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Saturday Matinee: Bamboozled

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By Brian Eggert

Source: Deep Focus Review

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled begs the question: When does artistic representation stop being a creative force and become something destructive? Released in 2000 to divisive assessments from both critics and audiences, the film raises questions through Lee’s flashpoint narrative and many-layered extratextuality. It concerns the history and lasting presence of negative African American stereotypes in mainstream entertainment; at the same time, and perhaps to more penetrating effect, it explores how negative representations in the media, even when they have an ironic or satirical objective, corrode cultural identities. To illustrate the infamous history of Black performers forced into demeaning roles, and the damaging outcome of entertainers who employ those images as commentary without due consideration of their intellectual and social ramifications, Lee dreamt up a transgressive film in which a provocative new television variety show, called Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, seeks to expose the most disdainful of Black stereotypes by featuring performers of color in minstrel makeup. It’s a show that employs grotesque caricatures in outrageous comic routines and dance numbers by tap artist Savion Glover, in effect hoodwinking its audience into applauding racist imagery. When the idea backfires and becomes a nationwide pop-culture phenomenon, the complicity of the creators and their audience comes into question—but so does Lee’s choice of using this imagery to make his point. Therein lies the problem that Lee wields and underscores in his meta-infused discussion. His film is designed to confront the viewer with the history and continued appearance of racial stereotypes in television and cinema, serving as an awakening and exorcism of these images. Whether it is successful has been a matter of some debate. Even so, Bamboozled supplies a necessary discussion about how African Americans are often depicted in television and cinema, and a maddening, deliriously made reminder of the dehumanizing consequences of the mainstream entertainment industry.  

Bamboozled is satire wrapped in irony, with more satire piled on for good measure. Sifting through the influx of fast-paced stimuli, the director’s self-referential and self-critical humor, and the packed layers of commentary proved to be an understandable challenge for many. This is not an easy film to reconcile, if such a thing is even possible. Some critics, notably Roger Ebert, found the image alone of blackface so offensive that, despite it being used in a satiric format, he wrote in his review that he “had a struggle” to see beyond the image itself to find the satirical purpose underneath. “To ridicule something, you have to show it,” Ebert wrote. “And if what you’re attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it.” Critics other than Ebert called Lee’s approach to the material “unfocused” and “heavy-handed” and deemed it an “intriguing failure”—remarks that have accompanied many a Spike Lee joint. The message of the film, although interpreted as a commentary on race in the media, was often misunderstood. Writing in the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris missed the sweeping commentary and speculated, “If Mr. Lee meant to bring back blackface entertainment as a metaphor for the current Black performers he finds obnoxious, he has miscalculated.” Often seen as messy and full of thrilling contradictions, a rare few have judged Bamboozled to be one of Lee’s very best and most thought-provoking pictures. Among the few positive notices, The New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote, “Its shelf life may not be long, nor will it probably be a big hit, since the laughter it provokes is the kind that makes you squirm.” Holden was right about his latter two claims, anyway—Bamboozled grossed only $2.2 million on a budget of $10 million for New Line Cinema. 

It would not be the first nor last time Lee took the history of representation of people of color, and to a larger extent, mainstream white entertainment, to task. In 1980, during his first year at New York University film school, Lee made a short film called “The Answer,” about a struggling African American screenwriter who takes on a fifty-million-dollar remake of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). However, the writer soon comes to his senses and backs out of the project, only to have crosses burned on his lawn by the Klu Klux Klan. Lee’s 20-minute film contains clips from The Birth of a Nation and generally calls out Griffith’s work for its racism. The faculty at NYU was not amused or impressed by Lee’s first effort, and some of them sought to have Lee removed from the program for his aggressive rejection of the film canon—as The Birth of a Nation is studied by some film historians and filmmakers as a monument of formal breakthroughs and techniques that other directors have learned from and borrowed. In an interview for The New Yorker, Lee told journalist John Colpatino, “They taught that D.W. Griffith is the father of cinema […] They talk about all the ‘innovations’—which he did. But they never really talked about the implications of Birth of a Nation, never really talked about how that film was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK.” Lee would later call out this fact in his thrilling 2018 procedural, BlacKkKlansman. 

In a similar setup to “The Answer,” Bamboozled follows Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a Harvard graduate with a forced, inflected accent of superiority with which, in traditional film noir fashion (specifically Sunset Boulevard, 1950), he narrates the tale of his own demise. The sole Black television writer for cable network CNS, Delacroix has been reprimanded—by his white boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), who says “I’m blacker than you”—for writing material that is “too white.” Delacroix is tasked with creating a new show that represents the racier side of race. In retaliation, Delacroix dreams up Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Along with his assistant Sloan (Jada Pinkett Smith), he hires two homeless street performers, Manray (Savion Glover, from Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), as his stars. Delacroix renames them “Mantan” and “Sleep-and-Eat,” after Black vaudevillian actors Mantan Moreland and Willie Best, and insists that the show’s all-Black cast perform in burnt cork blackface—the method used by original minstrel performers. Aside from Manray’s tap dancing, Delacroix arranges for Mantan to feature a litany of racist images and caricatures, including pickaninnies, Aunt Jemimas, Sambos, mammies, coons, and watermelon patches. After a lengthy and amusing audition process, Delacroix declares, “I don’t want to have anything to do with anything black for at least a week”—a remark that stands as a testament to his self-abasement. Despite some initial objections, Manray and Womack just want to perform, content notwithstanding. And anyway, Delacroix feels assured that no one in their right mind would approve such an over-the-top racist and politically incorrect program. 

But in hoping to make a point about how the white public only wants to see Black people portrayed as buffoons and racist stereotypes, and by extension continue the dehumanizing process of slavery in another form of commodification, Delacroix’s hypothesis ironically proves true when, instead of rejecting Mantan, CNS executives, critics, and audiences soon embrace the show. When it’s picked up, Delacroix can say nothing except, “There must be some mistake.” In fact, Dunwitty, along with his blond-haired, Swedish-born director Jukka Laks (Jani Blom), insists on injecting “funnier” material—comedy even more offensive than Delacroix conceived. A gaggle of white writers who embrace Black stereotypes all too much carry the material even further. Before long, Mantan has top ratings and race-unspecific live audiences who show their affection for their favorite show by wearing blackface. As the creator of “the newest sensation across the nation,” Delacroix’s fame is boundless, yet he cannot control his “Frankenstein’s monster” creation. Not unlike Max Bialystock in The Producers (1967)—the Jewish stage producer whose intended failure, the Nazi-themed musical Springtime for Hitler, becomes a sensation—Delacroix’s guaranteed failure becomes a hit at considerable personal expense. However, after visiting his father, a standup comedian named Junebug (Paul Mooney), who drinks too much and lives from paycheck to paycheck, Delacroix resolves to embrace the success of his show over his father’s alternative example. He even enjoys the spoils of his efforts most opportunistically, accepting awards for his writing and becoming what he calls “Hollywood’s favorite Negro.”

