together with the visuals it creates a tight and immersive experience, the kind you can only get when an entire team is entirely in sync, or when one guy does everything by himself.

Junk Head is an expansive sci-fi adventure, where the audience is forced to discover a strange and alien underground world together with the main character. Hori does take a little time to explain the broader lore of this universe, but doesn’t get into too much detail. It keeps his world wrapped in a veil of mystery, which probably won’t be to everybody’s liking. Personally, I welcome the mystery and adventure, following the events as they are experienced by the main character. Those who need more grounded explanations for what they see on screen may feel a bit disoriented at times.

As for any additional themes, the broader story offers some food for thought if needed. The premise isn’t all that original though, with humanity’s usual flaws sending us to the brink of extinction, having to resort to desperate measures to find a way out of the mess we created for ourselves. I’m not even certain whether Hori takes any of this too seriously, it could just as well be a convenient excuse for the gritty and uninhabitable world he wanted to depict, but at least it’s there for those who care about such things. The fact that there’s not really a clear-cut ending or an easy way out of this mess certainly helps too.

Every fan of Japanese cyberpunk will tell you not nearly enough films are being produced in this niche. That alone makes Junk Head a notable film. The (admittedly slim) bright side of this is that filmmakers who do try their hand at it are usually very spirited and driven to do the genre justice. With Junk Head, Hori delivers a sprawling sci-fi adventure, meticulously styled, set in a dark and perilous universe that harbors neat surprises around every corner. It’s a living testament that one person can still deliver a professional film, even if it costs him 7 years of his life. An absolute must-see this one, make sure you catch it if the opportunity arises.

Watch Junk Head on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100040381/junk-head

Saturday Matinee: The Beach Bum

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Review: Impulsivity, vice and margaritas reign in ‘The Beach Bum’

By alexlynch695

Source: David A. Lynch

It’s hard, after sitting through the sunshined-draped “The Beach Bum,” not to wonder that something substantial and substantially life-altering has happened to writer-director Harmony Korine in the seven years since his dark escapist drama “Spring Breakers.”

While that movie was an exercise in causticity and bringing to life some strange, morbid fantasy involving bikini-clad Disney products trading in their Mickey Mouse ears for Uzis, “The Beach Bum” – here referring to a blissful, good vibes-distributing Matthew McConaughey who has never Matthew McConaughey’d harder – uses that same degree of impulsivity as a force for inebriated l-i-v-i-n livin’. The movie is equally about abiding by one’s own rules and flourishing by our self-made excuses for success, but “Spring Breakers’s” coldness made sure that success came at the expense of ostensible innocence. In “Beach Bum,” it comes by way of a colorful drink in a cocktail glass garnished with a mini umbrella.

Korine once again shows he’s a sucker for spontaneity – both on the parts of himself as filmmakers and his characters – to a near-surreal degree. In telling the story of McConaughey’s coastal hillbilly author Moon Dog (a name as conspicuous as it is appropriate) drinking, smoking or typewriting the days away, he stitches a hypnotic yarn that is more a collection of experiences than a traditional movie, and perhaps one that doesn’t have anything to teach or tell so much as suggest.

Moon Dog is seemingly living on the lowest rung of society’s ladder, but over “Beach Bum’s” 90ish minutes, the creeping feeling may rear its head that his ceaselessly-smiling attitude towards everything that comes his way is something to be envious of. While we continue searching for some grand truth to life, Moon Dog has found it, and he’s drinking it through a martini glass. Think Jack Sparrow with margaritas replacing the rum, escapades much lower in stakes and an androgynous sense of fashion. He’s a gloriously cheery character in a gloriously cheery comedy, one that wishes goodwill through storms of marijuana smoke even as it gently pushes us off a pier. It doesn’t run off after doing so; it rumbles in good-natured laughter as if to say, “It looks like you were getting hot and could use a dip.”

Hell, maybe what Korine did since “Spring Breakers” to access a much more optimistic view of life was don the blunt for himself. Moon Dog is cut from the same cloth as James Franco’s violence-prone, chickie-hunting Alien, but the former feels like he slept next to a shrine made to Jimmy Buffer, the latter to Scarface. Moon Dog is the yin go Alien’s yang; a cosmic contradiction with two halves that live life two seconds at a time.

Moon Dog’s world reflects his good-times-should-be-had-by-all template to life, even if his circumstances don’t. He may be content passing the days away slumped over in a rowboat miles away from shore, but he’s got responsibilities too, as well as a reputation that he curates about as carefully as a chainsaw to a tree. He has a past as a renowned author of poetry, you see, but you wouldn’t mistake his vernacular for someone who comparably looks like he takes a bath every one in a while; it’s as profanely low-bar as he is, and it’s also struck an unexpected chord in Korine’s strangely unwieldy world. The more “The Beach Bum” breezes along, the more we see those who inhabit it are more in lockstep with Moon Dog’s sensibilities than we might expect.

