On this week’s Shot by Shot podcast we’re dodging zombies.
If it’s Wednesday, errr Thursday (apologies for the delay), it must be time for another episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects hosted by myself and OPS founder Geoff Todd. This week we’re tackling our first comedy on the ‘cast, Edgar Wright’s debut feature Shaun of the Dead, starring — duh — Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and shot by cinematographer David M. Dunlap.
Comedy isn’t often thought of as being especially cinematographical, but that’s one way in which Shaun stands out: the film is full of crafty techniques and stylish flourishes that not only spice up the film’s visual landscape, they also contribute to tone, atmosphere, and even narrative.
If this is your first listen to our show, the format’s simple: each week Geoff and I each pick a few shots from a certain film and discuss their effect and significance. Already we’ve done episodes on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max: Fury Road,Silenceand Drive, and next week we’re talking about a film many consider to be the best ever made: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Be sure to give us a follow so you can be kept up to date on new episodes and shows. We’re on Twitter @OnePerfectPod and Facebook at facebook.com/oneperfectshot, and you can find your two hosts on Twitter as well: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton.
And if you like what you hear — spoiler alert: you’re going to — be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode of us or any of the other shows in our family of OnePerfectPodcasts.
Enough promotion, let’s get you to the good stuff. Check out the podcast at the link below, and enjoy a gallery of the shots we’re discussing.
Here’s a thesis: with the singular exception of his animated adventure story, Fantastic Mr. Fox, the movies of Wes Anderson are fundamentally about nice, fiery desire. But while a number of his movies explore this through the conventional terrain of the heterosexual relationship and its discontents — The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom come to mind — others explore more curious expressions of desire, leaving Anderson’s plain and plaintive ladies behind. Shared aesthetic characteristics, from the constantly reprised Cornell boxes to the carefully referenced dead Eastern European novelists, are subject of much ruthless discussion among Anderson acolytes. And, considering Anderson’s diligent cooperation with turning a collection of essays and interviews into a $35 coffee table book, that seems to be the dissection that Anderson embraces. But what are those other, male-centric movies actually about? Most critics, when forced to give something like a serious and meaningful answer, will tell you they’re about loss. While certainly not incorrect — a number of characters in his movies do die — it’s a reading that feels on par with elucidating that Star Wars is about the conflicts between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Okay, but what else?
All Wes Anderson movies are interested in the micromanagement of small communities, from Bottle Rocket’s mislaid gang to The Grand Budapest Hotel’s titular residency, but three of them also present very well-articulated and similarly designed love triangles: Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Grand Budapest Hotel. To sketch them chronologically — Rushmore is the story of a high school student, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), hot for teacher (Olivia Williams) and thwarted by friendly neighborhood industrialist (Bill Murray). The Life Aquatic features a pilot, Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) hot for journalist (Cate Blanchett), almost thwarted by not-so-friendly neighborhood sea captain (Bill Murray). And The Grand Budapest Hotel stars a bellhop, Zero (Tony Revolori), hot for a girl next door (Saoirse Ronan) and overly-enthusiastic neighborhood concierge (Ralph Fiennes). Played out chronologically, the narrative value of these fixtures descends; almost the entirety of Rushmore, barely a blink in The Grand Budapest Hotel. But unambiguously articulated throughout.
Reading plot devices, particularly the obscenely ubiquitous love triangle, has long been the domain of literature. A popular approach at the turn of the last century, relating narratives to ancient systems of myth, had given way to more structuralist, and later deconstructionist, approaches of disentangling oft-reused plot systems. René Girard’s name is significant here; published in 1961, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure was one of many titles that changed the conventional study of the novel, turning it into a search for patterns and tropes that could answer more fundamental questions about how characters related to each other or even, as Girard himself wrote, “the mystery, transparent yet opaque, of human relations.”
We are helped here, in looking at Anderson’s treatment of desire, by the lack of spontaneity, common in the absurd romantic drama where characters look at each other and are suddenly in love, in Anderson’s design. In Rushmore, for instance, Fischer doesn’t fall for the first grade teacher in some chance encounter: he chases after a Jean Cousteau quote in a book and watches her from afar. Is he in love with her or merely these signifiers? Anderson never quite answers this. He begins to pursue her, in earnest, after his male compadres mock him for his inability to get laid (“Buchan said he’d have already banged her by now,” a friend says about his companionship with another older woman; later, he is refused the male companionship of a few jocks because “there’s gonna be girls there”) and, even then, languishes in the inaccessibility of his subject. When a more realistic object of desire presents herself to Fisher, he is initially unenthused.
Jason Schwartzman interacting with his love interest (right) vs. its intermediary (left)
Conventionally, we read it as Fisher remaining sore over losing his beloved teacher to a strolling industrialist he had befriended, but the maintenance of his schoolteacher crush never really makes any sense until we see it as a celebration of impossibility. It is a relationship with no chance of meaningful consummation but one that Fisher can, outwardly and to us, pretend that there is. When, famously, she asks Fisher if he imagines that they’re going to actually have sex, he is instantly turned off. Owen Wilson, who actually co-wrote Anderson’s first three movies, mentions in the DVD commentary that the scene was included in order to “puncture Max’s make-believe world.” It is a world established around a heterosexual farce that he engages with only because it requires him to do nothing, really. His heart is only shattered when he sees her with the subject of his real desire, Murray’s Herman Blume.
Before we stumble upon the Cousteau-loving schoolteacher, we meet Fisher’s rival, a weary and widowed Blume, introduced to us in the movie’s first minutes as the “best chapel speaker I have ever seen,” in Fisher’s words. Unlike Williams’ Ms. Cross, who inspires a slight and otherworldly wonder , Fisher is immediately smitten with Blume. Compared to Fisher’s own father, working class and barely present, Blume’s wealth and accomplishment make him even more appealing as a father figure. Few of Anderson’s father figures share any biological relationship to their newfound children, and they present possibility, the creation of a self to become. Anderson presents them as selves to desire becoming and inhabiting. Fitting them into Anderson’s aesthetic universe, they are all obscenely wealthy or, at any rate, possess vast troves of material things. What Anderson-acolyte wouldn’t want to be them? Using a word from a Stendhal novel to describe a copyist of temperament, vaniteux, Girard writes: “A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that is it already admired by another person whom he admires.”
In both Rushmore and The Life Aquatic, some element of coincidence is kept in between the angles of Anderson’s love triangles: it is a melodramatic surprise when Anderson’s objects discover the mediator of his desire in bed with its official subject. Why is this? Cinematically, this telegraphs not just a rivalry but the rich contempt of a betrayal. Checking back in on Girard:
The impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator […] The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model — the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.
Hatred, at least ostensibly so, is on richer display in The Life Aquatic. Zissou’s wife (Anjelica Huston) is kept peripherally, seeming to exist for no reason greater than stressing the rivalry between Zissou and a more popular captain (Jeff Goldblum). The movie’s main axis of desire, directed at Cate Blanchett’s pregnantjournalist,is intensely subdued and competes with a raft of influences to get our attention. The moment of betrayal, for instance, is interrupted by a pirate invasion. It a passion that is curiously bare, similarly, of any passion — it’s little more than a canvas for Zissou’s existential despair. We find out very little about her life outside of her pregnancy and her childhood love of Zissou, and even she is surprised to learn that she is subject of any desire at all: “Really? I thought he hated my guts.”
The bonding between Zissou and Plimpton occupies far more of the movie’s attention, and we’re given to understand that his ability to occupy Zissou’s otherwise slacker attention is out of a vague concern for his legacy. The largely male world of the Belafonte suggests otherwise (its singular woman member, save Keener’s dissatisfied wife, Anne-Marie Sakowitz (Robyn Cohen) is sunbathing and desexed. Her most notable performance is as the ship’s nag. Notably, only the male crew members wear the signature red beanie) is defended rigorously by Willem Dafoe’s fiercely loyal Klaus Daimler, and he regards Plimpton as a rival for Zissou’s affections. Like the male relationships that defined Rushmore, none are actually familial: even Plimpton, ostensibly there as Zissou’s illegitimate child, is revealed not to be, as Zissou is observed as impotent. Instead, Plimpton is introduced to replace the death of another non-biological father figure, whose death sets the film in motion. The movie begins with a shot of Zissou and the late Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel), intimate like old lovers — a place inaccessible to any of the coldly depicted heterosexual relationships the movie contains.
The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes, then, the most interesting work in Anderson’s oeuvre: taking the figures of Anderson’s love triangle and inverting them on itself. Revolori’s Zero and Fiennes’ concierge are not rivals, and the love interest, consequently, hardly matters at all. She is used as a brave prop two or three times and dies in a voice over, along with their unseen son, of “an absurd little disease.” When she is introduced, it is in passing, as Zero mentions her as a totem of how much he has learned from his master. When Fiennes’s character meets her, he flirts with her, detached, like playing with a curious toy. Instead of using an invented conflict to fluff out a story of intense masculine admiration, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes unflaggingly honest about its intentions. There is no hate. It became the first Anderson movie with a protagonist that some read as bisexual.
Fundamentally, it represented something in Anderson’s aesthetic vision long simmering under the surface that clinged clammily to tropes of 19th century literature. While the long suffering marriage in Life Aquatic is permitted to timidly persist in order to allow its hero’s journey to remain funded, its companion in The Grand Budapest Hotel, between Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, is mercifully over as soon as the movie’s plot begins in earnest. From clearcut obsessions with romantic poetry and the twee comfort Anderson discovers in the total male space of the prison cell, it celebrates a world that Anderson keeps his female characters far away from while financing it all. It’s not quite gay. Not yet.
Wes Anderson’s Manly Men was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Oregon’s newest film festival offers up a world premiere and a whole lot of other goodies.
‘Boys in the Trees’ features clowns on the bikes.
The Timberline Lodge located at Mt. Hood, Oregon is set to be home for The Overlook Film Festival — a brand-new horror film festival stuffed with 39 films (22 features and 17 shorts from 16 countries). Naturally this is the perfect setting for horror hounds to gather as the Timberline was famously used as the exterior setting in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, The Shining.
