‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ Takes a Class in the Devil’s Arithmetic
Three girls, one night of terror.
High school is an awkward time for most teenagers, but young Kat (Kiernan Shipka) seems especially put off by its mundane norms and cruelties. She’s slightly removed from the hustle and bustle of her peers, and as the campus of her remote all girls’ Catholic school empties out for winter break she finds herself stuck there for a few extra days. Her parents are going to be late picking her up, and she’s left in the company of two adults — sisters in Christ who help run the school and keep the girls in line — and a fellow student named Rose (Lucy Boynton). She’s older but not all that wiser, and after warning Kat about the devil-worshiping “sisters” and how they supposedly don’t have body hair she sneaks out to meet a boyfriend.
Isolation and despair swirl around Kat as the snow-blanketed school grounds and empty halls call to her with darkness. As the night ticks on it becomes clear that she might just be willing to answer.
Writer/director Oz Perkins delivers an absolute mood-piece with the chilling and atmospheric The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The setting is established early with dreamy fragments and visuals forcing a coldness to emanate from the screen both through the wintry landscape and Kat’s detached and lost behavior. She’s at risk from both herself and the pitch-black presence attempting to take her in its embrace. Her only hope rests in someone who may be the closest thing she’s ever known to a true friend, but will it be Rose or someone — something — else?
A second storyline works through the film as well involving another teen named Joan (Emma Roberts) who we first meet far away removing a hospital wristband in a dirty bathroom. A stranger (James Remar) sees her at bus station and offers her a lift. His kindness is suspicious, and even his wife is unsure of the offer, but Joan agrees to accompany the couple on their road trip to a small town… the same town where Kat and Rose are experiencing a night of terror.
This thread offers it own share of suspense and drama, but Perkins tips his hand a bit too early in regard to how it will eventually connect with the events back at the school. The two come together for an ending that delivers on the film’s growing darkness, but some of the narrative impact may be lost to those ahead of the curve. That said, even knowing or suspecting what’s coming doesn’t lessen the satisfaction for genre fans of its final frames.
While Perkins’ methodical pace and hauntingly attractive frames (credit to cinematographer Julie Kirkwood) work to create an enticing intersection between beauty and unease the cast is equally to thank for pulling viewers into this icy nightmare. Roberts revels in the mystery of her character offering teases as to her purpose while Remar’s “aww shucks” demeanor sees our suspicion grow.
Shipka in particular evokes an emotional distance that leaves us simultaneously worried for and about her. She’s a girl at risk, but her performance has viewers wavering between sympathy and fear. Boynton is similarly appealing but through opposite means. She’s lost in her own way but no weaker for it, and the two of them become the shifting focus of our attention as it becomes clear that the night will end in bloodshed and screams.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (previously known as February during its festival run) is a slow burn that won’t be for all tastes, but genre fans who appreciate atmosphere, dread, and the encroaching darkness will appreciate and enjoy its icy grip.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter opens On Demand and in limited theatrical release tomorrow.
‘Wild Tales’ and ‘Get Out’ prove entertainment and depth are not mutually exclusive.
“I am altogether opposed to popular entertainment,” says Jean Cocteau, “because I consider that all good entertainment is popular.” The filmmaker and poet continues by describing how “film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict. In any event, the measure of love with which it is charged will affect the masses more than any subtle and witty concoction.” Whilst there is an over saturation of images in 21st century culture (be that through small-screen phones or widescreen televisions) that leaves viewers familiar with repeated tropes and narrative devices, it’s easy to forget that cinema created to entertain the viewer can still have artistic depth. Rather than being about itself, or l’art pour l’art to use Théophile Gautier’s 19th century phrase, films intended to entertain can only exist with a mass audience. As Cocteau writes, “a mass audience is without preconceptions. It never forms a judgement based on an author or the actors. It believes in them. This is the childhood audience — and the best.”