That penchant for the outrageous is evident in the people Moon Dog associates himself with, from his stunning wife (a just-as-here-for-the-good-vibes-and-good-times Isla Fisher) to others who range from associates to drinking buddies to part-time employers. Embodying them is an illustrious supporting cast that looks like they’re having the time of their lives: Jonah Hill, Snoop Dogg, Martin Lawrence, even Zac Efron are here to facilitate Moon Dog’s life choices, and to take part in the belligerence.

Where “The Beach Bum” moves beyond us simply watching disciples of easy living endlessly getting high, getting drunk and getting into ill-advised situations is in Korine’s challenging us to question whether it’s right to label those choices as questionable. Or whether we even have the right. The sense of ambition that drives Moon Dog and Co. is emphatically one of a much different caliber than probably any of us can relate to (perhaps south Floridians can tell me otherwise), but does mean we can criticize it?

Unlike “Spring Breakers,” Korine does good work in ensuring that question remains one of deliberation instead of emphatically and blatantly answering it for us by film’s end, although “The Beach Bum” does provide a visual coda much more explicit than most of what has come before. It’s both jarring and also as appropriate as ending as you could expect for Moon Dog, one not out of place with everything we’ve witnessed prior.

If you’re not interested in such thematic minutiae, “The Beach Bum” is still a source for plenty of laughs, improv seemingly as much a tool for its characters as self-deprecation. It doesn’t outstay its welcome and never particularly lingers, moving from hilarious anecdote to hilarious (and sometimes gruesome) anecdote with a trance-life geniality, like bar-hopping with a bucket hat-wearing old-timer recounting stories of past adventures that just keep getting more and more incredulous, either as a result of alcohol intake or creative liberty on the storyteller’s part.

Who’s to say what Moon Dog – the haggard man’s Hemingway who carries around his typewriter in a pillowsack while searching strangers’ coolers for Pabst – would refer to it as, but from our perspective, spontaneity is a founding father of his world. It’s almost a superpower, actually, his capacity to instinctively accomplish something on his own terms, which sometimes means avoiding it at all costs, eventually morphing from habit to uncannily consistent skill. Moon Dog seems to never know where he’ll be five minutes from any given minute—and it might just be his best-kept secret.

“The Beach Bum” is essentially a Korine-led seminar on blissful existentialism. The filmmaker isn’t giving the middle finger to the establishment so much as he is nodding to those for whom practicing stringency means trapping yourself in an uncomfortably rigid life of routines dictated by everyone else but you. That is to say, it’s best to avoid practicing it all costs.

The movie and its characters and their self-created, self-governing laws pursue buoyancy. And “The Beach Bum” is groggily, profanely, deliriously buoyant in that pursuit.

“” is rated R for pervasive drug and alcohol use, language throughout, nudity and some strong sexual content

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Stefania LaVie Owen

Directed by Harmony Korine

2019

Watch The Beach Bum on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/11359834

Saturday Matinee: Downsizing

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Let’s Get Small: Reckoning with “Downsizing”

“Look, you don’t understand. There was shrinkage!”

By Noah Gittell

Source: Good Eye

In his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, essayist Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay defending the 2001 Cameron Crowe film Vanilla Sky from its reputation as a creative failure. Specifically, he honed in on critic Owen Gleiberman’s D+ review in Entertainment Weekly that accused the film of being little more than “a cracked hall of mirrors taped together by a What is reality? cryogenics plot.” Nonplussed, Klosterman pointed out that all the best films of this era—from The Matrix and Fight Club to eXistenZ and Mulholland Drive asked that same question about the nature of our reality. Klosterman argued that it was “the only relevant question for contemporary filmmakers.”

I bring this up to defend Downsizing, which is not a great film but deserves kudos for doing what Vanilla Sky did in the early ‘00s. Downsizing asks the only relevant question for filmmakers of its era: What should we do now that the world is ending? It asks this question all the way through, although its beginnings—the first third, basically—feels more like a broad comedy, which may have thrown some viewers. The film’s shifts in tone reminds me a bit of Zero Effect, one of my all-time favorites, which also presented itself as a wacky comedy before slowly transforming into something more profound. I have a theory that people—maybe critics in particular—don’t like movies that sell themselves as one thing and then become something else. It makes them feel manipulated or something. 