With Delacroix’s love of success and gradual defense of his show, he begins to discount the power of negative African American stereotypes as modes of strengthening a white supremacist worldview. He adopts a “just go with it” attitude and concerns himself more with the humor and sensationalism of the show, detaching himself from the social implications. Sloan argues that he cannot afford to deceive himself into ignoring their history as if it doesn’t matter, as it’s a form of soul-crushing self-hatred. But Delacroix dismisses the significance of racialized slavery, which he claims ended “400 years ago,” as insignificant in the modern world. “We need to stop thinking that way, stop crying over ‘the white man this, the white man that.” He adds, “This is the new millennium, and we must join in.” Sloan refuses to forget, soberly reminding Delacroix, Manray, and Womack about the history of such imagery. Later in the film, after the show becomes a hit, Sloan gives Delacroix a toy from the turn of the twentieth century called a “Jolly Nigger Bank” to remind him “of a time in our history in this country when [people of color] were considered inferior, subhuman, and we should never forget that.” Sloan wants Delacroix—who is so filled with self-hatred, so disgusted with his own identity as a Black man that he has changed his name from Peerless Dothan to the more “white-sounding” name—to look at the toy and ask, “Whose puppet are you?”

Sloan is Delacroix’s conscience and, therefore, the moral center of Bamboozled. She’s suspicious of Mantan from the start, and she questions any representation that could become a form of minstrelsy or contain racist overtones. Lee’s greater argument in the film is how blackness itself has become a pop-culture gimmick and warns of the dangers of falling prey to this sales pitch. Consider Sloan’s critical attitude toward her brother (Mos Def), a rapper nicknamed Big Blak Afrika, and his Black-obsessed radical outfit called the Mau Maus, named after the anticolonial uprising in Kenya that lasted from 1952 to 1960. The group dons entirely black clothing and produces a new album called “The Black Album,” but they also support detrimental stereotypes by drinking 64 oz. malt liquor called “Da Bomb” and wearing “Timmy Hillnigger” fashions—two products which Lee’s film presents in faux commercials that demonstrate a modern form of stereotyping evident in advertising and media. Lee argues that the popularization of African Americans in culture has resulted in “blackness” having a new set of cultural signifiers, which is another, somehow socially acceptable form of racism. Saying “I’m black” no longer refers to race or color for characters in the film; blackness becomes less a cultural identity than a pop-culture phenomenon. When the Mau Maus are shot down by the police in the third act of the film, the sole white member remains standing, shouting in desperation, “Why didn’t you shoot me too? I’m black!” Elsewhere, Dunwitty claims to have more experience with blackness than Delacroix: “I got a Black wife and three bi-racial children,” he asserts, defending his overt cultural appropriation. As for Dunwitty’s liberal use of the N-word, he will not apologize, in spite of “what that prick Spike Lee” said in his highly publicized debate over Quentin Tarantino’s use of the word in his films. 

As a satire, Bamboozled exists in the same realm as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), each about an unbelievable cultural phenomenon that sweeps through America like a plague. The ignorant masses embrace the sensation, whereas a few characters in each picture see the harmful extent of what they have done. In Bamboozled, Womack, who went along with Mantan to get off the street and earn some money, finally leaves the show: “It’s the same bullshit,” he says, “Just done over.” When Manray too realizes the extent of what he’s done by “This buck dancing, this blackface shit,” he makes his way to the stage free of blackface and announces, “Cousins, I want you to go to your window, yell out, scream with all the life you can muster up inside your bruised and battered and assaulted bodies, ‘I’m sick and tired of niggers and I’m not gonna take it anymore!’” This clear nod to Peter Finch’s pronouncement in Network, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” implies that minstrelsy allows the audience to take pleasure in white-comforting racial stereotypes, which by extension assumes the inferiority of another race of human beings and denies their equal share of humanity. But it’s also this moment where Bamboozled forgoes sending up these images and routines and transforms itself into a powerful melodrama.

Lee brings his film to a fitting, tragic conclusion. Could Bamboozled end any other way? Confronted by his part on the show and his role in its cultural degradation, Manray quits, only to be kidnapped by the Mau Maus and executed on the internet in retaliation. The authorities then corner the Mau Maus and kill, among the others, Big Blak Afrika. Shaken by Manray and her brother’s death, Sloan confronts Delacroix in his apartment, where she finds him at his lowest and most guilt-ridden, donning blackface in an act of shame and self-destruction. She accuses Delacroix and his show of causing all this death and cultural anarchy, and she shoots him in the stomach—an action for which he immediately forgives by telling her “It’s okay,” as if he now recognizes that he must die. Lee’s rather classical approach here, harkening back to film noir again, punishes the wicked for their misdeeds in perpetuating racist stereotypes. The ruthless violence with which he excises the film’s evildoers who have contributed to demeaning minstrel imagery is grandiose and arguably excessive, but nothing about Bamboozled is anything less than heightened, and in this context, the punishment fits the crime. As Delacroix dies, Sloan puts on a videotape with a procession of footage, racist images from American cultural history. In the punishing three-minute montage that follows, the videotape shows images from Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer (1927), Gone with the Wind (1939), Holiday Inn (1942), Ub Iwerks’ cartoon “Little Black Sambo” (1935), the Merrie Melodies short “All This and Rabbit Stew” (1941), and the sitcom Amos ‘n Andy (1951-1953). The list goes on and on, and Lee sets it against a nightmarish laugh track to accentuate its horror with appalling irony. 

As the montage comes to a close, Lee returns to Delacroix’s noirish voiceover for a final, oblique statement that underlines the persistence of Black performers conforming to negative racial stereotypes in American entertainment: “As I bled to death, as my very life oozed out of me, all I could think of was something that the great Negro James Baldwin had written: ‘People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead.’ Maybe Baldwin was right, maybe he was wrong. But as my father often told me, always keep ‘em laughing.” With that, Lee returns to an image of Manray in his Mantan garb, an unsettling close-up of his face, dappled with beads of sweat atop the corked-up blackface makeup, holding an exaggerated through-the-pain smile. Manray takes one pose after another as an off-screen crowd cheers, and Lee holds the shot for an unbearably long time. And in doing so, he asks the viewer to think about the roles people of color, such as Hattie McDaniel or Eddie Anderson, were forced to play historically, whereas today, Black entertainers have more choice in the matter. Lee told Allison Samuels in Newsweek, “Nowadays we don’t have to do this stuff.” But Lee’s argument with Bamboozled is that such stereotypes remain prevalent in American entertainment because, in part, too few Black performers have learned from past examples, but worse, the trends in entertainment remain a mere sample of the larger problems within American society.