The festival is scheduled to kick off in a little over a week on April 27th (and run through the 30th) and we now know that the Opening Night Selection will be the world premiere of Stephanie, the new supernatural thriller from director Akiva Goldsman and Blumhouse Productions. Stephanie was written by the dynamic duo of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and stars Frank Grillo, Anna Torv and Shree Crooks.
Goldsman will be on hand with producer Jason Blum to participate in a Q&A after the screening of Stephanie which will then be followed by a screening of their favorite film in the Paranormal Activity franchise. Blum will also be on hand to accept the festival’s Visionary Award on behalf of Blumhouse Productions. The Visionary Award was established to honor a contemporary horror figure or company elevating the genre, while fostering the community by providing opportunities for new talent to thrive.
Stephanie is just one of a number of exciting films aimed to thrill audiences making the trek to the Pacific Northwest. Here are 12 films, including Stephanie, that I’m eager to feast my eyes upon at the first-ever Overlook Film Festival.
Opening Night Film — World Premiere
Stephanie — Dir. Akiva Goldsman — United States, 2017
Stephanie re-unites Blumhouse with Academy Award winning writer and director Akiva Goldsman (director: Winter’s Tale, writer: A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code, executive producer: the Paranormal Activity franchise) for this supernatural horror-thriller. In the not too distant future, after a global crisis, Stephanie is left alone in her remote home, while a dark supernatural force looms in the background. When her mother and father return to claim her, the malevolent power spins out of control with Stephanie at the center.
The Bad Batch — Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour — United States, 2016
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this imaginative tale sees a young girl deemed no longer suitable for civilized society forcibly put out to pasteur in the rugged Texas wasteland inhabited by a iron-pumping ground of blood thirsty cannibals.
The Bar — Dir. Alex de la Iglesia — Spain, 2017
Spanish genre maverick, Alex de la Iglesia, returns to form with fast paced horror-comedy about a random group of diners who get trapped together inside a bar in downtown Madrid when a sniper opens fire on the streets. As claustrophobia sets inside, a series of bizarre occurrences take place outside, leading this mismatched bunch to extreme paranoia that may have vicious consequences.
Boys in the Trees — Dir. Nicholas Verso — Australia, 2016
Part eerie, part moving, this engrossing coming-of-age tale sees two estranged teens as they begrudginly find themselves walking home together on Halloween 1997. As the differences in the pair start bubble to surface, the two embark on a surreal journey through their vivid memories, lurid dreams and morbid fears.
The Dwarves Must Be Crazy — Dir. Bhin Banloerit — Thailand, 2016
The most insane and hilarious horror comedy you will see this year, The Dwarves Must Be Crazy follows a village of little people as it is attacked by an evil ancient Thai spirit. When the local inhabitants feast on some poisonous fireflies, all hell breaks loose in this chaotic piece of anarchic cinema full of intenstines and flatulance humor.
Centerpiece Presentation
Lady Macbeth — Dir. William Oldroyd — United Kingdom, 2016
Rural England, 1865. Katherine is stifled by her loveless marriage to a bitter man twice her age, and his cold, unforgiving family. When she embarks on a passionate affair with a young worker on her husband’s estate, a force is unleashed inside her so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
Meatball Machine Kodoku — Dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura — Japan, 2017
Japanese cyberpunk is alive and well in this folllow-up to the 2005 splatter comedy Meatball Machine. Taking the reigns this time is effects specialist Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) as he puts his own independent spin on the story of the alien parasite who turns unsuspecting humans into Necro-borg — half man, half machine creatures who will stop at nothing to battle each other to the death.
Prey — Dir. Dick Maas — Netherlands, 2016
Bad boy Dutch director Dick Maas returns with this over-the-top thriller about an enormous, aggressive lion who is on the loose outside of Amsterdam. Teaming up with the police and her hunter ex-boyfriend, a brilliant veternarian is hot on the trail, dead set on catching the beast before he tears through everything in sight in the romp of a gore-fest.
Psychopaths — Dir. Mickey Keating — United States, 2017
When an unidentified madman is sent to the electric chair, it triggers a sort of Mischief Night for a group of serial killers out in an entire city. An escaped mental patient, a beautiful seductress, a strangler who preys on unsuspecting women and an enigmatic masked contract killer run amok in Mickey Keating’s new slasherfest.
Terror 5— Dir. Sebastian Rotstein, Federico Rotstein — Argentina, 2016
On a night when the City Governor is facing the accusation of being responsible for a tragedy that led to the death of 15 persons when a building in construction fell apart, five citizens who remain disillusioned are fated to face their most terrifying fears. Based on a set of urban legends, these seedy, allegorical tales of lust, possession, revenge and voyeurism will make your skin crawl.
Mayhem — Dir. Joe Lynch — United States, 2017
In this explosive new film from director Joe Lynch, a dangerous virus that prevents the infected from controlling their inhibitions is discovered in a corporate law building — the very same firm that recently cleared an infected man on murder charges. When a quarantine is issued and the building goes on lockdown, all hell breaks loose inside, leaving a disgruntled employee (Steven Yeun) and an irate client (Samara Weaving) to fight their way to the top to “have a word” with the corrupt executives who wronged them.
Lake Bodom— Dir. Taneli Mustonen— Finland, 2016
Every camper’s worst nightmare came true at Lake Bodom in 1960 when four teenagers were stabbed to death while sleeping in their tent. As the years passed and the case grew cold, the unsolved mystery turned into a creepy campfire story passed from generation to generation. Now, a group of teenagers arrives at the same campsite, hoping to solve the murder by reconstructing it minute by minute. As night falls, it turns out not all of them are there to play.
The stars of yesterday now are making three films a year you never knew existed until they show up on Netflix.
^ Real Movie ^
In my prior life as a script reader, I certainly read a lot of bad scripts, but at times, an even more common occurrence was a script that seemed to do a great many things right, but somehow fell just short of being something you wanted to champion as a movie. As draining as the terrible scripts were, there’s something pure about clear-cut bad. It takes little effort to explain why they’re unfit.
The real challenges were the scripts that had kind of a decent premise, kind of an okay twist or two, and a lead character who wasn’t bad so much as he or she was just… there. The raw materials are there for what COULD be a script. They just happen to be assembled in the least compelling way possible. It’s competent enough that it feels close to being a movie, but it’s raw enough that you won’t want to put your job on the line to tell someone else to read it. Scripts like this often got the “Consider with Reservations” ranking. If you’ve worked in Hollywood, you’ve probably read a number of scripts like this. If you’re not in the biz, it’s hard to find a good analogy to explain these scripts that need more time to bake.
Then, after a trip to Netflix one recent afternoon, I realized there’s an easy series of examples I can point to. In their library at any given time, you’ll stumble across a ton of recent films you’ve never heard of that star former mega-stars like Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, John Cusack, and Pierce Brosnan.
The men who headlined some of the biggest films of the eighties and nineties now film entire movies that no one knows exists until they show up under the heading “Because you liked Con Air.” Just going back five years, here are the films of just ONE of those aforementioned actors: Stolen, The Croods, The Frozen Ground, Joe, Rage, Outcast, Left Behind, Dying of the Light, The Runner, Pay the Ghost, The Trust, Snowden, The USS Indianapolis, Dog Eat Dog, Army of One, Arsenal, and Vengeance: A Love Story. That’s SEVENTEEN films! How far into that list were you before you were sure I was talking about Nicolas Cage?
Most of those movies are basically direct-to-DVD thrillers in their latest incarnation, but there are a few interesting choices there. Army of One is an unusual quirky film from director Larry Charles (Borat) about a man who believes he’s on a mission from God to capture Osama bin Laden. It’s not the sort of movie that would have done well theatrically. It’s thoroughly bizarre from start to finish (Russell Brand plays Jesus, just to give you a baseline), and the kick of seeing Cage play way against type as a crazy schlub is often tempered by the fact it’s still “Nic Cage as a crazy guy.” He doesn’t disappear into the role and it sorta feels like we’re watching what would be a movie in the Nic Cage version of Jean Claude Van Johnson.
I’m not even sure if I liked it, but it’s a singular brand of crazy and I have to respect that. Now this was not the typical middle-ground kind of script I was referring to earlier. It’s weird enough to compensate for its shortcomings, despite the sense that the satire could be more razor sharp and the directing more polished. But in concept and character, it’s so off the wall that I get how Cage wouldn’t see it as a “Consider with Reservations.” If an actor is going to make seventeen films in five years, they’ve earned the right for a few of them to be balls-out bonkers. In fact, this is how these guys should be used at this point in their career.
Let me give a quick explanation about how the direct market has worked pretty much going back to the days of Golan-Globus. When VHS came, there was a killing to be made in the direct-to-video market, particularly overseas. So producers would throw a lot of money at famous names whose participation would move those units overseas. Often these were actors who were past their glory days here and were no longer getting the big studio offers. So a guy like Chuck Norris or Jean Claude Van Damme got a lead role and probably better money than a studio would offer at that point, and the producers make a killing on foreign sales. This is pretty much how it worked for decades, through the advent of DVD.
The passage of time has meant that guys who were on the top of the A-List in the nineties don’t have the same commercial value for studios. Cage is one of them, but take a look at some of his more active contemporaries.
John Cusack actually beats Cage’s list, appearing in a staggering 18 films in the last five years: The Raven, The Paperboy, The Factory, The Numbers Station, Adult World, The Frozen Ground, The Butler, Grand Piano, The Bag Man, Maps to the Stars, Drive Hard, The Prince, Love and Mercy, Reclaim, Dragon Blade, Chi-Raq, Cell, and Arsenal. Wikipedia specifically lists seven of those as direct-to-video. A few are cameos and some got a token theatrical release. Don’t assume that all of these are bad. Love and Mercy is one of the best of his career, but he’s been very prolific.