I was up for it with Downsizing because if you look closely, it’s about the end of the world from the beginning. The film stars Matt Damon as Paul Safranek, an occupational therapist struggling to get his head above financial water. He and his wife (Kristen Wiig) accept a radical new solution: they will shrink themselves and head off to live in Leisureland, a community for the small where their scant savings will allow them to live like millionaires for the rest of their lives. 

It turns out to be a real bait-and-switch, for Paul and for us. His wife leaves him just before the procedure, leaving Paul small and alone. After fighting depression for a year or so, he eventually gets caught up in the life of Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident who was a brief cause celebre after shrinking herself to escape political persecution and is now cleaning tiny houses for a living in Leisureland. 

Despite the economic framing, Downsizing is pretty goofy up until this point, with a lot of sight gags built around objects that are not the size we’re used to seeing them. Still, there are hints of the thoughtfulness to come. The shrinking process is initially sold as a way to cut down on human consumption and save humanity from the ravages of climate change, but director Alexander Payne slips in some well-meaning commentary on how environmentalism is co-opted.  Most people shrink themselves out of self-interest, using their duty to the planet as cover. When Paul reconnects with an old friend who has gotten small and asks him if it feels good to save the environment, the friend replies, “Downsizing is about saving yourself.”

It’s a neat summary of the problems of the film, which is ostensibly about saving the planet but is ultimately more committed to the journey of its average, White middle-class protagonist. When Paul meets Ngoc Lan, he discovers the dark underbelly of Leisureland: the projects on the wrong side of the tracks (okay, in this case, a tunnel), where she and an entire class of unseen, underrepresented workers live. Paul is horrified by their living conditions, and finds himself compelled to help her feed, bandage, and generally care for them out of the goodness of his heart. When he learns of an opportunity to visit the original small colony in Norway—and be included in their plan to start a new colony underground while waiting out the impacts of climate change—he must decide between being part of the privileged future or staying behind to help those afflicted in the present.

I’ve noticed that most people who have seen Downsizing seem to get fed up in this final third. Paul and Ngoc Lan travel to Norway with his debauched neighbors (a perfectly cast Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier), where the film completes its transition from broad comedy to meditation on the morality of Armageddon. Paul justifies his choice to be part of the future in selfish terms: ”Why didn’t I become a doctor? Why did I downsize? Why did my wife abandon me? So I could wind up here at exactly the time to go into that tunnel! I finally have the chance to do something that matters.” In the end—SPOILER ALERT—he stays on the surface, marries Ngoc Lan, and spends his downsized downtime helping the indigent.

I have no issue with the film’s transformation, and I admire its willingness to ask, as Klosterman puts it, the only relevant question of our time. It reminds me of the best moment in the political career of Andrew Yang, who, when asked at a Democratic presidential debate for his approach to climate change, gave a startlingly clear-eyed answer. Other candidates talked about the need to listen to climate scientists, transitioning to green energy, and, if they were feeling bold that day, a carbon tax. Yang looked right at the camera, and said something like (I’m paraphrasing), “I would allocate $40 billion to move every American family to high ground.” His honesty hit me like a load of bricks, and for a minute there, I thought we finally had a politician who would tell the truth. The bloom came off his rose pretty soon after that, but at least he didn’t deny reality, and neither does Downsizing. It should be commended for that.

It just chooses a poor lens through which to explore the issue.  The film’s problems run along two intertwining tracks: creative and political. First, there’s something unseemly about Payne exploring these themes through a middle-class White protagonist. Watching Downsizing, you can’t help but wish Ngoc Lan were the main character, and Paul was just a sweet White guy she picked up along the way. Hong Chau gives a miraculous performance as the resolute activist. Yes, she uses a comically exaggerated Vietnamese accent that threatens to offend sensitive viewers, but her increasingly soulful performance overwhelms the stereotype. Was all this on purpose—the offense and the redemption? I tend to think so. Payne is telling this story for privileged White viewers, and he hopes that her transformation from, um, housecleaner into fully-formed human being will transform them into caring about those they would otherwise ignore.

Maybe it will, but I can’t help but feel he’d have a better shot at doing that if his main character weren’t the most boring person on the planet. I get the appeal of an Everyman in this type of story, but Paul Safranek does not need to be this bland. His backstory is compelling enough: He was going to be a doctor, but his mom got sick, so he moved back to his hometown to take care of her and became an occupational therapist instead. His mom died, and he married a seemingly sweet lady who inexplicably left him in the lurch. This series of events would produce an interesting person, or at least a recognizable personality, certainly more than the human blob that Payne, his co-writer Jim Taylor, and Matt Damon come up with here. On the page, Paul is torn between altruism and self-interest, but that conflict never comes to life on the screen. There’s no self-deprecation, black humor, frustration, or anger. It’s a bland performance by an actor who is capable of much more.