This existence with the audience rather than separation from them emphasizes the skill needed in creating cinema of entertainment; the filmmaker has to combine beauty and art with commerce and breadth. And it’s Damián Szifrón’s 2014 comedy/thriller Wild Tales, Argentina’s most successful film to date, that encapsulates film’s ability to entertain its audience while still being a work of art that holds depth and beauty. Along with this is another, more complex tale of revenge, that’s found in Jordan Peele’s recent horror Get Out.
Focused on revenge and revenge only, Wild Tales is a series of six short segments that explores the many different forms revenge comes in. The first and opening segment of the film, titled “Pasternak,” acts almost as an example as to how the film’s comedy will work. Following a woman, who later turns out to be a model, onto a plane and finding out two of her passengers are connected to her ex-boyfriend, the viewers’ suspension of disbelief is subtly brought into focus. Yet, as more and more of the flight’s passengers reveal they knew Pasternak — which results in everyone, including the air hostess, declaring their relation to him — this suspension of disbelief is dramatized and heightened. From here on, the viewer knows what to expect; exaggerated reality.
What follows this opening segment are sequences titled “Las Ratas” (The Rats), “El Más Fuerte” (The Strongest), “Bombita” (Little Bomb), “La Propuesta” (The Proposal), and “Hasta Que La Muerte Nos Separe” (’Til Death Do Us Part). In one, a woman poisons a man with rat poison; however, instead of being concerned about the consequences of her criminal actions, she’s more distracted by whether expired rat poison is more or less harmful to humans. In another segment, viewers see a victim of a corrupt towing company and government go from being a disgruntled middle-aged man to a hero known as “Dynamite.” While these stories may sound silly — and Szifrón accepts that they are, portraying each tale with confidence in the slapstick-esque portraits of his characters — they are also examinations into the different ways humans interpret and use revenge for themselves. After all, Wild Tales is a black comedy, emphasizing the portrayal of reality through its humor.
For the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw has described the Roald Dahl-like sense Szifrón’s ‘gripping nightmares’ have, relocating Szifrón’s stories and his audience back into the world of childhood; there’s lessons to be learned from each ‘wild tale,’ but each lesson is established as if through a fairytale or a dream rather than a lecture.
It’s not just in Szifrón’s story where the depth of his entertainment comes from, however, with the filmmaker’s technical mastery emphasizing the thought put into each sequence. There’s the Hitchcockian feel to each segment, with Szifrón often adhering to the director’s bomb under the table theory both literally and metaphorically (something Get Out’s director also does successfully). Meanwhile, Wild Tales’ cinematographer Javier Julia has discussed the thought put into the aesthetic style of each tale, noting “we [Julia and Szifrón] talked about shooting each segment differently: in black and white, then in 35mm with anamorphic lenses, then video cameras for the final wedding segment,” while Szifrón instead thought “that would be distracting, disconnecting. […] I wanted it to be one dreamlike experience for the audience.”
Similarly, Get Out’s cinematographer Toby Oliver wanted this dreamlike experience — of the audience’s ability to get lost in the world of cinema — to translate into Peele’s horror film too. In an interview with our Ciara Wardlow, Oliver says “most of the movie should feel really grounded in a reality that suggests a real world rather than a heightened, horror movie kind of visual experience… to make sure that it feels very grounded for the main character, Chris.” It’s clear that the thought of entertainment is on the minds of both Get Out’s production as well as Wild Tales’. The “dreamlike experience” created through each films’ cinematography enables the audience to return to what Cocteau called the “childhood audience.” On a surface level these films are fun, but beneath their appeal lies important messages.
There’s also a Shakespearean technique at play in Szifrón’s film, too, with each segment feeling as though it is told through the perspective of the fool. However, like how Shakespeare often used the fool, Szifrón uses this archetypal character in order to make social commentary easily digestible for his audience. Szifrón’s film, then, is not simply about revenge, but also about, for example, the corruption of the government or the privilege of the wealthy. This results in the final segment at a wedding party, what Szifrón establishes as a type of storytelling where a tension “begins and has to come out. You have to release it.”