Bruce Willisalso has made eighteen films, though more of his are recognizable studio titles: Moonrise Kingdom, Lay the Favorite, The Expendables 2, The Cold Light of Day, Looper, Fire with Fire, A Good Day to Die Hard, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Red 2, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, The Prince, Vice, Rock the Kashbah, Extraction, Precious Cargo, Marauders, and The Bombing.
Next to those filmographies, former James Bond Pierce Brosnan actually looks rather lazy, for he’s only made 11 films in those five years: Love Is All You Need, The World’s End, The Love Punch, A Long Way Down, The November Man, Some Kind of Beautiful, Survivor, No Escape, A Christmas Star, Urge, and I.T.
Having not seen many of these films, I wouldn’t presume that all of them are the sort of “Consider With Reservations” screenplays I’ve discussed. In the name of expediency, I picked out a few select titles to view. Brosnan’s I.T. sounded the most intriguing. It’s a paranoid techno-thriller in which Brosnan stars as Mike Regan a business tycoon who invites Ed, a young I.T. tech from his company to fix a few wi-fi issues in his state-of-the-art home. While there, the seemingly pleasant twentysomething flirts with Mike’s 17 year-old daughter and when this relationship progresses to the point where Ed is dropping by for family parties, Mike’s character fires him.
As you might expect, this is not a smart move when Ed knows how to hack your entire home and the many cameras contained within, to say nothing of their devices like iPads. His revenge includes sending fake emails to the SEC and secretly filming the daughter masturbating in the shower and then texting it to all her friends. At one point, Ed hacks Mike’s navigation system and sends him the video while also messing with his breaks to cause a crash. Naturally, it turns out that Ed has lied about his background and he’s a complete psycho. It has all the elements of a good stalker thriller… seemingly.
So where does the film go wrong? A good stalker film needs to really give a scenery-chewing bad guy. I’m not personally a fan of the trope where the person turns out to be legitimately deranged (thereby freeing the film of their motivations always needing to make sense), but it’s done often enough. The problem here is the actor playing Ed just isn’t up to the task. Even Swimfan managed to provide a more compelling psycho. When the script makes the stalker two-dimensional, it falls to the actor to bring more to the role, and this performer isn’t up to the task.
The film is also a great object lesson in how just a few issues can throw off the whole thing. If the stalker isn’t the scene-chewing selling point, than our POV relocates to the protagonist. In a technothriller like this, The Net could be a good operational model for how to put the audience in the shoes of someone whose life is being unraveled by nigh-omnipotent technical forces. Twenty years later, The Net’s view of computers and the internet is even cheesier than it was then, but it’s got a pace and an energy to it. It helps that Sandra Bullock is good at playing the confusion and helplessness the situation warrants. And once you consider that, you realize a former James Bond is the wrong casting choice here.
Brosnan excels at playing characters who remain unflappable and in control in even the most desperate situations. It’s why he was an underrated Bond and why he was right for movies like The Thomas Crown Affair and The Matador. Here, it short-stops any sense of emotional engagement with his character and predicament as things accelerate. It’s not entirely Brosnan’s fault — he’s playing the character as written and that person has a strong degree of coolness and formality to him.
It’s also notable that the single greatest humiliation that Ed doles out is not aimed at Mike — it’s his daughter. The stalker tries to get under Mike’s skin by sexually humiliating Kaitlyn, and there’s something unseemly about how the movie objectifies her as much as Ed does. It’d be less egregious if SHE was the protagonist. Frankly it’s not hard to imagine a version where the story is told through her eyes and is a lot more effective. Can you spot it?
The teenage actress isn’t the player who gets funding for this film. Brosnan’s star value is essentially subsidizing the production. He has to be the star, which is why you end up with this movie that comes so close to working, but is done in by its own restrictions. It’s also the same mistakes you see in a script by a writer who has decent material but hasn’t considered every nuance about WHY some movies work.
Going back to those filmographies, you might have noticed there are a few films that show up on more than one actor’s list. Both Cage and Cusack star in The Frozen Ground, a film that sounds SO much better than it came out. Based on a true story, Cage plays an Alaskan state trooper trying to close the murders of several young women. One escaped victim points the finger at Cusak’s character, a local restaurant owner named Robert Hanson who is so meticulous in his crimes that the best police can do is turn up circumstantial evidence. It’s an experience you finish and ponder, “Everything here should have added up to a really cool movie, but it missed by a few degrees and came out dull.”
But even that near-miss is better than The Prince, also starring Cusack, this time with Bruce Willis. It’s a crime thriller so needlessly complicated and simultaneously flat that I can’t summarize it mere weeks after I watched it. I doubt it was the script that lured the talent, and it points to a frustrating truth: these men want to work, the money exists to pay them to work, so why aren’t there more writers turning out better mid-level crime thrillers for them? The truth is that it’s far harder to write a good movie than anyone realizes.
I’ve encountered hundreds of writers who think they’ve got the next In the Line of Fire or Silence of the Lambs because they’ve reproduced the genre and the drive of those thrillers. In truth, they’ve really written I.T. or The Frozen Ground. With so many name actors in the twilight of their career now working in this arena, I’d love to see more of these guys making really interesting and bizarre misses like Army of One than tepid, forgettable work like The Prince. The further outside their comfort zone, the more interesting the movie is like to be. That at least gives some life to “Consider With Reservations.”
A before-and-after look at the director’s meticulous productions.
The cinematic worlds of Wes Anderson are rich with minute detail and innovative design, they’re like life-sized playsets for adults, and they lend to his films not only a unique visual distinction, but also a lighthearted theatricality. Anderson doesn’t just direct his films, he crafts them from the ground up, starting with meticulous illustrations that he then hands over to set designers to realize in three dimensions.
In the latest comparative montage from Candice Drouet, Anderson’s set design finds itself in the spotlight. Drouet has paired pictures from Anderson’s various productions with screencaps of the final results, allowing you to appreciate just how much work goes into making the director’s seamless, fluid, and uniquely quirky worlds. In a cinematic landscape that’s largely computer generated, it’s refreshing to see the practical lengths to which Anderson and crew will go to in order to distinguish their work from that of the herd.
“You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.”
Noah Hawley’s acclaimed midwestern crime anthology Fargo returns to FX this week, along with my enthusiasm for saying oh yah and you betcha to anyone with the gall to speak to me when I would rather be watching Fargo. In my defence there are not one, but two, gloriously bad Ewan McGregor wigs. Truly, Hawley is doing the Lord’s work. Season three is set in the not too distant past of 2010, and follows the tried-and-true template of a ridiculously stacked ensemble of endearing (and woefully misguided) ne’er do wells gradually bungling their way into a shit show of their own design. As with each of the previous installments, least of all the Coen Brothers’ original 1996 film, the opening of this week’s episode features the following superimposed text:
This is a true story. The events depicted took place in Minnesota in [year]. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
This claim is, as in all incarnations, bullshit. Fargo is, as the tiny-print disclaimer in the credits notes, a work of fiction. Full disclosure: my gullible ass didn’t think to fact check this until about halfway through season 1 of the FX series. It’s an oversight I share with a great deal of the reviewers who saw the Coen original, skirted the then-nascent internet, and propagated what Joel and Ethan probably thought no one but the very dense would fall for (see: yours truly). That being duped, or at the very least rendered unsure, was possible is a testament to the effectiveness of a film that, to quote Ethan, “pretends to be true.”
ah jeez Fargo’s fake, pack it in
Like most fiction, swatches of the Coens’ Fargo are sourced from real events: most emphatically, the “Woodchipper Murder” of Helle Crafts and, according to Joel, a real-life case of “a guy…gumming up serial numbers for cars and defrauding the General Motors Finance Corporation.” Not to say that Fargo is some artistic-license-abusing biopic because its inspiration has some ties to real events; by that logic, every film would require some kind of pre-show disclaimer. Rather, Fargo’s actual fidelity is a lot less interesting than it’s purportedfidelity; that the Coens, and Hawley, have chosen to endow Fargo’s narrative with an apparent authority of truth. Or, as Ethan explained in a recent interview with The Huffington Post: “We wanted to make a movie just in the genre of a true story movie. You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.”
This isn’t truthfulness— it’s something that feels like the truth; that itch in the back of your skull that says wait…maybe this happened for real. It’s a frustratingly charming invitation to wilfully ascent to a cinematic reality; to give it a place in what you consider to be possible. To say “yes” to such requests can be both enchanting and dangerous. I cannot speak to every instance of fictions that, like Fargo, pretend to be true — but I would like to briefly touch on two of my favourites: found-footage horror, and its predecessor, the early modern travel novel.
‘Fargo,’ 1996 (Top); FX’s ‘Fargo’ Episode 1, Seasons 1, 2, and 3 (L to R)
While pinning down the exact origin of the “true story” framing device is somewhat murky — it certainly saw refinement during the unofficial 18th Century hell-in-a-cell match for the title of “first English novel.” Often, particularly in fictional travel literature, authors would claim to have come into possession of a stash of letters, a memoir, or an otherwise scrawled testimony they’d been entrusted to publish. Arguably, the device hit a stride with Daniel Defoe, who authored his most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, under the name its eponymous protagonist. This pre-Lemony Snicket shit, in conjunction with the confessional tone and the then unprecedented sense of realism, led many readers to believe the book was an actual travelogue as opposed to a piece of fiction. Seven years after Crusoe, famed would-be-baby-eater Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, where he parodied the bejesus out of Defoe’s purported narrative veracity in an introductory note from the book’s fictional publisher. In it, Swift claims that his “ancient and intimate friend,” Mr. Gulliver bequeathed him the following papers and “there is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a short proverb among his neighbours.” While a part of me pines for such a high level of petty subtweeting, the 1700s were a decidedly bad time to be lady writer.Though as it happens, some women, like Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, were able to fashion a comfortable distance between their work’s content and contemporary prejudice by framing their novels as historical fact. For women writers at this time, ascribing the authority of truthfulness to their fiction accomplished more than just narrative world-building , or tonal realism — it compelled their readers to consider their work as valid and worthy of attention. It’s a power less noble, shakier, more horror-inclined works, would come to exploit.