Downsizing still gets points for trying. Damon could have given a better performance, but the broader problem of centering a boring White man in this story was not really fixable. An FX-driven moral parable about the end of humanity would never be made without a movie star at its center, and certainly not for its reported $68 million budget—it’s kind of a miracle it got made even with one. And outside of Denzel Washington and Will Smith, there were no non-White movie stars at this time who guaranteed a  certain box-office haul. Put simply, it always had to be Damon or someone like him, which means that Downsizing probably did the best it could under the circumstances. If you want to make a movie that reckons seriously with Armageddon, you’re gonna have to work with the devil to do it.

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Watch Downsizing on Kanopy here:https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/13159250

Saturday Matinee: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy

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By Matt

Source: Review All Monsters

Stumbling into something new while seeking out material for this site is always an exciting experience—and nothing demands my attention like the phrase “weird Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Science Fiction movie from the early eighties.” Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (sometimes referred to by the more nondescript title Visitors from the Galaxy) is definitely a weird one, and has only found wide distribution in English-speaking countries in the last year thanks to Deaf Crocodile Films—its combination of unvarnished eighties European settings and borderline surrealist storytelling makes for the kind of cult-ready object that modern boutique film distributors regularly gift to us. Shifting between exaggerated reality and extreme fantasy, Visitors has something of a satirical edge, and combined with its bizarre visuals, you can really tell that director Dušan Vukotić comes from an animation background (the movie was partially produced by prominent Croatian animation studio Zagreb Film.) To further invite attention—my attention in particular—there is a prominent monster element that was designed and partially animated by stop motion animation master Jan Svankmajer before he gave us such classics as Alice and Little Otik.

Opening with a blur of space age imagery and an enrapturing wash of seventies Sci-Fi synth by Tomislav Simović, the kind of music that embodies the style’s simultaneously unnerving and soothing qualities, the dreamy sensory experience shifts to the earthbound, where we meet aspiring Sci-Fi writer Robert Novak (Žarko Potočnjak), who can evidently only begin to craft his literary opus by putting on a space helmet and speaking passages into his voice recorder. In what turns out to be a story about the struggle of seeking one’s artistic dreams, Robert’s writing is interrupted by his neighbours—which includes a fellow artist, the aspiring journalistic photographer Toni (Ljubiša Samardžić), and his mother—and his girlfriend Biba (Lucié Žulova), who thinks he’s spending too much time with his fictional characters and not enough with the real people in his vicinity. There’s a bit of nuance to this depiction of an artist’s life: Robert’s need for escape is established not just through the people hectoring him while he writes (although he’s clearly also suffering from writer’s block as well), but from the scenes where we see his unfulfilling job at the front desk of a hotel, badgered by his boss and swarmed by the tourists that flock to his city. At the same time, Biba does have a point about his growing disconnect, and she is also shown to have her own issues (living in an apartment with her own set of annoying neighbours and an overprotective older sister), providing enough depth of detail to prevent her from just being a hectoring girlfriend. I do think she is allowed some hectoring, though, when his android creations from the planet Tugador in the Arkana galaxy—Andra (Ksenija Prohaska) and the child-like Ulu (Jasminka Alic) and Targo (Rene Bitorajac)—appear in the real world and, among other things, briefly transform her into a small cube.

Robert’s creations first contact him through his recorder, bringing him to a small island off the coast near his hotel job to find them. That first encounter is so disturbing to him that afterwards he visits a psychiatrist, and in conversation reveals that he possibly possesses the mental power of tellurgy, creating physical objects with his mind. This explanation ends up being as weird as the aliens: Robert tells a story of how, as an infant, he materialized working breasts on his single father in order to be fed. That establishes the way in which the aliens could become real, and soon Robert returns to the island with Biba just to have proof that he is not going insane, and both witness Andra experimenting on the island’s lone security guard by removing his heart, followed by all the business with the cube.

You can probably tell that there would need to be a very careful handling of tone to keep this series of baffling events from going off the rails, and to its benefit, Visitors finds that balance, mostly by varying the comedy. Sometimes, the humour comes from normal people somewhat realistically reacting to unbelievable events, while other times both the “normal” people and the Sci-Fi elements are equally absurd. The latter is frequently deployed with every human character other than Robert and Biba, who are regularly portrayed as cartoonish buffoons who react to the alien presence with numerous bizarre assumptions—for example, when all the tourists at the hotel decide to track down the extraterrestrial trio on the island, one woman convinces the rest that only way to show the aliens that they “have nothing to hide” is to take off their clothes, leading to moments of very European comedy where it’s just a crowd of stark naked people walking around a cave.