By conforming to pop-culture demands, Delacroix convinces himself to carry on harmful traditions by distancing himself from his own race and refusing to acknowledge the power of the imagery he resolved to employ, even for satirical and comic purposes. It’s the very thing that has sparked Lee’s criticism of similar real-life television shows, including Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Emmy-winning In Living Color, a sketch-comedy and variety show that aired on Fox between 1990 and 1994. The show gave a start to comedians and performers like Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, Jim Carrey, and Jennifer Lopez, but it also employed negative stereotypes for the sake of comedy, sometimes using motifs that originated in minstrelsy. Lee has been vocal about his critiques of In Living Color, a show he references in Bamboozled. He also hired the program’s former cast members, Wayans and Davidson, in conspicuous roles that at once atone for and magnify the show’s occasionally problematic representations. Wayans, in particular, has had a complex if bankable career playing sometimes troubling stereotypes, evidenced in the feature films Mo’ Money (1992), Blankman (1994), and Major Payne (1995). The connections between In Living Color and Mantan may not be one-to-one, but they have a similar effect on their viewers, encouraging a racially diverse mainstream audience to laugh at harmful imagery. Lee’s film incites his audience to question our willingness to laugh at such material and, instead, think about the cultural consequences of that laughter. 

Lee’s commentary would prove not only reflective but prescient. A more recent example that follows In Living Color’s legacy was the oft-scandalous Chappelle’s Show (2003-2006), Comedy Central’s sketch-comedy hit whose journey through American pop-culture mirrored Bamboozled. The show famously ended at its height after star Dave Chappelle left the production, questioning if his show was making fun of stereotypes or reinforcing them. The catalyst for Chappelle leaving the show came as he filmed a sketch for the third season in November 2004, about “magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races.” In the sketch, Chappelle plays a Black pixie and wears blackface, and he tries to convince people of color to behave in a stereotypical manner. But as Chappelle told Time magazine interviewer Christopher John Farley, when a white crew member laughed, he began to question whether he started reinforcing stereotypes instead of lampooning them, and his crisis of conscience led to Chappelle leaving the show. In the cases of both Delacroix and Chappelle, when they embrace their respective shows’ racist material, they forget that such damaging imagery of African Americans exists and conveniently ignore that fact for the sake of humor and entertainment. Anything to “feed the idiot box,” as Delacroix reminds himself. Harsher critics of Bamboozled might argue that Lee engages in the same irresponsible form of representation in his film; however, Bamboozled is not a pure comedy for the masses. It recycles what is appealing about minstrel shows—such as the talent required to carry out “coon” routines, as they’re referred to—and through them represents and opens up a discussion about their dangers in the film’s violent third act.

Lee’s maximalist aesthetic on the film—replete with jagged editing by Sam Pollard that switches freely amid cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ multiple cameras—aligns with his subject matter in its disorienting effect. Bamboozled was shot fast almost entirely on consumer-grade digital cameras, in a period before digital was the industry standard, and then later converted to 35mm for a grainy and dreary-looking outcome. The Mantan show sequences were filmed on Super-16mm film stock to contrast the gritty everyday scenes shot on digital and accentuate the performers’ cork-black and “fire engine red” makeup. Lee and Kuras steeped the film set with multiple cheap cameras for maximum coverage, which in turn reduced the production’s costs. The approach is most evident through Pollard’s kinetic editing, a style that often repeats a particular moment two or three times for emphasis. Extreme low angles, conversely muted and color-saturated palettes, and a pointedly digital look give the entire film the suspicious quality of home-movie reality. And yet, the exaggerated situations and performances (most expressly Wayans and Rapaport), present a juxtaposition that forces the viewer to think about Bamboozled as a reflection of how African Americans in entertainment and advertising are portrayed. All the while, the forlorn music by Terence Blanchard, in one of his very best scores for Lee, imbues the material with weighty implications far removed from satire alone.

However challenging and outlandish Bamboozled may have seemed in 2000, it’s not such a fantasy today—certainly not after life imitated Lee’s art to such an extreme with Chappelle’s Show. Perhaps this is why critics and scholars have kept returning to the film over the years and discovering, through its many layers, the brilliant complexity of Lee’s film. Admittedly, I was uncomfortable, exhausted, and skeptical about the film upon first seeing it, but gradually, I came to recognize how much of Bamboozled proved true in the ensuing years, and along with repeated viewings, I have recognized that much of what Lee discusses in the film continues to play out in our entertainment and society today. One need not look further than the Rachel Dolezal incident in 2015, when the NAACP leader at the Spokane branch turned out to be a white woman posing as African American. And critic Ashley Clark wrote in his book about the film, Facing Blackness, that Bamboozled was “effectively howling with hallows laughter at the utopian notion of a ‘post-racial society’ eight years before the concept gained traction with the election of President Barack Obama.” Whether it’s entertainment we consume or our response to public figures, Lee’s film leads to bigger questions about appropriation—and about what scholar Michael Rogin, writing in Cineaste, called minstrelsy’s “white form of appropriative access to imagined black experience”—which resonates in ways that many American audiences could not recognize in their society or predict for their future at the time of Bamboozled’s release. 

Then again, maybe we should have anticipated that Lee was ahead of the curve. Lee’s approach had already been thoroughly demonstrated by the time Bamboozled was unleashed into theaters. With School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing(1989), Malcolm X (1992), and other films, Lee draws historical parallels by using images from the past that relate to our present, reminding us that the roots of history are sometimes right under our feet. It’s a method he employed on BlacKkKlansmanas well—in a screenplay that finally earned Lee an Oscar—by drawing comparisons between the KKK in The Birth of a Nation, the KKK in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Similarly with Bamboozled, Lee investigates history to call out how television and cinema rarely have a place for African Americans outside of stereotypes, negative or otherwise—even in Oscar-winning roles for actors of color, from Octavia Spencer’s sassy maid in the white-savior feel-good drama The Help(2011) to Lupita Nyong’o’s role as a slave in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave(2013). Nevertheless, Lee knows that the issues and dynamics concerning race in America are complex and multifaceted, that they demand investigation and debate. And he knew that his appropriately-named film would be met with confusion, anger, misunderstanding, and frustration—but that’s the point, evidenced by his use of a clip of Denzel Washington’s performance in Malcolm X and his line, “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray. Led amok. You’ve been bamboozled.” 