For better or for worse, found footage horror is a direct descendent of the aforementioned fancy early modern fare. A descendent you privately loathe and leave out of the will, perhaps, but the point stands: in both cases, giving credence to your fiction puts money in your pocket. Now listen, we could be civilized connoisseurs of the 21st-century found footage boom and talk about goodies like REC, baddies likeThe Fourth Kind, or oldies like The Blair Witch Project. Or we could talk about Cannibal Holocaust, which I’m going to heretically sit at the same table as Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast for its shared interest in procuring a “truthy-feel” out of its medium. But where the jury is out on the particularities of the havoc conjured up by Welles — Cannibal Holocaust is a different, and cautionary, tale.
Found footage trailblazer Cannibal Holocaust (1980)follows a team of American filmmakers into the Amazon basin to recover a documentary crew who disappeared while filming tribes of cannibals. Both the amateur documentary style of the film-within-the-film and the employment of real indigenous actors (which is a whole other can of worms) led many to suspect that Cannibal Holocaust was a bonafide snuff film, a rumour director Ruggero Deodato did little to dispel. Probably didn’t help that Sergio Leone wrote Deodato a prophetic letter that concluded: “everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.” 10 days after its premiere in Milan, Deodato was presented with every director’s dream scenario: obscenity and murder charges. Did it help that the four leads were under contract to go into hiding for a year so as to fan the promotional flames of “are the actors really dead?” No. No it did not. While the actors eventually broke contract and Deodato was cleared of the murder charges, the film does contain some very real and very graphic violence towards animals that landed Deodato, his producers, the screenwriter, and their United Artists representative an arguably lenient four-month suspension. All to say, if there’s a dark side to cinematic verisimilitude, Cannibal Holocaust is a contender.
By endowing Fargo’s narrative framework with a sense of truthfulness, Hawley and the Coens invite viewers to validate improbable events — to ascent to a world that can contain both the tenacious courage of Marge and Molly, and the chaotic violence of Malvo and the Gerhardts. In this way, to consider the plausibility of Fargo’s fiction is to entertain a peculiar and uneasy paradox: an exotic homeyness, a humorous severity. It’s a tension at home in both the broader Coen canon, and the adjacent space Hawley has carved out for himself. I have been dancing around the term truthiness, which belongs to Stephen Colbert. Admittedly, the impulse to bristle at something purporting truth with no basis in actual fact is a valid one. What ultimately distinguishes, and I think redeems Fargo’s truthiness is its playful attitude towards this framework, its ruthless commitment to the bit — its tongue-in-cheek invitation to validate an implausible comedy of errors. There’s that emboldening and terrifying paradox again: “stories that are not credible [that] occasionally turn out to be true.”
This Week: Special effects master Chris Walas, known for ‘The Fly’ and ‘Gremlins.’
You may not recognize his name, but the odds are good you know his work.
Welcome to the first episode of the Film Itself podcast, another new addition to the One Perfect Pod family of shows. The idea for our new show is simple: each week, we’ll be speaking to film fans both inside and outside the industry. Directors, cinematographers, actors, podcast hosts, video essayists, journalists, if they have a passion for film, we want to explore that. For those that may not know, Film Itself was the original name for One Perfect Shot, but in the end, the latter was a better description of what we did (and do). Our new show is an opportunity to dust off that name, a quiet tribute of sorts to the late Roger Ebert (a hero of mine), and give it the spotlight as we talk to aficionados of cinema from around the world.
Our first guest is legendary creature effects artist Chris Walas. He melted faces in Raiders of the Lost Ark, designed Gizmo and crew for Gremlins, and won an Academy Award for his work on David Cronenberg’s The Fly (turning down Gremlins 2 in the process. Yes, this is one of the few people to have ever told Steven Spielberg “No”). His latest project is more personal, but like his best screen moments, practical.
Chris is currently raising funds on Kickstarter for his latest short film called The Inheritence. Co-directing with his daughter Zena Walas, the film tells the story of a young man who arrives at a castle to claim his inheritance “but instead he finds mistrust, mystery, monsters, mutants and mayhem that lead him down a nightmarish path to his ultimate destiny as he faces the true nature of his ancestor’s spirit.”
Image: A scene from Chris Walas and Zena Walas’ short film THE INHERITANCE.
This project is being executed using practical effects, puppets, and classic techniques. You can find the project byclicking here, they are getting closer to their goal each day but they need your help to make this project a reality. We spoke to Chris about his amazing career, we talked Raiders, The Fly, Gremlins, and sat in stunned silence as he casually mentioned that he painted the original Michael Myers mask for John Carpenter’s Halloween. This was the third or fourth chance I’ve had to speak with Chris and each time I walk away learning a new fact about his rich career.
So, there’s only one thing left to do: click play. Enjoy the first episode of Film Itself with the always entertaining Chris Walas.
A man sits in a café sipping a spot of tea, reading a book and waiting on a sandwich. That’s when a fly begins to pester him, but a moment’s observation reveals this is no ordinary fly and no mere pestering. See, the fly keeps landing on specific words in the man’s book, words that when strung together seem to be an impossible communication. As he starts to decipher the message, the man makes a supernatural connection that…well, you’ll have to see for yourself.
Musca is the name of this brief and dark comedy that hatched in the mind of writer-director Stefan Parker, and though it is only four minutes long and contains very little dialogue, it’s a sharp, poignant, wry, and wickedly amusing slice of life that’s comes across like The Fly as made by Monty Python. Bob Fletcher plays the lead with an awestruck naivete that firmly anchors the film in reality while the fly does his/her part at stirring up absurdity.
This one’s a slow-burner but the payoff is totally worth the wait. With Musca Parker has crafted a droll and sardonic — not to mention hilarious — look at life, death, and whatever waits on the other side. It’ll make you laugh, think, and pay extra attention the next time something’s buzzing in your ear.
It’s the director’s first adventure into the genre film.
It has been four long years since Sofia Coppola last directed a feature film, 2013's The Bling Ring. But now the director is back with The Beguiled, and Wednesday’s release of the full-length trailer shows that it is Coppola’s first exploration into the world of genre film.
Coppola’s films are known for their attention to detail and use of natural lighting (with this latter detail often evoking the work of nineteenth century photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden). If Coppola’s viewers were to look at her feature debut The Virgin Suicides (1999), the themes she examines in her later films are already present: Coppola explores loneliness in worlds filled with people; she depicts portrayals of female friendship as simply existing rather than questioning and judging what forms them; and looks at the closeness between love and obsession.
However, while the themes are the same, each film is different in tone, and each story told in a distinct way to the one that came before. Where The Virgin Suicides is about the suicidal Lisbon sisters, Somewhere (2010) explores the relationship between father and daughter, while the story of the young French Queen seen in Marie Antoinette (2006) remains one of Coppola’s biggest productions yet.
However, the latest trailer for The Beguiled shows that the film will be the director’s first adventure into the genre film. The white southern dresses, sepia undertones of the lighting and production design, and the hint of gunplay presents the western genre’s presence. Meanwhile, Coppola’s voyeuristic camera also places the film into the thriller genre. From the trailer, the director doesn’t seem to be breaking the rules of the genre here, presenting an interesting challenge for a director who works in films that are largely either unable to be categorized or of genres of her own making.
The only tradition that is broken is the 1966 novel’s focus on the male perspective, with Coppola instead adapting this story off of which The Beguiled is based to look at the female point of view. As Coppola has said of the film, “the main crux of the story is about the dynamics between a group of women all stuck together, and then also the power shifts between men and women.” The “exotic setting of the Southern gentility,” as Coppola refers to it, and its following of the thriller western genre’s conventions contrasts with the gender dynamics broken by Coppola’s choice to focus on the women. She is at once breaking the rules of the original story yet adhering to its style, hopefully adding a multifaceted layer to an already complex tale.
What’s more, Coppola has noted she hasn’t “really done a genre film.” She’s said of The Beguiled’s genre, “it was fun to figure out how to approach that but still [keep the film] in my style, and to have this kind of beautiful, dreamy world that I like — but with a plot!” Let’s hope the dreamy world of Coppola can still exist in the world of westerns.
Sony has the rights and an executive producer for ‘Wheel of Time.’
Credit: Tor.com
It’s happening; it’s finally happening! Sony Pictures Television announced that it is adapting the Wheel of Time bookseries. Sony, Red Eagle Entertainment and Radar Pictures will co-produce the series. Rafe Judkins will write and executive produce. Judkins’ credits include ABC’s Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D., Netflix’s Hemlock Grove, and NBC’s Chuck. Red Eagle’s Rick Selvage and Larry Mondragon will also serve as executive producers as well as Radar’s Ted Field and Mike Weber. Harriet McDougal, books series writer Robert Jordan’s widow, will serve as consulting producer.
Game of Thrones, there I said it. The first thing that springs to everyone’s mind when mentioning this project is Game of Thrones. Since Game of Thrones premiered on April 2017, I’m pretty sure just almost every television pitch meeting has started with the phrase, “It’s like Game of Thrones meets [Insert show title].” Wheel of Time is different because it is both a cause and effect of Game of Thrones.
The two are tied together not just by genre, but through their authors. Wheel of Time is a 14 book series written by Robert Jordan under the nom de plume of James O. Rigney Jr. Martin’s given Jordan shoutouts throughout his series. A Storm of Swords features a reference to a “Lord Trebor Jordayne of the Tor,” and in A Feast for Crows, a character states that “Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again, he said.” The latter reference speaks to the cyclical character of the central conflict in Jordan’s novels. Following Rigney’s death in 2007, Martin wrote a post honoring Jordan stating: “his huge, ambitious WHEEL OF TIME series helped to redefine the genre, and opened many doors for the writers who followed.” Martin’s statements are touching and genuine.