In a similar way to Szifrón’s use of the fool in each of his segments, Peele uses the horror genre in order to discuss racism while still creating “popcorn entertainment.” “As with comedy, I feel like horror and the thriller genre is a way, one of the few ways, that we can address real life horrors and social injustices in an entertaining way,” says Peele in an interview with Forbes. He continues, “we go to the theater to be entertained, but if what is left after you watch the movie is a sort of eye-opening perspective on some social issues, then it can be a really powerful piece of art.” And for The New York Times Peele says, “the best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality. You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real.” From Peele’s use of intense and what feels slightly distorted close-ups on the faces of the Armitage’s black servants to the warm, inviting glow that almost suffocates Daniel Kaluuya’s character Chris, the director achieves his aim in making what he has called a “social thriller.”
Notably, both films do not want to distance their viewers by transporting them to unfamiliar territory. In Wild Tales, the furthest we are taken out of reality is through the exaggerated and heightened personality of its most memorable characters. In Get Out, however, Peele opts for a more poetic kind of experience with his visualization of an Other world, the Sunken Place. With Kaluuya’s Chris metaphorically pushed into a void that comes to mirror the audience and the viewer when watching through a screen, the Sunken Place is visually a whole new world for Get Out. The way in which Peele not just makes this place look like a cross between the depths of the ocean as well as space, but feel like it too, reflects on the immersion of the audience.
However, the Sunken Place is also the most familiar place for Chris. Not only does it reflect a childhood memory, but it’s a representation for the true horror that the film is portraying: extreme and elite liberals that see themselves as so progressive that they refuse to acknowledge their racism, believing they live in a post-racism world. Viewers never see or hear of any white people having been sent to the Sunken Place, yet viewers hold the knowledge that Walter, Georgina and Logan have each been there. The voyeurism and paralyzation of the Sunken place — the inability to do anything, or the fear of inaction itself — becomes a visual conceit for what Ivie Ani describes as Jordan’s use of “Chris’s interaction with white people to delve into how black people can be paralyzed by fear as we maneuver through racism.”
Like the episodic nature of Wild Tales allows the film’s many forms of revenge to build upon themselves in order to create entertaining, short series of commentaries on real life, it’s clear that Get Out, with its reliance on the luring in of its audience, needed to be in the horror/thriller genre in order to work. By both Wild Tales’ and Get Out’s ending, the directors’ messages are clear: it’s humans who audiences should be afraid of. This cinema of entertainment, then, turns into a mirror into which audiences can reflect.
Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, on its surface, is the anecdotal story of Dorothea (Annette Bening) and her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), who are essentially raising each other in late-70s Southern California. From the first scenes we understand that what we’re seeing is a reflection, it’s a composite of memories from Dorothea, Jamie, and the hodgepodge of people in their lives, played by Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and Elle Fanning. At its core, then, 20th Century Women is a movie of multiple subjectivities and it’s narrative moves like a memory, repeating, refracting, altering, even mythologizing. Mills’ Oscar-nominated screenplay does a deft job of navigating these at-times complementary, at-times conflicting perspectives, but it isn’t just in words that his film deals with the movement of memory, the visuals as well serve as echoes of one another, as proven by this eloquent montage edited by Alice Sanna.
In this brief video Sanna has collected reflexive images from the film and set them side-by-side for comparison. Notice how in many of these shots, the motion of the camera in one is opposed by the motion in the other; one zooms in, the other pulls back, one pans left, the other pans right. This is a subtle and graceful directorial technique that many might have missed, but fortunately for them there’s the sharp, erudite eye of Sanna to capture it.
20th Century Women is on Blu-Ray and DVD this week. Check out FSR’s original review right here.
My Genre Film Love Shakes The Earth When It Stomps, The Coming of ‘Colossal’
We’re talking Nacho Vigalondo and his out-of-this-world genre filmmaking.
It’s easy to take for granted the idea that great literature is the only medium out there accurately capturing time, place, and people. Or, that the Great [Insert Your Country] Novel is the only thing studying what humanity is made of in your neck of the woods. And, because of that, movies frequently don’t deserve the same level of consideration. Balderdash. My counter-argument? Basically, Hamlet is a movie, innit? Argument settled.