Bamboozled’s passionate and provocative look at the stereotypes faced by African Americans has prompted responses ranging from outrage to laughter, empathy to sadness, anger to acknowledgment. Though a controversial choice, Lee allows his audience to experience first-hand the dangerously entertaining appeal and humor derived from minstrel acts, and through it, he demands that his audience reflects on the consequences of such representations. Just as Delacroix intended for Mantan, Lee wants to offend; he argues that if you aren’t offended or questioning the material, there’s something very wrong. Lee told Cineaste in a 2001 interview, “I want people to think about the power of images, not just in terms of race, but how imagery is used and what sort of social impact it has […] I want them to see how film and television have historically, from the birth of both mediums, produced and perpetuated distorted images. Film and television started out that way, and here we are, at the dawn of a new century and a lot of that madness is still with us.” Although no certainty or universality will ever be reached about what representations should be considered appropriate or how far is going too far, the discussion is crucial to understanding our feelings on the subject. Even if Lee’s only intent with Bamboozled was to ignite fiery discourse about race and representation in entertainment, his film remains a rousing achievement as both art and a social prompt.

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Watch Bamboozled on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/16138885

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

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By Simon Abrams

Source: RogerEbert.com

Swedish comedy “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting On Existence” has a very particular style of deadpan humor and an equally specific morbid sense of empathy. As in his previous two films, writer/director Roy Andersson (“Songs from the Second Floor,” “You, The Living”) presents several thematically-united sketches of life as it’s experienced by the meek, and the suffering, two groups of people who are (according to Andersson’s films) doomed to inherit nothing. “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” is, in that sense, a kind of alarmist comedy. It’s a series of comedic sketches about people who are too self-involved to empathize with each other. It’s also a plaintively blunt wake-up call, and an effective demand for viewers’ vigilant sensitivity.

I’m writing this review as a series of direct free-associations because that’s essentially how “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting On Existence” presents itself. Like Andersson’s other recent films, “Pigeon” is a movie that’s so viscerally effective that it doesn’t really matter how hard individual scenes clobber you over the head with Andersson’s humanist message: by choosing to isolate ourselves from each other, we die a thousand little absurd deaths every day without ever really moving on.

“A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting on Existence” doesn’t really have a plot, but it does feature two recurring characters: Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) sell novelty items, but aren’t very good at it. They’re shy and tactless, as we see in any scene where they try to pitch people who could clearly care less about plastic vampire fangs, and rubber Halloween masks. But Jonathan, who is repeatedly teased for being over-sensitive, also suffers from a vague sinking feeling that something is wrong with his life, and that leads to problems with Sam later on.

To be fair, Jonathan’s not completely blameless. In one scene, we see him bullying a store-owner who is too anxious and depressed to address Jonathan and Sam when they demand payment for novelty items that were bought on credit. It’s an awkwardly heated argument since Jonathan and Sam have to argue with their client through a third party: the store-owner’s wife. Jonathan and Sam’s seeming lack of empathy is what unites them with the various other people in “A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting on Existence.” Several characters receive phone calls that lead them to miss whatever situation is happening right in front of their eyes, like the callous scientist who ignores a monkey she’s performing electroshock therapy on or the desperate barber who doesn’t see his reluctant (and only) client leaving his barber shop. Each time this happens, the person on the phone ironically says “I’m glad that you’re doing fine,” reminding viewers that the opposite is actually true, and that a state of un-fine-ness is actually what passes for normalcy in Andersson’s film.

Andersson is not however a pessimist nor is “A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting on Existence” a cynical film. On the contrary, “Pigeon” leads viewers through a series of comically bleak vignettes towards a hopefully open-ended conclusion. In a 2009 interview published in MuBI by former “At the Movies” co-host Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Andersson describes his simultaneously unsparing but ennobling sensibility as “a light without mercy.” Vishenvetsky correctly adds that “There’s a difference between being ‘without mercy’ and being cruel.” You can see exactly what Vishnevetsky means in the most confrontational scene in “Pigeon:” a dream sequence wherein white blue bloods set a giant container full of black slaves on fire, and watch as the container revolves slowly and makes music. The painfully deliberate pacing of this scene makes it surprisingly shocking. You realize what’s happening well before the scene is over, but by the time the scene ends, you’ll also realize that you’ve just seen the most serious scene in “Pigeon.” It’s a howl of inflexible indignation that informs the rest of the film’s slippery pre-apocalyptic comedy.

Andersson is able to essentially lecture his audience into laughing at his funhouse reflections of human insensitivity because he has a very exact style, one that he’s honed after directing hundreds of equally surreal commercials. Andersson takes his time behind the camera. He typically reshoots scenes that feature only a handful of dialogue over and over again, sometimes several dozen times. He doesn’t agonize over shots, according to line producer John Carlsson, but rather just chooses them at his own pace. That sensitivity shows in “Pigeon”‘s sets: life-like models and fixtures that make you feel like you’re looking at street scenes when in fact you’re looking at vividly detailed interior sets that also retain a magical kind of artificiality. The film’s interiors are similarly shot like tableaux vivants that just barely come alive whenever a zombie-like protagonist trudges through. The world of “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” is, in that sense, fragile, but not really moribund. Andersson’s hysterically impotent characters may, in other words, be perpetually on the verge of a spiritual breakdown, but they never completely fall apart. That kind of mulishly stubborn resilience is very human, and also very funny.

Saturday Matinee: Everybody Wants Some!!

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“Everybody Wants Some!” — Richard Linklater’s Remembrance of Teams Past

By Gerald Peary

Source: The Arts Fuse

Richard Linklater has branded Everybody Wants Some! a “spiritual sequel” to his earlier Dazed and Confused (1993), with Dazed and Confused’s pack of 1970s high school boys, after a summer break and with new identities, off, in fall 1980, to freshman year at college. Critics have piped in that Boyhood (2014) ends with teenager, Mason, at the moment of entering university, so that Everybody Wants Some! is also some kind of Boyhood sequel. Not only is Everyone Wants Some! deeply personal in Linklater’s oeuvre, it’s also nakedly autobiographical. Floppy-haired Blake Jenner, cast as Jake Bradford, the film’s protagonist, is a look-alike for young Rick Linklater. Like his character, Jake, Rick is a native Texan who attended a small Texas college, Sam Houston State, on a baseball scholarship.

(Lucky for us, Linklater suffered a blowout injury, which stopped short a wished-for trip into the minor leagues for a talented second baseman. He dropped out of college, worked for a short time on an off-shore oil rig, and then, back on land, chose a different career path.)

There’s more than autobiography in Everybody Wants Some! We should not forget to factor into the movie what seems the film’s real “spiritual father,” that infamous anti-PC guilty pleasure, National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). In both films, a university’s Apollonian claim to be an epicenter of learning and intellectual development is a total sham. Dionysus reigns. Everyone is at college for the party-going. Period. In Animal House, the university administrators we meet are all hapless grotesques. In Everybody Wants Some!, the sole college teacher we see, in mismatched jacket and pants, appears only in long shot in the last scene of the movie. Far off and powerless. “Who the hell is that?” asks a student, unable to grasp what that old guy by the blackboard has to do with higher education.