Wheel of Time tells the story of Rand al’Thor, a farmer’s son whose life changes when two travelers arrive in his small village. Soon, Rand discovers that he can wield magical power and this causes a tectonic shift in both his life and the lives of those around him. Oh, and you guessed it, he is destined to battle an evil entity known as the Dark One. Further, this battle between Rand and the Dark One is just one in an age-old cycle. The Dark One rises, and a hero known as the Dragon has to defeat him. Rinse and repeat. The story sounds simple, but in its execution, it’s not. Jordan, like Tolkien and Martin, gives his characters a rich world to play in and well-rounded personalities. Wheel of Time’s world is a place to get lost in filled with people to love and hate along the way while being peppered with exciting action scenes.
For such a beautiful and engrossing piece of work, the Wheel of Time series has had a bizarre development adventure. An adaptation of the books has been in development in some way or another since 2000. For instance, a television pilot starring Max Ryan and Billy Zane aired at 1:30 a.m. on FXX in February 2015. The pilot was titled ‘Winter Dragon.” Following the release of the pilot, McDougal issued a statement that she had no knowledge or involvement with the pilot. She seems just as surprised as fans were that morning.
Wheel of Time deserves better than a 1 a.m. pilot drop because it is so important to the fantasy genre. Like The Expanse and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, it is going to feel familiar but not because it is derivative of what we know. Rather, Wheel of Time is going to feel familiar because what we know is directly influenced by it. As Jordan wrote:
“As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Men wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same man. Yet no one knows the Great Pattern the Wheel weaves, or even the Pattern of an Age. We can only watch, and study, and hope.”
Let’s watch, study, and hope for an adaptation that lives up to its source material.
What is it about this big, dumb movie that gets me every time?
You can go ahead and sheathe your Tweets, we are well aware that 1987’s Over the Top is a flawed piece of cinema. It’s called Over the Top for crying out loud; if ever the writing was on the wall. However, there is something about this spectacular failed attempt to take the sport of armwrestling mainstream that continues to delight and inspire this writer and the other hosts of the Junkfood Cinema podcast. If you currently sneer at “that movie where Sylvester Stallone armwrestles for custody of his son,” allow me to offer an argument in favor of Over the Top. Look, just read it, ok? Meet me halfway.
While the popular logline for Over the Top is not entirely accurate, it’s unquestionable that it is a silly movie. Truckers getting their faces smacked before armwrestling each other in sweaty diner back rooms, a father who wants to reconnect with his son despite the film never telling us why he left him in the first place, and Stallone going toe-to-toe with a bearded man who willingly guzzles motor oil before a match. More inescapable however is the working class sincerity of Over the Top that speaks to the most fascinating point of Stallone’s career.
There is a perfect storm of hubris in combining for one movie the collective inflated ego of Cannon Films producer/director Manahem Golan and actor Sylvester Stallone. If Leni Riefenstahl had directed a documentary about this collaboration, it would be called The Imposing of the Will. For those who don’t know, Golan was the head of a studio known for employing more shady production tactics than Roger Corman during tax season. Similarly, Sylvester Stallone has made as much a career of being a musclebound prima donna as he has of being an action hero.
But in the 80s, that arrogance was restrained to behind-the-scenes antics. These incidents include firing Barry Sonnenfeld off Tango & Cash because he felt Barry didn’t know how to light him correctly and actually asking the author of the book on which Cobra is based if the book could be re-released with Stallone instead listed as the author. And yet for all the elbows he tossed around, which I’m pretty sure would be a penalty at the World Armwrestling Championships, the characters Stallone plays during this decade are primarily blue collar Joes to whom the audience can relate and who are drenched with humility.
He kicks off the decade in the gritty buddy cop flick Nighthawks wherein he plays a cop so eager to clean up the streets that he is willing to dress as a woman to bait purse-snatchers; no judgment of those who enjoy crossdressing, but it’s certainly something we’d never see Stallone do again. He plays a cab driver in Rhinestone (terrible but apt for this analysis), he plays a New Jersey mechanic/prison inmate in Lockup, and even his exaggeratedly hardboiled cop Cobra is saddled with the ego-checking first name of Marion.
Consider also two of his most popular cinematic characters: John Rambo and Rocky Balboa. Much like John McClane, Rambo and Rocky lost their grasps on the everyman identity throughout their sequels. But recall that Rocky began life as a struggling boxer forced to be a loan shark’s enforcer to make ends meet and in 1982, we were introduced to the original version of John Rambo: a damaged Vietnam veteran being hassled by small-town cops while literally just trying to make it back home.
There are exceptions to this Stallone 80s model — self-parodying caricature Ray Tango and a Rocky who figuratively punches down the Berlin Wall — but they are just that: exceptions. This is before we hit the 90s wherein he is playing assassins, cryogenically frozen supercops, and post-apocalyptic super…judges. His roles became so hilariously larger than life that Stallone the actor became subsumed by Stallone the movie star right before audiences’ eyes. This might be why his turn in Copland was so heralded, as a return to the 80s Stallone archetype we all preferred.
Somehow one of the least over-the-top characters Stallone has ever played is Over the Top’s Lincoln Hawk. Hawk, who is periodically also called “Hawkes” because the writers weren’t paying much attentionm, is a freelance truck driver with big dreams owning his own trucking firm. He subsists on truck stop steak and armwrestles for extra cash to make ends meet. He’s divorced, is estranged from his own son, and has a bitter relationship with his ex-father-in-law. If his collar were any bluer, he could go on tour with Jeff Foxworthy! While it’s true that Over the Top is Manahem Golan’s temple of machismo, bigger than the biceps in this movie is the heart of the movie itself. Stallone plays Hawk with such a evocative genuineness that you not only buy him as the underdog at the armwrestling podium, but as the David to everyday life’s Goliath.
Off screen, I don’t care about armwrestling in the slightest whether it be single or double elimination, but like a well-crafted documentary (incidentally, the third act slips in some surprise documentary-style structure), Over the Top makes the audience care about the subject by delivering likable characters with sympathetic motivations whom we want to see succeed. And my god is Lincoln Hawk’s victory triumphant!
Although he’s not technically winning custody of his son, because he’s legally had that custody the entire time, the struggle of a physically mighty man to be a loving, providing father elicits tears from even the stoniest of eye sockets. That triumph is enhanced by a beautiful score by the legendary Giorgio Moroder, a power ballad by the equally legendary Kenny Loggins, and a blistering, montage-inciting anthem from Sammy Hagar.
Don’t feel out-of-place if you haven’t previously connected with Over the Top. Junkfood Cinema cohost C. Robert Cargill wasn’t hot on it either, and he and Brian Salisbury wrestled with covering it as part of their Summer of 87 series. Luckily, Alamo Drafthouse programmer and Neon Films creative director Greg MacLennan was there to referee. Give it a listen and see how Cargill’s (and possibly your own) opinion turns around like Lincoln Hawk’s trucker hat.
As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! During Summer of 87, there will be an entirely separate Summer of 77 miniseries just for Patrons! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!
Is there any contemporary filmmaker more provocative or polarizing than David Lynch? People who love him consider him a genius, and people who don’t consider him a weirdo. His films stubbornly eschew understanding for emotion, rely more heavily upon visual storytelling than that of the more traditional, narrative variety, and actively seek to make the audience uncomfortable as often as possible. Regardless where you stand on his work, you can’t deny Lynch is a capital-A Artist, a jack of all creative trades, and a cultural figure the likes of which we haven’t known since the heyday of Salvador Dali.
As such, that makes Lynch ripe for frequent exploration by video essayists seeking to unearth a little clarity from among his body of work. In my time at One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects I’ve viewed essays attempting to define his themes and aesthetic, essays that breakdown his neo-realistic style, montages that collect his varied visual references, and a score of attempts to excise meaning from films like Mulholland Drive, and now I’ve collected 11 of the best right here into a crash course of all things Lynchian.
In addition to the essays, there are also four bonus videos: one that kicks things off with Lynch himself describing creativity, and then three to close things out that imagine a trio of famous films as directed by Lynch — The Shining, La La Land, and Return of the Jedi, which Lynch was actually asked to direct but passed on.
I can’t promise you’ll be a Lynch expert when all is said and done — can anyone truly be such a thing? — but I can guarantee an increased interest in and understanding of the man and his glorious madness. This is a guide for neophytes and old hands alike, so everyone dive into the deep end.
We recommend titles that influenced Ben Wheatley and more.
With his sixth feature, Ben Wheatley finally has a wide release in America. Free Fire might be his most accessible movie yet, consisting a single location and pretty much just one long action sequence. It’s basically a 90-minute third act without the first two acts getting in the way. Also it features Oscar winner Brie Larson, and who doesn’t like watching her act?
If you like what you see, then you’ll want to discover Wheatley’s other work, starting with the small crime film Down Terrace, which kicked off his career. I also recommend the following dozen movies, some of which are direct influences on Wheatley, others being similar kinds of films, and then just whatever else I had determined worthy.
The Truce Hurts (1948)
Ben Wheatley loves Tom and Jerry cartoons and has cited them as an influence on his latest movie. I don’t know which ones he considers the best or his favorites, but you can just start off with the first Tom and Jerry short, Puss Gets the Boot, or with their Oscar-nominated and winning films, such as Yankee Doodle Mouse. I’m highlighting The Truce Hurts because it involves the three main rivals, Tom, Jerry, and Spike, attempting to get along, which is sort of like all the characters in Free Fire trying to play nice in the first part of the movie. Obviously in both cases these two groups ill-fitting individuals wind up at war with each other.
Free Fire is very much, in its whole, like the climax of a Western. Wheatley has acknowledged Sam Peckinpah is an influence, and The Wild Bunch is possibly the most clearly influential on his latest, down to the arms deal gone wrong. Notorious for its violence, The Wild Bunch might now seem somewhat tame next to Wheatley’s work. But only slightly.
“In The Wild Bunch, what was inspiring was that you could run several different stories with different characters at the same time,” Wheatley says in a list of his favorite action movies, “crosscutting back and forth between them — some of the stories being in slow motion, some being in real time, and some in extreme slow motion. I’d never seen anything like that.