For the most part, Andra just wants to hang around with Robert in order to learn about human emotions—eventually she shows up in his apartment and begins vacuuming the floor with her arm (one of the more whimsical moments of Svankmajer stop motion)—and that inevitably causes problems for Biba, especially after she walks in on them touching each other, making the background erupt into orgasmic green static. From the beginning, it’s not hard to figure out why Robert thought up Andra in the first place, and any concern he has with his creations mucking up his real life is pretty quickly put aside when the benefits make themselves clear. Robert and Biba fight over this, but neither is truly made out to be totally in the wrong.

If anyone comes close to being an antagonist in this story, it’s Targo, an aryan-looking little cretin who apparently took exception to Robert’s decision earlier in the movie to remove him from his novel and replace him with a monster named Mumu, at the behest of his book seller friend who tells him that readers want scary stuff (the author they keep bringing up as a point of comparison has the amusing name “Hover Decklerd”, who I don’t think is real?) So, for the rest of the movie, when he isn’t chasing after people in his spherical blue space vehicle, Targo is finding opportunities to summon his monstrous replacement to terrorize people—it starts out in the form of a small toy, because Robert had the idea that the monster should be “some insane toy” (an idea dismissed by his friend for being too cutesy I guess), and then grows into a person wearing perhaps the most indescribable monster costume you’ll likely see. It is abstract art come to life, like a fusion of HR Giger and the expressionist movie posters from Europe that you see posted online from time to time, unique and disgusting in such a way that the fact that it’s an old school person in a monster costume simply doesn’t register. While this obviously means that Mumu is not purely a creature of Svankmajer’s nightmarish animation like Little Otik, he does provide suitably horrific flourishes for certain shots, like a pair of eyeballs that pop out of its pectorals. For something that is obviously not a big budget affair, its combination of somewhat tongue-in-cheek cheesy Sci-Fi visual effects and genuinely imaginative ones matches the tone of the movie, and can even be held up as something that feels genuinely otherworldly at times.

The monster makes only fleeting appearances throughout the movie, giving us a chance to look at its bizarre design but never long enough to see it actually do anything, but it gets to be front-and-centre in the climax, where Targo’s machinations lead it to break into a wedding party in Biba’s apartment. This is a very long sequence of escalating destruction and borderline horror moments that are intentionally undercut with gags—a man has his head torn off, and another’s head is flattened into a rubber dummy, but both treat it more like an inconvenience. The implication throughout this extended monster rampage sequence is that Mumu is not actually violent in nature—at first, it seems more interested in using its fleshy proboscis to sniff flowers—and that is probably the way Robert himself imagined it. However, as it is attacked by the terrified onlookers, it either defensively or even accidentally maims and kills them in response, the result of its strange alien anatomy (it burns down a room with flamethrower breath just so it can dislodge a fork in its throat.) The guests at the party argue over whether to shoot the creature or try to make peaceful contact with it, neither approach getting them anywhere—in attempting to make friendly gesture, the psychiatrist from earlier in the movie has his hand chomped off by a toothy stomach-mouth in a moment that presages a certain famous horror effect in John Carpenter’s The Thing, released not long after this. The whole sequence, while offering the exact kind of violence and thrills that Robert was encouraged to put into his novel, is actually more a comedy of errors.

The shifting, borderline contradictory nature of those moments brings us back to the way this movie handles Robert’s creativity. What little we hear of his novel seems mightily cliched—aliens coming to Earth to learn deeper truths from our primitive civilization (that beings like Targo view with disdain) is certainly not award-winning material, and even the idea that a man disappointed by life would imagine a beautiful robot woman that dutifully loves him shows Robert to be pretty basic. But even though he willingly tries to change his story to match the tastes of mainstream readers, there’s a naive purity to his imagination, a desire to explore a universe full of interesting and well-meaning beings. In his vision of reality, it makes sense that the monster would not be as nasty as it appears, and that there would be hyper-convenient time-rewinding power that allows them to undo all the horrific damage his tellurgy might have accidentally caused. Robert is someone who uses his imagination to make something that is nicer than what he has, and it’s no surprise that the movie ends with him going back to the Arkana galaxy with his alien creations—giving halfhearted promises to Biba that he might come back at some point—finally finding a place where he can live out the fantasies he’s been crafting. Abandoning everything and everyone to live out his fantasy is not a choice that necessarily reflects well on him, but in that way it accurately reflects both the positive and negative aspects of spending so much time in your own head.

Watch Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/13957909