Higher education? Getting high, on weed or beer. Getting laid. Perhaps the most arresting “student” in Everybody Wants Some! is Finnigan (Glen Powell), a charming rogue—pipe smoking, Kerouac-reading — who uses his verbal dexterity as his major tool in getting coeds into the sack. He’s the cocky heir of the smooth-talking frat rodents of Animal House who sounded, at their smug wittiest, like the amoral rakes from a Restoration stage comedy.

I am a lifetime baseball fan but I’m also a Northeastern intellectual, a friend to feminism, a left liberal. And I’m old. For a long time, I couldn’t get into the philistine, Southern swagger of those we hang out with in Everybody Wants Some!: the budding guys on the baseball team, who share a house and don’t need to belong to a fraternity to act like heathen brothers. It’s four days before the college semester begins, and those days are taken up with drinking, doping, playing, in lieu of baseball, lots of ridiculous competitive games and, above all, scoring with anonymous, ever-willing young ladies. Am I just being paranoid? I imagined these almost-all white boys later in life, living high off the hog in rural Texas, good ole’ men in their late 50s, voting one and all for Rick Perry and Ted Cruz.

It’s hard to separate the unapologetic sexism of the baseball players, for whom Linklater has an obvious affection, from chauvinism in Linklater’s point-of-view. Should he be tougher on his macho crew, or, as he does, forgive their cave boy attitudes as part of his utopian stance on college life 1980? I suggest a reading of an excellent review by new MTV critic Amy Nicholson, in which, disappointed by his new film, she scolds Linklater for having “a lame midlife crisis.”

Me? I was finally won over in the last act, when Everybody Wants Some! turns a little emotional, a little “girly.” After three days of male carousing, Thursday-Saturday, Jake settles down on Sunday with Beverly (Zoey Deutsch) a smart, sassy, ambitious, artsy dance and drama major. The other guys can’t believe it: he “likes” her. Jake wants to see Zoey as more than a midnight bounce on a bed. What can I say? Both young actors are winning and sweet, and I put behind me Jake’s earlier moments of piggy behavior. (Hey, I’ve been there! Oink, oink,) Jake has learned something meaningful in three days: women are more than sexual objects. And now it’s time, Monday, to actually start college.

If Jake is Richard Linklater’s alter ego in his movie, where do we see in Jake the seed of the person who would become a pioneer indie filmmaker? Pointedly, there’s not one movie reference anywhere in Everybody Wants Some! But around Jake there are some who are sensitive to the arts, starting with his new girlfriend and his Beat-reading baseball cohort, Finnigan. Most importantly, there’s the odd guy who is somehow on the baseball team: Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a bearded, weathered, Californian hippy. He quotes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, he owns a roomful of Twilight Zone VHS tapes. He blames the crowd’s love of the band Van Halen on the power of corporations to form mass taste. Best of all, he delivers long, winding soliloquys on whatever. And that’s a key to Linklater’s sensibility: his devotion to disquisition. It’s the road to the moviemaker’s first hit film, Slacker (1991), a roundelay of alternative people walking about and holding forth. In weird Austin, a Democratic oasis in Texas, where Linklater landed and stayed.

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Watch Everybody Wants Some!! on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15776471

Saturday Matinee: The Last of Sheila

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REVISITING THE LAST OF SHEILA (1973)

By Craig Leask

Source: Foote & Friends on Film

The Last of Sheila is a brilliantly clever thriller which tries (and succeeds) beautifully in combining the best of a bitchy Hollywood self-satire, mixed with a traditional whodunit. Ultimately the film is tongue in cheek homage to both the murder mystery genre and the cutthroat world of movie making. It’s about playing a game, both as a diversion as well as means of controlling, manipulating, and undermining desperate people, their self-esteem, and their careers. The film is very well structured and as such, it is not a movie for those who like their plots to be obvious – the writing requires the viewer to pay close attention to each clue, plot twist, nuance, and strategically placed red herring – and trust me, there are many. Virtually every line of dialogue and visual reference, including the most blatant which is revealed later into the film, is designed to assist the viewer in playing detective.

The screenplay came from the unexpected collaboration of actor Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and composer Stephen Sondheim (of Broadway fame), who had based the film on their penchant for elaborate scavenger hunt parties the pair hosted for their show business friends in New York City in the 1960’s and 70’s. A guest to one of their parties was producer and director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye Girl, California Suite) who encouraged them to write a script based on the party and its roster of famous guests. Ultimately this conversation led to the development of the The Last of Sheila. Although there is a very clear Agatha Christie vibe to the premise, the writers wanted to differentiate their murder mystery with any others: they wanted no detective. The participants were to be isolated, and they alone were to solve the crime. This was the only film script written by either Anthony Perkins or Stephen Sondheim.  Herbert Ross stepped in to direct.

The plot centers around movie producer and game-aficionado Clinton Greene (James Coburn) who invites a diverse group of business contacts and associates for a one-week cruise aboard his yacht off the southern coast of France on the one-year anniversary of the death of his wife, gossip columnist Sheila Greene (Yvonne Romain in her final acting role). Once the ship is under way, Clinton announces to the passengers that they will all partake in “The Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game” in which each of the six guests will be assigned “a pretend piece of gossip” on an index card, to be kept hidden from the other passengers. The object of the game is simple: discover everyone else’s “gossip” through a series of carefully planned events and clues, while protecting one’s own secret. Each night a planned event on shore will reveal the holder of one of the secrets. Following the conclusion of the first night’s activity, cumulating with revealing of the first card, “You are a SHOPLIFTER”, realization begins within the group that each guest’s card may not be a “pretend” piece of gossip as initially stated, but instead an actual, embarrassing secret about each participant.

To further tease and flaunt his dominance over the Hollywood B-List invitees, Clinton announces he is about to begin a new film project and is offering each guest the opportunity to participate in the project – with the better billing awarded to those who score higher in his game. It is no secret that being involved in a Clinton film project is precisely the lure each of the guests need to repair their damaged careers and restore their tattered reputations.

As the game progresses, the evenings begin to evolve into a macabre game of clue, with guests each sparring over who owns each dirty little secret as they compete for top billing in the elusive film project. In the midst of a particularly eerie session of the game, set in an abandoned monastery, someone protecting their own damaging secret rewrites the rules resulting in the death of one of the participants, leaving the surviving guests to play murderous musical chairs in a proverbial floating drawing room.

It is interesting to note that this really is a game to each of the guests; collectively they do not waste time grieving over another’s death, they merely clean up the blood and write off one more loser against their desperate yearning for a win.