Like Free Fire, this Peter Yates movie is set in Boston and involves arms dealers. It’s also one of a few crime films from the era Free Fire is set in that Wheatley directly claims was an inspiration. Robert Mitchum plays the title character, a gunrunner who becomes an informant to avoid yet another stint in prison.
“There’s nothing flashy here, just tension,” Wheatley writes in a piece for the Criterion Collection. “The direction is spare and it’s as cold as concrete. Through the observational style, we forget that, inevitably, the world in which these characters operate is chaotic. Everything seems so reasonable and certain, every word and action measured, but there is always a wild beast waiting to be unleashed, so that all these measures and controls are for nothing.” The scene he discusses can be seen below.
Like Peckinpah, John Carpenter is, in general, a big influence on Wheatley and his latest movie. As in all of their movies are somewhat felt in and worth a look after you see Free Fire. Carpenter’s The Thing is another single-location, every man for himself sort of film, for instance. The original Assault on Precinct 13 gets to that point, as well, and like The Thing, this one should be noted as being inspired by a Howard Hawks film, namely Rio Bravo.
In a recent interview with Wheatley, The Skinny notes that a year ago the filmmaker mentioned to them that Assault on Precinct 13 was an influence on Free Fire. But that now he sees less of this movie in his own. ““It was all those kind of spare ‘70s movies,” Wheatley tells them. “I suppose Assault is one. But this is a bit fiddlier than Assault is, because ultimately it’s a bit more austere, and a modernist thing.”
Straight Time (1978) and Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978)
These two 1978 releases tend to be mentioned alongside Eddie Coyle as the biggest influences of that era on Free Fire. Straight Time stars Dustin Hoffman as a thief who tries unsuccessfully to go clean. Who’ll Stop the Rain is about an attempt to smuggle heroin out of Vietnam. As per Wheatley’s suggestion below, these two movies should be watched back to back.
“I would pair it with Straight Time or Who’ll Stop the Rain,” Wheatley tells Vanyaland of Free Fire’s best complement. “Evil Dead 2. That’d be better, wouldn’t it? It’s a bit more actiony, and Free Fire wouldn’t come off too well against two super cool films like that. Who’ll Stop the Rain and Straight Time, that should be the double bill.”
Not only does Wheatley include this horror classic on that list of his favorite action movies, but he also keeps bringing it up in interviews as the movie he thinks Free Fire is most like — mixed with Tom and Jerry. As you can see above, he also thinks it’s the best to pair with Free Fire. Directed by Sam Raimi, it is of course a sequel to Evil Dead but doesn’t require viewing of the original first. Wheatley saw them out of order because the first movie was banned in the UK, but he considers Evil Dead 2 the “masterwork” anyway.
“It became more apparent as we were making it,” Wheatley tells Moviefone, “but that level of swinging the camera around and the slapstick elements of it. We were making it and thinking, ‘This is more Raimi than it is the cooler end of ’70s stuff.’ Because it was much more flying cameras and steadicams and techno-cranes and all of those things that weren’t likely to appear in a ’70s film because they weren’t invented.”
Wheatley’s initial inspiration for Free Fire, as stated in multiple interviews, is the infamous 1986 shootout outside Miami between the FBI and a couple of bank robbers. The incident became a case study for law enforcement and inspired books, TV, and movies, including this TV movie depicting the robbery and gunfight. Among the true crime series episodes, I’d also recommend Real Vice Miami’s coverage, titled “Bloodiest Day.”
“I’d read a transcript of a shootout that happened in Miami in the ’80s between the F.B.I. and potential bank robbers,” Wheatley tells the New York Times. “It was a blow-by-blow account, and it was really fascinating, very different from anything I’d ever seen in a film. It was messy and complicated and quite slow. No one could hit anything. They were being injured but they weren’t dying instantly like you see in a movie. So I thought that there was a potential to make a movie that was an action film but much more personal and closer-range, incorporating this more realistic experience.”
John Woo’s Hard Boiledis another one of Wheatley’s favorite action movies of all time and deserves a mention here for its influential shootouts. But since I included it in last week’s column for The Fate of the Furious, the next best and most appropriate Woo is The Killer. It’s also got a great shootout at the end is another of these kind of movies where nearly everybody dies.
A bunch of criminals face off in a warehouse after plans go wrong is the description of Free Fire and Reservoir Dogs, and their endings are nearly identical. The biggest difference is that Quentin Tarantino’s movie contains a lot more context and clearer character development, mostly through the use of flashbacks. It also has more dialogue, less shooting. Of course, Quentin Tarantino was himself partially remaking City on Fireand influenced by many others. So you need to go back to his sources, yet I also recommend his other relevant movies, including True Romance, which he wrote and involves a climax like the entirety of Free Fire, and The Hateful Eight, which like Wheatley’s movie is set in one location.
“I think that a lot of films drink from the same pool,” Wheatley tells Forbes. “If you look at Quentin Tarantino’s work such as Reservoir Dogs there are touches of Howard Hawks stuff and films like The Killing and City on Fire. The reference points for Free Fire are also John Carpenter and Sam Peckinpah and directors like that. It was never a big worry about it, it was always going to be in that great sub-genre of things set in warehouses so it aligns with Reservoir Dogs a bit but it doesn’t really have anything massively in common with it.”
Martin Scorsese, who executive produced Free Fire, is probably Wheatley’s biggest filmmaking hero. His Taxi Driveris regularly brought up as one of Wheatley’s favorites and most inspiring, with the final shootout being cited as significant to the new movie. Wheatley and DP Laurie Rose have also referenced Mean Streets, After Hours, and Goodfellasas influences on Free Fire. So why do I include The Departed instead of those older classics? Well, it’s set in Boston, has a warehouse deal scene, and it’s another movie where most characters die. It’s also a good gateway to the stuff that came before, not just Scorsese’s works but more Hong Kong films, which Wheatley loves. Specifically, The Departed is a remake of Infernal Affairs.
If Wheatley has a complementary match out there right now, specifically a sort of American counterpart, it might be Jeremy Saulnier. Both filmmakers were being celebrated around the same time a year ago, when Green Room and Wheatley’s High-Rise both finally came out, but the former is more related to Wheatley’s latest in being about an unexpected clash of two groups of characters at an isolated location. They’re not a lot alike, with this movie lacking the humor and Free Fire, for one thing, but they’d still make a terrific double feature.
Here are some more movies that Wheatley has acknowledged as either an influence on Free Fire or, in his new Reddit AMA, as stuff to watch after Free Fire: The Killing, The French Connection, The Getaway, The Outfit, Watership Down, and The Terminator.
This weekend, Ben Wheatley will unleash his blood-spattered gunfight film Free Fireinto movie theaters around the world. And while I may not be the movie’s biggest fan — I’ll discuss it in-depth on Monday’s episode of After the Credits, but suffice to say it’s five pounds of movie in a ten pound bag — I find myself aggressively rooting for it to succeed based entirely on the premise of Wheatley’s next movie. You see, Wheatley is about to make a movie about soldiers fighting mutant crabs in sewers, and that’s a movie the world desperately needs to see. #MakeAmericaFightGiantCrabsAgain, if you prefer. I know the kids are all about a catchy hashtag.
And in celebration of Free Fire’s release, I thought today might be a good time to run down everything we’ve heard about Wheatley’s upcoming movie. Let’s start with his more recent comments. Wheatley recently raised a lot of eyebrows — and maybe a few… other body parts — when he described Freak Shift as a combination of Hill Street Blues and Doom to Collider. It’s an unlikely pairing of properties, but now that we’ve heard about it, we think it might stick.
It’s monsters, shotguns, trucks, fighting at night, and it’s in the future, things coming out like crabs. Stuff with claws. That’s the elevator pitch. And August is when we shoot it. It will be dynamic and exciting the same way that Free Fire is. But it won’t be sadistic. But it will be fun. It’s a kind of a 50s B-Movie done through the prism of Hill Street Blues and Doom.
Of course, Freakshift isn’t exactly a new project for the director (that Hill Street Blues comparison in particular is nothing new). As far back as 2012 — when Wheatley was making a name for himself on the festival circuit with his Wicker Man-esque Kill List — Wheatley was describing his desire to make Freakshift one of his next films. In an interview with IndieWire that January, Wheatley shared that he had been working with a few artists from the popular comic book series 2000 A.D. to do storyboards for the movie and was even getting involved in the costume designs as well, noting that he had been spending a bunch of time in “army surplus store buying up all of the chemical warfare suits.” The director even provided a more straightforward synopsis for the movie in the IndieWire interview, suggesting that audiences should be ready for some very strange creatures:
It’s about a crew that’s built up this armored vehicle and they go out and have to respond to 911 calls about these big monsters that have come out of the ground. They come out of the ground every night but there are different creatures — there are these massive half-monkey mutant things and loads of weird spiders and shit.
With ambitious creature work and story designs — Wheately has been sharing the storyboards for Freakshift via an anyonymous Twitter feed for a while now — Wheatley has also suggested that this would be his most expensive film to date. “It needs a budget of about $15m, so it’s quite big,” Wheatley told Empire Magazinein 2012, a statement that still stands when compared to the gradually increasing budgets of High-Rise ($8 million) and Free Fire ($10 million).
And then there’s the casting. While a few names from the cast have been announced — Alicia Vikander was the first official announcement back in March, with Armie Hammer re-upping for another Wheatley movie just a few weeks ago — we can also expect the cast to become increasingly more diverse from here on out. Wheatley told Digital Spy in 2013 that he envisioned Freakshift as a movie about immigrants. “”It’ll be an American cast, but it’s kind of an immigrant cast,” Wheatley said at the time, “so they’ll be Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Irish and Polish characters. It won’t be a full-blown cast of Americans, it’ll be people who’ve gone to America to live and they’re first generation.”
Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet. At least part of the success of Freakshift will be contingent on how Free Fire does at the box office; BoxOfficePro has previously projected the film to earn about $24 million at the domestic box office, which would probably be enough of a profit margin to ensure that Wheatley gets a chance to make his next movie. Still, a lot can happen between now and the film’s expected August production date.“I’ve made the cardinal error of talking up projects much too far in advance,” Wheatley admitted when asked about Freakshift back in 2014, noting that, “if you Google me, there’s about a million things that will come up.” Guess what, Ben? We did Google you and a million things did come up, but all will be forgiven if we have a killer case of the crabs come 2018.