I kid. It is really easy to see movies as a fun diversion instead of a substantive exploration of humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I know we take our dramas fairly seriously. But, I think folks tend to experience the emotional wash of a movie and then allow it to roll away like the tide going out as the credits run. Genre movies, especially playful ones, get that on the regular. For whatever reason, people look at a movie like Shaun of the Dead and see a fun zombie horror comedy first instead of a marvelously layered examination of what it is like to transition into functional adulthood.
Genres — and all the definitions, tropes, and story types that go along with them — give risk-taking directors a chance to blend their own style out of this mash of cultural shards. Break a dozen different containers and scatter their contents. Assess the field of battle. Assemble the pieces that work for what you are feeling as a creator. It’s like a sort of filmmaking version of kintsugi, the Japanese art of reassembling broken pottery with a lacquer and gold dusting and using non-matching pieces to fill in gaps. The films I tend to dig use that to highlight nuanced character work or layer messaging for effect. If I’ve learned anything from Nacho Vigalondo’s work, it’s that the man uses spectacular settings to create room for us to explore his terrifically human characters.
Next week, his new film Colossalmakes a limited debut and then expands to wider release the following week. I have had the pleasure of seeing this beauty. I’m here to say that you need to see this thing. Let’s get into part of his filmography for a minute and talk about (with no spoilers) what should really excite you about Colossal. Given that his first two films were made in Spain, there’s a good chance I’m about to turn you on to some films you haven’t seen that you’re really going to dig.
Timecrimes is operating in a world where a major company has invested in and begun testing a time machine. However, rather than tell the story of the corporation and the workers testing the machine, Vigalondo chooses to tell a story about a recently-retired, somewhat perverse man. The retiree spies a busty, topless young woman in the woods and proceeds to spy on her. He loses sight of her and frantically searches for her. When he finds her, unconscious, in the woods he is assualted by a man whose entire head is covered in pink bandages. Fleeing the scene, he winds up in the facility testing the time machine and is sent back to the beginning of this encounter. It gets weird.
“Something I really don’t like about modern films is that most of the time movies live up to the expectations of the audience. Movies seem to be what they really are and instead of playing with your expectations, they play to your expectations.” — Nacho Vigalondo, Filmmaker Magazine Interview
That’s totally evident in Timecrimes. Where you would think this movie would descend into your average sci-fi time travel settings, it goes another direction. That’s kind of what made Back To The Future so great. They made a coming of age story where a young man literally has to help his parents grow out of their highschool ways and figure out who they really want to be. Vigalondo’s flick is about being seduced by curiousity and the thrill of watching and, really, the damage that sort of impulsiveness can do. He uses the time travel trope to add layer upon layer to his busy-body and ultimately it provides both the crucible and the catharsis for the guilt he’s forced to experience. It is one of the freshest time travel movies around. It’s streaming on Shudder right now.
Extraterrestrial is basically set in a world like Arrival. Alien ships suddenly arrive and hover over major parts of the world. However, our main characters aren’t able to catch this monumental event because they were busy boozing it up and shagging the night away. We don’t stay with the scientific team investigating the aliens or the military hero and computer science engineer teaming up to destroy the mother ship. We start, middle and pretty much finish in an apartment based rom-com. He’s stuck at her place. The boyfriend shows up. The story literally becomes farcical. Just what the hell is going on with that next door neighbor? And, is one of these people an alien?
Extraterrestrial may be set in a world where aliens have arrived, but it’s about the lies and paranoia we engage in on a regular basis and how that complicates and damages our lives. As Vigalondo explores this very human vein, he playfully brings in relationship vengeance, farcical fun, and a pretty terrifying burst of McCarthyism. Are you the alien menace? J’accuse! It’s loads of fun and one I don’t hear people talking about enough.
If you haven’t seen these movies, I highly suggest you find some time to give them a look. One of them is effectively already a cult favorite and the other should be. He’s so creative in the way he brings these disparate elements together to make something totally invigorating. So, Colossal is his movie set in a world suddenly beset by kaiju. But, instead of showing us the government plan of action to take it down — like Shin Godzilla — or the plan to go beat the holy hell out of it with giant mechanized robots — like Pacific Rim — we get the story of a dysfunctional alcoholic with no sense of the damage she does to others or herself and a complete inability to relate positively with the world around her.