The cast of guests / suspects and their players have been carefully and well selected for the film, including: attention starved secretary-cum-talent agent Christine (Dyan Cannon in a role based closely upon talent agent Sue Mengers); starlet Alice Wood (Raquel Welch) and her talent-manager husband Tony (Ian McShane) who holds leafy aspirations of becoming an associate producer; pessimistic “has-been” film director Philip Dexter (James Mason); Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin), a screenwriter frustrated with only doing rewrites of others’ work and Lee, Tom’s wife, who is basically just bored and rich. These characters have been developed to represent a cross section of Hollywood personalities: people who are proud and narcissistic, who maintain their status and dominance through developing and spreading rumors about the faults of their competition. They each portray a surface air of stability and contentment, while diligently working on their social status, desperately seeking to connive their way back on top in the eyes of the Hollywood power establishment. This is what actually differentiates this film from your basic “bring a group of people together, isolate them and make one a murderer” plot, is the writers are concerned as much with who the characters are and how they interact as they are with murder itself.

Although the character conflicts and the backstory to whom-does-what-to-whom doesn’t always seem justified, the performances as demonstrated in the ever-competitive personality game, are clever, sharp-edged, quick and very entertaining. I did however find Rachael Welch as the starlet “Alice” to be quite unremarkable.  She added little to nothing to the plot and in my opinion her and her character didn’t need to be in the film at all. James Mason did, howeve,r famously refer to working with her on the film, stating she was “the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I have ever had the displeasure of working with.”

Ironically, the film ends to Bette Midler’s song “Friends,” playing over its closing credits.

In 2012 New Line Cinema, division of Warner Brothers Pictures, announced a remake of The Last of Sheila was in the works, helmed by producer Beau Flynn. The project appears to have fizzled out shortly after this announcement as no further mention of the remake has been made.

Saturday Matinee: Alligator

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By Mike Brooks

Source: Mana Pop

The urban legends surrounding the idea of alligators living in the sewer date back to the late 1920s and early 1930s, which makes it rather surprising that it took until 1980 for such an ideal subject matter to make its way into a horror movie. We got giant ants in the sewers back in 1954 for Christ’s sake why not alligators? It took screenwriter John Sayles to finally pen such an urban epic, but his gator wouldn’t simply be large it would be super-sized!

After the success of Jaws, the rip-offs of Spielberg’s summer blockbuster almost become a genre unto themselves, sadly, most of them were terrible and without any artistic merit but with Lewis Teague’s Alligator we got a truly excellent “man against nature” monster movie, one that turned out better than it had any right to be. While there are plot and character elements similar to what appears in the Spielberg shark film, with the main protagonist being a police officer who is helped by an animal expert, and there is a professional hunter who dies similar to that of Quint in Jaws, but he’s more villainous antagonist rather than part of the camaraderie trio in that film, but what John Sayles brought to the story was an environmental slant with the creatures immense size being due to the dumping of the bodies of dead animals that had been subjected to an experimental growth formula and then being eaten by the sewer-dwelling alligator, thus the cause of its increased size.

The basic plot of Alligator follows the actions of a PTSD-suffering homicide detective named David Madison (Robert Forster), who lost his previous partner under less-than-ideal circumstances, and it’s his investigations of body parts showing up in the local sewer that brings him into contact with a pet shop owner (Sidney Lassick) who has been stealing dogs and selling them to a Slade Pharmaceuticals for growth experiments. And just how evil is this company? Well, not only does scientist Arthur Helms (James Ingersol) cut the larynxes of his subjects to keep them quiet he demands that the pet shop owner only bring him puppies. It’s safe to say this guy will not be around when the end credits roll, in fact, the film’s big smorgasbord of action takes place at Arthur’s wedding, where he is to be married to his boss’s daughter.  It is at the wedding where he and his boss (Dean Jagger), as well as the crooked Mayor (Jack Carter), all meet their untimely ends, which begs the question “Did the alligator get a copy of the script, so it knew where the villains were and who it had to eat?”

Filling in the role of consulting oceanographer Matt Hooper from Jaws we have herpetologist Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), who doesn’t believe that Madison’s latest deceased partner (Perry Lang) could have been eaten by a sewer-dwelling alligator, stating that a creature that size would have starved in a week and that the toxic gasses found in a sewer are not conducive to a healthy life. Even his boss Chief Clark (Michael Gazzo) doesn’t believe him and wants David to take a much-needed vacation, but lucky for Madison, a yellow journalist (Bart Braverman), who is one of the reporters that have suggested that Madison may have been responsible for the death of his first partner, is killed by the alligator and was kind enough to leave photographic evidence of the creature’s existence. This results in a failed sewer dragnet that causes the Mayor to sideline Madison and bring in big game hunter, Colonel Brock (Henry Silva), to track and kill the beast, this would be the film’s Quint analog, unfortunately, Henry Silva is never given a cool monologue about being aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis and is just eaten in a dark alleyway.

Stray Observations:

• The alligator’s first victim is a sewer worker named Edward Norton which is an obvious nod to the character played by Art Carney on The Honeymooners.
• That the alligator in question was flushed into the sewers by Marisa’s father, twelve years ago when she was a child and I’m surprised that her dad didn’t get an ironic death in this film.
• The idea of a victim’s camera taking snapshots of the monster during the attack was also used in Jaws 2 (1978).
• Madison gets fired because of his investigation of Slade Pharmaceuticals, whose owner is friends with the mayor, but no actual grounds are given for his dismissal and any Policeman’s Union would be down on this situation like a ton of bricks.
• Henry Silva’s big game hunter hiring three black youths to be his “native bearers” is as brilliant as it is racist and makes his death even more appealing.
• The two men working the gate at the wedding don’t seem to notice that people are being eaten by a giant alligator a few feet away, then again, this is Chicago so maybe that’s normal.

This may have started off as a simple Jaws rip-off but with Lewis Teague’s deft hand at the helm, and the wonderfully tongue-in-cheek script by John Sayles, they were able to produce a film of admirable quality and a lot of this has to do with such a great cast of character actors, a group that is more than aptly lead by the great Robert Forster, who really nails the whole world-weary cop who is “Too old for this shit” to perfection. It should also be noted that Teague did run into the same problem that Spielberg had concerning his mechanical shark, as the mechanical Alligator did not function all that well or often, but the use of a baby alligator on a miniature set worked surprisingly well.

Lewis Teague’s Alligator is easily one of the better examples of the genre, one that has brought the world such “classics” as Grizzly and Orca, but John Sayles elevated things by weaving in some nice social commentary – the creature did seem to eat its way up the social-economic food chain – and the movie even had the balls to have the alligator brutally eat a small child. If this “Man against Nature” film has somehow escaped your notice do yourself a favour and track this one down, you won’t be disappointed.

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Watch Alligator on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100006257/alligator

Saturday Matinee: Pump Up the Volume

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Looking back at Pump Up The Volume

By Simon Brew

Source: Den of Geek

“Do you ever the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?”