‘Hounds of Love’ Is a Harrowing and Grimly Satisfying Experience
A deranged couple with a desire to kill, a teenage girl with a will to live.
A twisted relationship between a man and his wife sits at the center of writer/director Ben Young’s feature debut, but it’s the more innocent one between a teenager and her mother that viewers will hope prevails as the harrowing and unsettling Hounds of Love heads towards its conclusion.
It’s the late ’80s and Christmastime in Perth, Western Australia, and Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) is enduring a common right of passage for teenagers the world over. Her parents have split, but while her dad tries to retain her affection with the gift of a new puppy, her mom (Susie Porter) is trying to establish ground rules. Vicki scoffs at her restrictions though and instead sneaks out into the night for a party, but along the way she has the misfortune of crossing paths with Evelyne (Emma Booth) and John White (Stephen Curry).
We’ve already watched the couple clean up bloodied tissues and sex “toys” from the floor of a sparsely decorated bedroom and then bury the girl who had recently been their captive, so we know their intentions with Vicki are no different. One drugged beverage later and the teen is tied to the bed and left to be victimized by the deranged pair. Her only hope sits in her observations of the couple — John’s an obsessive, abusive narcissist, while Evie’s emotionally weak and incapable of seeing herself without him.
Hounds of Love is a wonderfully-acted dark drama that eschews both typical genre thrills and the extremes of onscreen torture. It’s suspenseful, particularly during its nail-biting third act (even if it does borrow a memorable trick from a significant Hollywood thriller), but it finds real strength in the journeys of its two main female characters.
Young wisely focuses our sympathies with the film’s real victim, Vicki, but he allows time to be spent with the couple as well in order to explore their relationship. Brief glimpses of John outside the home reveal a man who’s powerless and easily put in his place by others, and the belittling fuels his power trip inside the house that sees him abuse Evie physically, emotionally, and even at times with a little bit of gas-lighting. Both are villains, with John being the main aggressor, but Evie’s villainy is a multi-layered affair. There’s a risk that some viewers may see Evie as far more of a victim than she actually is, but the film never veers anywhere near excusing her behavior. We’re given a contrast in Vicki’s mom as another woman paired with an overbearing man — but one who found the strength to walk away from him.
Booth’s performance beautifully and painfully captures the woman’s own torment — we’re shown hints of what she’s lost in years past, but it’s Booth’s portrayal of a lost woman struggling between what her head knows and her heart wants that forces viewers to see the person behind the monster. Sorrow, rage, affection, and agony wash across her face in endless waves with each new tidal change wiping away more of her resolve. The film avoids showing viewers any of the rough stuff — violations are implied or allowed to happen off screen — but Booth’s devastating performance is itself difficult to watch at times.
As heavy and intense as the subject matter is though, Young keeps viewers entranced with an attractive film. Slow-motion shots of suburbia and kids at play belies the darkness developing on these unassuming streets and even suggest a subconscious desire to hold onto these moments of innocence for as long as possible. Dan Luscombe’s subdued synth score and some inspired and effective song choices — “Night in White Satin” stands out — find a sensory appeal even as we know the vileness unspooling beneath the sounds.
Perth was home to a real-life killer couple in the ’80s named Catherine and David Bernie, but while the film no doubt drew some inspiration from them it could just as easily be based on any number of similar crimes in this sick, sad world of ours.
Hounds of Love is a strong and stylish debut for Young, and while comparisons to the endlessly oppressive The Snowtown Murders are inevitable this is the better and more affecting film. It walks a fine line between entertaining thriller and psychological drama, but it succeeds at merging the two into a darkly memorable feature.
Hounds of Love is currently playing Tribeca Film Festival 2017.
30 years ago Cage teamed up with the Coen Brothers to create comedy gold. Why haven’t they reunited since?
“That sumbitch. You tell him, I think he’s a damn fool, Ed. You tell him I said so — H.I. McDonnough. If he wants to discuss it, he knows where to find me: in the Maricopa County Maximum Security Correctional Facility For Men State Farm, Road Number 31, Tempe, Arizona! I’LL BE WAITIN’! I’ll be waitin’.”
Earlier this week the Coen Brothers’ screwball comedy Raising Arizona turned 30, which is pretty absurd, but whatever. Since the film did celebrate this recent anniversary I figure it’s as good a time as any to talk about what is my favorite Nicolas Cage movie.
Raising Arizona is one of those movies where the stars just come together and align perfectly; at least as far my personal tastes are concerned. Favorite actor? Check. Favorite director(s)? Check. Set in my home state? Check. Reference to underappreciated 80’s slasher? Check. John Goodman screaming? Check.
If you haven’t seen Raising Arizona that’s weird, but I’ll give you a quick breakdown of what it’s about. Cage stars as Herbert I. “Hi” McDunnough, a career criminal, but a very petty one. Hi typically robs convenience stores with unloaded guns, so not great but he’s not a bad guy. Unfortunately Hi just can’t seem to keep out of jail. Fortunately for Hi is constant run-ins with the law result in him meeting officer Edwina, AKA Ed (Holly Hunter).
Ed is responsible for taking mugshots of the recently arrested to her and Hi see each other quite frequently. Hi becomes quote fond of Ed and after seeing her crying one day because her fiancé dumped her he vows to go straight and be with her. And Hi sort of does. He gets a job at a machine shop, the two of them get a trailer and things seem to be going well. That is until they try to have a kid and realize that can’t because Ed is infertile.
Hi and Ed are devastated, especially Ed. They try adoption but that fails due to Hi’s criminal past. That’s when they hear about the Arizona Quints, born to Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), a local furniture dealer that’s a bit of a celebrity in Arizona. Hi and Ed concoct a plan to steal one of the babies, because why should someone have five when they can’t even have one?
The role of Hi is a wonderful part for Cage. It requires a zany, off-the-wall and at times cartoonish performance and Cage nails it on all accounts. It’s the type of performance we don’t see much from Cage these days. He still gives big, larger than life performances, but few these days are done with a light-hearted comedic tone. Every time I re-visit Raising Arizona, which is quite often, I find myself desperately wanting to see Cage get back to his comedic side.
In my mind it’s no surprise that Cage worked with the Coen Brothers. On the surface they seem like a natural pairing. The work of the Coen Brothers has a very unique feel and some would say it’s a bit of an acquired taste. They constantly put weird characters on screen with bizarre hairdos and equally bizarre accents, and this is especially true when looking at their comedies like The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and of course Raising Arizona. A lot of these same things apply to Nicolas Cage. Logically they would make for a match made in heaven, right? Well, only kind of.
For years it killed me that Cage and the Coens never got back together. They were so perfect so why not reunite? After all the Coen Brothers have a history of using actors over and over again.
My first thought was that they haven’t really had a role that would suit Cage and I think that’s somewhat true. An argument could be made for O Brother, Where Art Thou? but that’s about it. I decided to some digging to try and find the true answer and when I did it all seemed so obvious.
I found an interview with the Coen Brothers on YouTube one day. I can’t remember what the interview was from, what it was for and sadly I haven’t been able to find it again, but I do remember the interviewer asking about Raising Arizona and working with Cage specifically. The question was geared in a way that made it sound like it was a difficult process.
Ethan, or maybe it was Joel, responded saying something about how it’s much better to work with an actor like Cage that you have to reel in a bit rather than work with an actor that you have to kick to get going. Of course I’m paraphrasing from memory but I think that was the gist of it.
Note: if you know what interview I’m referring to and can point me in its direction that would be greatly appreciated. I’d love to watch it again.
Outside of this interview that I could very well be wildly misremembering I haven’t been able to find much on what Ethan and Joel thought of working with Cage. Maybe I’m just bad at googling.
Cage for his part hasn’t said much either but I was able to find a few tidbits from over the years.
“Joel and Ethan have a very strong vision and I’ve learned how difficult it is to accept another artist’s vision. They have an autocratic nature.”
IMDb attributes this quote to Cage. I’m not sure when or where it was said but I’m willing to trust IMDb on this one. It sounds like something Cage would say and it makes sense.
On the Fargo documentary Minnesota Nice Peter Stormare shares a story about how he thought the “pancakes house” line was a typo. He thought it was supposed to be “pancake house.” When he brought this to the attention of the brothers they simply said, “We don’t make typos.”
Taking this little story from Stormare and combining it with the fact that the Coen Brothers are known to be pretty particular with their scripts, allegedly writing out every little detail including mannerisms and pauses, it’s easy to see where an issue could arise when working with Cage.
Cage is like a jazz musician, relying on improv to guide him through a set until he finds a groove he likes. He comes prepared and has a general idea of what he wants to do but he’s open to letting the vibe carry him. Ethan and Joel seem like complete opposites. They’re much more meticulous with their approach. When the arrive on the set they know what they want to shoot and that’s what they shoot.
These are two very distinct styles that directly conflict with one another. Both parties set out with the same goal in mind, and often times the final products share similarities, but two completely different paths are taken to get there. It’s easy to see why Cage didn’t become a regular for the brothers.
Of course I’m just using the little bit of information I have and making a guess. There could be any numbers of reasons why they haven’t tried to recapture that Raising Arizona magic. Just working out schedules can be extremely tricky. This is a topic I do think about a lot though, especially when watching Raising Arizona.
Will they ever work together again? Who knows. From what I can gather Cage likes Ethan and Joel, and Ethan and Joel like Cage. In a 2014 interview with The Talks Cage was asked about working with the brothers and spoke positively of them saying, “I’d seen Blood Simple and I really wanted to work with the Coen Brothers and I must have auditioned for Raising Arizona 10 times.”
So maybe there’s a chance. It’s something I would love to see. I think they’ve all done their best work together. But hey, if it never happens we’ll always have RaisingArizona.