Check out the trailer, there’s nothing spoilery about it. Go support this movie when it comes out. We need more Vigalondo joints in the world.
Literally, the word “lachrymology” means “the study of crying.” Philosophically, it describes the belief that spiritual advancement is only possible through pain, both of the physical and emotional varieties.
While The Lachrymist from writer-director Matthew Gowan doesn’t confront this philosophy head on, it is certainly an emotional undercurrent of this taut, chilling, deviously confounding tale of psychological terror.
The plot is hauntingly simple: Savitri (Navi Rawat, Numb3rs, The O.C.) checks into a hotel room with her husband Byron (James Harvey Ward, True Blood, Low Winter Sun). At one point, she leaves the room, but when she tries to make her way back to it, somehow she can’t seem to find it. She asks the staff to help her, but they can’t because she’s not a registered guest of the hotel. Furthermore, they claim to have never seen her, and even the physical space around her seems different from what she remembers. This is how The Lachrymist begins. Where it goes you won’t quite believe until you experience it, but suffice it to say, panic, confusion, terror, and sanity are all plumbed in the film’s 24-minute runtime.
For all that’s impressive about The Lachrymist — the performances, the taut, Hitchcockian script — the fact that Gowan and cinematographer Nicholas Gartner managed to pull the entire thing off in just one take is astonishing, and makes for a mesmerizing viewing experience, almost like the wake of Savitri’s ordeal is dragging us along with it.
Is she crazy? Is she the victim of some supernatural snafu? Or possibly even both? Press play and see; Gowan and company only present this mystery, the solution is up to you.
This week, Warner Bros. announced that they are in development on a solo Batgirl movie that will be written, produced, and directed by Joss Whedon. To break it down, Neil talks to VanityFair.com writer and podcaster extraordinaire Joanna Robinson about Joss Whedon’s fit, the film’s comic starting point, and who they’d cast in the titular role.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@OnePerfectPod) and Facebook (facebook.com/oneperfectshot). Subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, on TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow host Neil Miller (@rejects) and guest Joanna Robinson (@jowrotethis). We’d very much appreciate your feedback, as well. Leave us a review on iTunes or email us: pod@filmschoolrejects.com.
One writer thinks so and we really, really want to agree.
Welcome back to Fan Theory Friday, where we explore the most ridiculous and ridiculously-valid fan theories concerning you favorite films and TV shows. This week’s outlandish connection comes from writer Tom Guise, who works over at The Red Bulletin, and it involves the two action franchises held down by the inimitable Keanu Reeves: The Matrix and John Wick. This theory posits that the second chapter of the latter film is a secret sequel of sorts to the former trilogy. Mind blown yet? Just wait.
One of these is AM, one is PM … choose carefully.
The full argument is Guise’s so you should hit the link above for all the gritty details, but for the sake of economy allow me to sing the high notes for you. Guise has built his theory on basically four pillars:
First and foremost, for this theory to hold any water at all, John Wick and Neo have to be the same dude. This facet is easy to accept, after all the characters’ fighting styles are similar, their ease with killing tons of folk at once, their silent and stoic demeanors, their penchant for black, and their knacks for not getting shot despite the hail of gunfire seemingly always surrounding them. The only problem here is that Neo did all this stuff in The Matrix, while John Wick lives in the real world. Unless he doesn’t.
Because what if the world of John Wick Chapter 2 takes place inside The Matrix? Think about it: like the Crank movies, John Wick has a very video-game quality to it, including a protagonist who seems to have unlimited lives. In the second film particularly there are a handful of moments that inject artificiality, like when Ian McShane’s character “pauses” everyone in a park. These could be intended as obvious feats of artifice from a stylized filmmaker, or they could be glitches in The Matrix. Furthermore, Guise points out that both film feature oblivious bystanders, people who are witness to violence but who don’t react to it, like all those wandering pixels in the Grand Theft Auto games and their ilk.