When writer/director Allan Moyle’s work is celebrated, it’s generally Empire Records that gets the acclaim (and with some justification). Furthermore, if the conversation then moves on to cult movies starring Christian Slater, then it’s almost sacrilege to not start with Heathers.

Me? In both cases, I go for Pump Up The Volume every time, a thoughtful film masquerading behind a name that doesn’t necessarily do it a lot of justice. It’s certainly not the first story about a shy-by-day high school kid who assumes an anonymous identity out of hours – although this is a film in pre-Internet days, remember – but it’s comfortably one of the best.

“I didn’t talk to one person today, not counting teachers”

The film centres on Christian Slater’s Mark, a meek, lonely teenager, moved into a strange area by his parents, and attending a high school where he knows nobody. Actually, scratch that, he knows the youngest school commissioner in the history of Arizona – that’d be his father – but other than that, he’s very much alone.

He’s also nervous and shy: early in the film, his writing is read out to the class by an impressed teacher, and his discomfort at his talent being aired in such a way is evident. Mark prefers flying under the radar.

That’s until 10pm every night, when he takes his one piece of company in life, his radio broadcasting equipment (given to him by his parents so he can keep in touch with his old friends), finds an available frequency, and broadcasts for as long as he wants as pirate DJ Happy Harry Hard-On. His collection of music is quite brilliant, and the film’s soundtrack is most definitely worth checking out (although it lacks the version of Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows that’s heard more prominently in the film), but it’s what Harry has to say that grabs the attention.

Because in Harry, Mark has an outlet to say what he actually thinks. And say it he does. His views aren’t, in the scheme of things, massively radical. His parents have sold out (his father used to fight the system, we’re told, and now he “is the system”), the school system is warped, and everyone conforms. There’s nobody to look up to, nothing to do. Oh, and he simulates masturbation. A lot.

As if to reinforce the two sides of his life, after one of his early broadcasts, Mark attempts to talk to a girl at school, and she blanks him.

That notwithstanding, though, he inadvertedly becomes the lone voice of protest in the midst of a messed up system. The film centres around the fictional school of Hubert Humphrey High, whose principal, Loretta Cresswell, firmly knows how to get the academic results that her own superiors judge her school on (her eventual demise in the film, arguably, doesn’t solve that much). Root out the problem students, with the below average scores, then find a reason to expel them, and just keep those who get decent grades on the register.

Interestingly, the story does have its roots in a real life situation. Appreciating Hubert Humphrey High doesn’t exist, what does exist is a school that it’s based on, and where Moyle’s sister, according to the Toronto Star, taught.

“This dancing is a privilege, and it’ll be taken away if it’s abused”

Back to Harry, then. His listeners are everywhere, and his audience unites the people who simply don’t talk to each other when they’re together at school. The nerdy overweight kid, the jocks, the prim and proper swot girl: Moyle draws together the usually clichéd characters of the high school movie, and pretty much gathers them around the radio. Some of them have very swish radios, too.

This wins him a gradually building word-of-mouth audience, which is where Mark’s problems begin. Kids start ringing each other up, to help pass the broadcast on. Tapes do the rounds. More people start to notice. Moyle demonstrates this by gradually congregating more and more people at the physical spot where the reception for Harry’s show is at its best.

Consequently, much to the growing consternation of his father and the principal, more and more people take seriously what Harry has to say. A calm school population starts to take on a rebellious flavour, and a small system that works on complicity starts to unravel.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Mark/Harry has access to documents and information that don’t show Hubert Humphrey High in the best of lights. And when he particularly highlights the case of one student who has been expelled for her problems, although really for her grades, then suddenly, Harry is on lots of people’s radar.

The turning point for the movie, though, comes surprisingly early: it’s the suicide of one of Harry’s listeners. As his army of followers know, if you include a number in your letter to Harry (he’s a pirate radio DJ with a  PO box), you get a call back. In this case, it’s all a little too late. One on-air conversation with Harry later, said caller commits suicide, and the system has its scapegoat. Moyle’s film makes no bones about the way the system looks for the obvious, public fix rather than examining what really drove a youngster to kill himself, and it’s in moments like these when it’s at its best.

There’s also a foil of sorts to Mark/Harry, and that’s with Samantha Mathis’ Nora. The film was made in 1990, and it shows just what my predictive powers are like that I was fairly convinced at the time she’d go on to be a bigger star than she became. Her choices of films didn’t massively help – the Super Mario Bros movie is a stain on most people’s CV – but there’s real potential in her performance here.

For Nora is a far more popular person than Mark by day, yet she too feels the need to express herself anonymously. In her case, it’s her letters to his show, signed from the Eat Me Beat Me lady. It’s Nora who fairly quickly works out Mark’s true identity, and the irony of their relationship is that by them both talking to nobody, they both find somebody.

“Like everything else, you have to read the fine print”

It’s around then, though, that the film starts to run out of steam. It lands lots of punches in its first hour, in pretty quick succession, yet its momentum falters a little, and it goes just a little more conventional (the romance, certainly, is well done, but less interesting). Thus, the final act of the film is more concerned with those in authority tracking down Harry, and shutting down his show. And it all comes together via Harry’s last broadcast, which ends up taking place from the back of a 4×4.

It’s worth acknowledging too, that some points jar just a little. Some of the reaction moments to people listening to Harry’s broadcasts feel a little out of place. Furthermore, while Moyle takes time to briefly explore why the parents, staff and authorities act the way they do, he doesn’t invest too much in it.

Why do they come up with daft schemes such as BIONIC (‘Believe It Or Not I Care’)? Why do Mark’s parents not see beyond the tick box obvious? There are moments with Mark’s dad in particular, to be fair, where you get a glimpse of what he was, and contrast that with what he’s become (check out the moment where he catches Mark and Nora in the basement). But Moyle is, understandably, a little harder on their side of the story.

Still, for its few foibles, and appreciating that the film tailors off a little, at no point in its 102 minute running time does it feel like it’s outstaying its welcome. There’s sometimes a rawness to it, and there’s also a bunch of strong performances from the predominantly young cast.

I should focus on Christian Slater in particular, though. He’s electric here, in the midst of Harry’s raging monologues, but it shouldn’t be overlooked how well he conveys Mark’s innate shyness. It’s one of the more trickier characters he’s tackled, and the issues he has to talk about – sexual abuse, suicide, sexuality, loneliness – mean he has to balance the tone just right. I’d suggest he very much does. Moyle’s writing, too, is at times exquisite. The monologue he pens for Slater to deliver on the simplicity of suicide is dark, gripping material for a supposed teen movie

“I am not perfect. I have just been going through the motions of being perfect”

I find it odd that Pump Up The Volume, a film with a misjudged title and a not wonderful promotional campaign behind it, seems to have been lost a little. Appreciating that at most we’ve had a basic DVD release of the film, and it’s never likely to be ripe for Blu-ray, it’s still comfortably one of the best teen movies of the 90s (and the 90s were hardly short of strong teen movies), and also, a qualityaddition to the unnaturally strong genre of radio DJ movies (seriously: how many bad ones can you name?)