With ‘Free Fire’ hitting theaters this weekend, we enlist director Ben Wheatley in the selection of a few of his favorite Shots.
We’ve been out there stanning for Ben Wheatley’s new movie Free Fire from the moment we laid eyes on the first trailer. In fact, we’d heard rumors and rumblings about it well before that — a cavalcade of reliable voices telling us that this was going to be our kind of movie. When our Victor Stiff reviewed the film at TIFF in 2016, he wasn’t shy with his praise.
This weekend it arrives in a number of theaters around the country and we’re happy that everyone can see it and discuss it. It’s a lot of fun. But in true form, we also like the idea of going deeper with a filmmaker like Ben Wheatley — and in true One Perfect Shot form, that means digging into some of the filmmaker’s favorite frames. Below you will find the result, as Mr. Wheatley was gracious enough to send us over a list of his 5 Perfect Shots with comments…
Apocalypse Now
“This is one of those great “fuck yeah” moments in cinema when he pops out of the water and you know he’s made a massive turning point to kick some ass, finally after sitting on the fence the whole movie. And it just looks beautiful.”
Blade Runner
“Apart from it all looking beautiful in the way that the lighting works, the great thing about this shot is that Harrison Ford looks so bored about being in the future, which subsequently makes it feel much more real than it otherwise would. He’s seeing something that for us is incredible, but for him it’s an everyday experience.”
Brazil
“This is one of the great uses of a wide angle lens ever. It overwhelmed me with the amazing set design and camera movement.”
The Road Warrior
“A brilliant movie and a great final shot. Every shot in Road Warrior is iconic, but this one is particularly fantastic. It’s hard to stand properly like that without looking like an idiot, to strike those heroic poses, but in the end he pulls it off.”
Seven Samurai
“This is a really powerful emotional moment. The performance is brilliant with Mifune’s character Kikuchiyo admitting to weakness in front of Kambei, the samurai leader. In a film about strength and honor, and hiding emotion, this a rare moment of Kikuchiyo breaking down and showing that he’s human, and also that he’s a fraud — that he’s not a samurai but a farmer.”
For more information about Mr. Wheatley’s new movie, check out freefire-movie.com.
An exclusive video traces from Bonnie and Clyde to Mickey and Mallory and all stops between.
One of the most tried and true tropes in all of movie history is that of lovers on the run. They can be petty thieves, master criminals, wrongfully-accused innocents, chance acquaintances, fleeing victims, or escaping wards, but whatever the impetus they are two lovers, usually young, who take to the open road to get away from whatever unforgiving lives they come from. Films about lovers on the run differ from other duos in similar situations because no matter how wicked said lovers are, the fact that they are in love always generates empathy from an audience, even if we can’t connect to the impulses or decision-making skills of the characters, we can understand their motivation to avoid capture and stay together no matter what: they’re in love. And yes, sometimes that love is an anchor and sometimes it’s a rocket, but in every case it is genuine love, perhaps more genuine than that found in traditional settings because it is a love forged under hardship, under persecution, and often it is the only silver lining in two lives constantly overcast.
To trace the history and evolution of lovers on the run in cinema, I’ve made the following compilation from a score of films that fit the bill, including Bonnie & Clyde, True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Badlands, Moonlight Kingdom, The Sugarland Express, Boxcar Bertha, The Getaway, and a handful of others you might not have heard of. Then, to make it especially sweet, I’ve set it all to the truest love song ever written: Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Watch it with someone you love.
Lovers on the Run was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Let me break something down real quick. I justifiably catch a reputation as being someone who likes to like things. And that’s true. Whenever I have time to share movie talk with folks, I want to talk about the things I love. Because, for me, it’s just too darn easy to fall down a rabbit hole of negativity. When I stumble across something that thrills me, I want to share it. Even still, sometimes I’m a bit abashed when it comes to how enthusiastic I tend to be about things. This is especially true when I find a great new-to-me trash-cinema film. Over Easter Weekend, I got stuck on a “Blood” film kick. Don’t judge me. I like topical themes. Any road, that’s when I ran into Blood Diner. I had no idea this movie existed until I saw the poster flipping through movies on Shudder. When I finished watching it, here’s how I immediately pitched it to my buddy:
Michael and George looking for the perfect head for Sheetar (Sheetar!)
“Hey, Happy Easter! Have you ever seen Blood Diner? Holy moly! That movie is insane. A lady gets battered. Like, covered in batter. And then the guy deep fries her head. But she doesn’t die. She jumps up and runs around with her head like a fried ball. Also there’s a Hitler wrestler and a Nazi trumpet section in a club band. It’s. Weird.”
In fairness to Blood Diner, I’m pretty sure it was actually a Nazi guitar section in a club band. Which is maybe an important distinction? I don’t really know.
These are such weird movies to love. Trash cinema makes for such a wide selection of all-you-can-eat offensiveness, gross-out moments, rubber body parts, and enough red corn syrup to subsidize Big Corn. Blood Diner does not disappoint. It is a riff on H.G. Lewis’ 1963 film Blood Feast about two brothers, Michael (Rick Burks) and George (Carl Crew) indoctrinated at a young age by their Uncle Anwar (Drew Godderis) into the cult of Sheetar (Sheetar!). He’s taught them to hypnotize cats and prepare sacrificial meals. His final act is to implore them to study their Sheetar (Sheetar!) lore as one day they’ll have to finish his mission. He then calmly exits their house to be gunned down by the man. The movie picks up twenty years later when the brothers dig up dear old Uncle Anwar and put his brain and eyes in a jar so he can mentor them once more.
Anwar definitely talks out loud, because he uses a phone. I just don’t understand how it works. He’s just a brain. In a jar. But, maybe we all are. But, god dammit this is what I love about trash cinema. Why the hell shouldn’t the brain and eyes in a jar talk with a voice?
Where was I? Right. Anwar is all about resurrecting the goddess Sheetar (Sheetar!) and instructs the boys on the proper blood feast recipe and how to assemble only the finest of the jigsawed pieces of many a murder victim into the proper vessel for the goddess Sheetar (Sheetar!).
You can rest 100% assured that Uncle Anwar inappropiately reminisces about his lost genitals.
Blood Diner was directed by a young Jackie Kong. She made her first movie The Beingin 1983. Her last movie was The Underachievers, also released in 1987. She spent much of her time after that working for a non-profit organization called Asian-American Media Development to advocate for increased representation in cinema. Blood Diner is gonzo chunk of hilarious trash cinema. I wish we could see more of her work. It’s a weird feeling to discover a decade old body of work that makes you suddenly realize how much you might have missed. I love her style. Her mean, gory, burpy, barfy, gross, hilarious style. The costume work alone in this movie is enough to recommend it to your attention.
Dukey Flyswatter, whose given name is Michael Sonye, wrote Blood Diner. He went on to voice Uncle Impie in Sorority Babes in the Slime Ball Bowl-O-Rama, which I recently saw thanks to a tip during our chat with Ted Geoghegan. More noteworthy, Flyswatter went on to play the Clit Master, a loving homage to the Crypt Keeper, in the pornography-as-horror-film genre mash up in the clearly adult film Terrors from the Clit. So. You know. I’m just here to give you the context for the filmmakers who brought you this madcap gore-fest.
I’m not even playing about the costumes and make up choices. I. Am. In. Love.
Still unclear what you’re getting into? Let me just grab the text from the opening warning message from the filmmakers.
“WARNING! The truly unusual motion picture you are about to see contains many scenes of Graphic Violence. It is not intended for the faint of heart nor the young and impressionable.
While it is a sad fact that mass homicide and practioners of Blood Cults infest our society, the producers of this film wish to express that they do not condone nor do they want to inspire, any of the human butchery or violence portrayed in this film. If you feel you will be offended by such material, please leave the theatre at once…
Note: (All of the mutilations, bodily dismemberments and cannibal rituals were performed by seasoned professionals)”
That warning reads like a whole-hearted endorsement to me. Especially the bit about seasoned professionals. Now, you need to go out and watch this movie full of gurgling digestive sounds, a disgusting group vomit scene (emetaphobes — this one is not for you), wacko violence, and sheer glee in murder. And if you like it, which I’m sure you will, I finish with gifts.
Jackie Kong is working on her first movie in 30 years right now. Per Kong, “For those of you wondering where the hell I’ve been, well I’m back!” It’s called Coexistence and she describes it as her take on Romeo and Juliet. She’s also anticipated your lackluster reaction. “And I bet you’re probably saying ‘What? Another effin’ version of Romeo and Juliet?’ Well, forget everything you think you know about this play.”
The pitch for her Kickstarter is both cracking me up and getting me excited for the project. The tagline she’s going with for the pitch? “We’ve all heard of Shakespeare in Love, well get ready for Shakespeare in Blood!” According to the film’s website, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, and John Savage are attached to star. Color me into it.
“One astronaut’s journey through space and life ends on a hostile exosolar planet. Grounded is a metaphorical account of the experience, inviting unique interpretation and reflection by the viewer. Themes of aging, inheritance, paternal approval, cyclic trajectories, and behaviors passed on through generations are explored against an ethereal backdrop.”
This is the description writer-director-vfx-producer Kevin Margo gives to his short film Grounded, and while it certainly provides an erudite encapsulation of the film’s themes, what it doesn’t relay, what you have to watch to receive, is the heart-wrenching emotionality of the film. For all its virtues — and there are many including VFX, cinematography, score, direction — I believe Grounded’s biggest strength is the way it takes such epic themes and makes them intimate. It’s also seriously impressive how Margo’s script manages to convey such complex themes with pretty much zero dialogue. According to Margo, the film was inspired by his father’s passing, and if he doesn’t mind my saying, Grounded is a beautiful tribute.
Short film shorter, this is mind-blowing work, which is why it’s won oodles of awards from film festivals all over the world. It is graceful, thrilling, contemplative, intelligent, and gorgeous to behold. There’s a link to the film’s VFX breakdowns on the Vimeo page, so be sure to check that out too so you can see the extent of Margo’s cinematic wizardry.