Even if you take just the romance element in isolation (arguably the weakest ingredient) between Mark and Nora, the scene where Harry takes to the airwaves to tell her his feelings, unable to look her in the eye and voice them face to face, is really well done. It’s the kind of stuff that romcoms stumble over all the time. Here’s a teen movie that handles it with class.

When the film is quiet in particular, and when good actors are being trusted with long passages of dialogue, Pump Up The Volume is brilliant. And it still is. Moyle has fashioned here an intelligent, well made and strongly written film, with something to say, that – in an age of Internet anonymity – might even be more resonant over two decades later.

And if it isn’t? Well, to take the works of Harry himself, “so be it”…

Saturday Matinee: The Square

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By Freda Cooper

Source: Flickering Myth

SYNOPSIS:

A museum curator is preparing to launch a major art exhibition.  He sees himself as having a social conscience, but when his wallet and phone are stolen, the other side of his character emerges and he badly mis-handles the situation – and does the same thing when it comes to promoting his new show.

A film from Ruben Ostlund isn’t going to be cozy.  Compelling and fascinating, yes, but never easy and sometimes impenetrable.  His previous offering, Force Majeure, was well received and won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2014.  His latest, The Square, went one step further and scooped the Palme D’Or last year.

Force Majeure centred on a spontaneously cowardly act by a father.  This has another act from another father at its centre, but this time one that’s thought out.  Badly.  And it’s followed by a second one, which is equally ill-considered.   The Square of the title is an art installation, the centrepiece of an exhibition supervised by museum curator Christian (Claes Bang).  He’s a man under pressure, both professionally and domestically, but still believes he has a social conscience – until his wallet and phone are stolen.  His reaction is extreme, a more accurate reflection of the real man, and he’s responsible for something equally rash when it comes to launching his beloved exhibition.

That’s putting it simply.  Ostlund has a number of targets for what is, at times, a savage satire.  At the heart of it is how those with money treat others – the homeless, the poor or those who are just not as wealthy.  Society encourages tolerance and kindness, but it’s easier to ignore them.  “Would you take a moment to save a life?” asks a charity worker and everybody who walks past her says no.  Are they just saying no to her or to her actual question?  Or both?

The art establishment, in the form of The Square installation, comes in for attack as well.  It’s meant to represent a space where everybody is safe and responsible for each other – but that can apply to any space, from a circle to a pentagon. It’s nonsense.  As are some of the other exhibits, especially one made up of conical piles of gravel.  It’s no surprise that some are accidently vacuumed up by the cleaner.  The exhibition’s marketing team is equally ridiculous, but also irresponsible in its creation of a promotional video of a little, impoverished girl.  It goes viral and causes an outcry – all because Christian doesn’t take the time to think it through properly.

Much of this creates uncomfortable laughter, but lurking in the background in the museum is another installation featuring an ape like man, brought to life by a performance artist.  His actual appearance at the exhibition launch is breath-stoppingly unsettling, as he lumbers around the room, aggressively whooping and pawing at the guests.  The end of the scene is even more deeply disturbing.  Yet again, the idea is mis-judged, with the guests initially alarmed and scared and then turning on the man in the most vicious of ways.

That scene marks a change in tone, but it’s also where the film starts to unravel.  Christian delivers a speech, videoed on his phone, which essentially explains the plot.  Except that, by that stage, the point is already clear, so it’s hardly necessary.   His explanation of the marketing video to a packed press conference is equally superfluous and more than a little disingenuous.  But Claes Bang holds both halves of the film together with the arrogant, flawed but not wholly unlikeable Christian, although talents like Dominic West and Elizabeth  Moss are under-used and have only a handful of scenes apiece.  Terry Notary, in that exhibition launch sequence delivers the piece of acting that sticks in your mind and, disturbing as  it is, it’s powerfully excellent.

The Square doesn’t have the clarity of Force Majeure, but it does have the ability to grab the audience firmly by the shoulders for the duration.  Given the complexity and occasional obscurity of the story, the film needs it.  It isn’t always satisfying, but it is never less than compelling.

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Watch The Square on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/590338/the-square?start=true

Saturday Matinee: Let the Bullets Fly

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By Josh Larsen

Source: Larsen on Film

Little visual gags fly as fast as the bullets in this 2010 Chinese action comedy, starring co-writer and director Jiang Wen as Pocky Zhang, a bandit leader who poses as governor of a southern outpost. One of the first things we see is a bandit leaning down to listen for an approaching train on railroad tracks—but first he ostentatiously sticks his finger in his ear to clear it out.

Mistaken identity is at the core of much of the movie’s comedy. Let the Bullets Fly opens with Zhang and his band hijacking that train, which is carrying the actual governor (Ge You) to his post in Goose Town. During his interrogation of the governor (captured in a shot-reverse-shot sequence that’s edited at light speed), Zhang decides that pretending to be the governor might be more lucrative than simply robbing him. But upon arriving in Goose Town (with the real governor in tow, disguised as Zhang’s counselor), Zhang finds that things are actually run by the local crime boss, Master Huang (Chow Yun-Fat). This leads to a series of strategic chess moves between the two men, culminating in a comic set piece where Zhang’s crew and Huang’s henchmen square off while wearing the same bandit masks with red circles on them, unable to tell who is who. It’s a face-off as farce.

With its manic comic sensibility, Let the Bullets Fly recalls the work of Hong Kong’s Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle, CJ7), whose own films seem inspired by Looney Tunes cartoons (the opening train sequence here could easily be a Wile E. Coyote short). Physics takes a back seat to fun, so that much of the film seems to be occurring in fast motion. As director, Jiang looks for every opportunity to be showy; at one point an alarm clock is thrown in the air and shot to pieces, causing a metal circle to sail over the camera like a collar.

As an actor, Jiang seems to understand that his face has a comic appeal—those big ears—that allows him to underplay the gags by keeping a straight face. He’s a delight. The legendary Chow (The Killer, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) gets a double role as the villainous Master Huang and Huang’s dim-witted body double. He’s quite a bit broader than Jiang, but equally amusing.

The disparate tones Jiang juggles can make for some uncomfortable moments. There are sudden bits of graphic violence, for instance, and a rape scene that isn’t given nearly the serious consideration it deserves. (Like much of the movie, it’s a setup for a later gag.) But as a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise. “I want to make money standing tall,” Zhang says at one point, trying to explain why he’s left forest robbery behind. “Impossible,” the real governor replies, knowing bureaucratic corruption all too well. The best joke in Let the Bullets Fly might be that a bandit is the movie’s moral center.

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Watch Let the Bullets Fly on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/10088666