This is the most obvious connection, I think, thus maybe the most tell-tale proof: Morpheus, y’all. In both The Matrix and John Wick Chapter 2, Keanu’s character is dependent upon the wisdom of an older male mentor, one who prefers the shadows to the spotlight and one who is also as physically proficient as he is mentally. In both The Matrix and John Wick Chapter 2, that mentor is played by Laurence Fishburne. Coincidence? Maybe, but where’s the fun in that?
Then there are the real world connections: John Wick Chapter 2’s director is Chad Stahelski, who got his start in the industry as a stuntman, specifically as Keanu’s double, specifically as Keanu’s double in, among other things, The Matrix trilogy. Furthermore, Stahelski was also Brandon Lee’s double on The Crow and filled in for him onscreen after the actor’s tragic death. Just imagine if you were to take the themes of the latter film — resurrection, revenge, redemption — and meld them with the characters and universe of the former trilogy. You’d end up with something that looks a helluva lot like John Wick Chapter 2.
This really is just the tip of the iceberg, Guise has a lot more going on in his complete theory, including how JWC2 could also be inferred as a sort of Highlander prequel, and how it honors Enter the Dragon.
Verdict: the connections are too esoteric to make a clean call, but it isn’t impossible, meaning we have the joy of awaiting future films — both John Wick 3 and a new Matrix movie are in development — to see if the theory can hold up.
115 shots, 151 seconds, 1 Oscar, and a masterclass in action editing.
If you listened to this week’s Shot by Shot podcast, you heard myself and Geoff Todd discussing the cinematography of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, shot by John Seale. But in the midst of that conversation we touched for a moment on the film’s editing, which was done by Margaret Sixel, who for her efforts was awarded an Oscar. Particularly we were talking about the fight scene that occurs between Max and Furiosa the first time they encounter one another, her taking a water break with the wives after jacking a truck, and he recently-escaped from his duties as a blood bag but still muzzled and chained to Nux.
Geoff mentioned that over the course of this fight, which lasts less than three minutes of screen-time, there are more than 100 shots flickering past. He pointed out, and rightfully so I think, that this one scene best represents Sixel’s astounding abilities and an editor and storyteller. So what I decided to do was make a video, below, that counts each and every shot from that one scene, and lo and behold, Geoff was right: in 151 seconds there are 115 cuts, and their arrangement and various lengths can teach a vital lesson about action-oriented editing and visual storytelling.
There’s no consequential dialogue in this scene, only movement, but notice how that movement portrays the characters of Max, Furiosa, Nux, and the individual wives, notice how the runtime of the shots are arranged to build a pace that surges, recedes and surges again, building to its climax, and notice how though some shots are almost too quick to see, these especially still infuse tension and a sense of controlled chaos.
This is a masterclass in editing, and a testament to the skill’s narrative indispensability.
Alternate timelines, MPAA evisceration, and a presumed dead cast member.
You know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s reason to spend an entire Saturday marathon-Googling Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. What? Ok, so perhaps I improved upon the maxim a bit, but that does little to change the fact that I recently happily tumbled down the internet rabbit hole to investigate the many controversies surrounding Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
For most people, the only real controversy here is that the Friday the 13th franchise was allowed to produce seven films in the first place; these poor folks are also apparently blissfully unaware that the entry count currently sits at 12. What is so rewarding about being a b-movie devotee is how often one can find fascinating stories buried under the oddest and trashiest flicks that most would deem cinematic afterthoughts.
The seventh chapter in the ongoing saga of why people should camp literally anywhere other than Crystal Lake pits mama’s-boy-turned-mutilator Jason Voorhees against Carrie clone Tina in a battle to determine the exact number of ideas the producers had run out of. The first and most familiar (to horror hounds) controversy of the film is how savagely the MPAA censored the kills. This is obviously not the first time that this supposedly relevant content watchdog organization took umbrage with graphic violence, but given the blood-spilling precedent set by the previous six installments, the mind boggles a bit at why New Blood irked them so much. At any rate, the franchise signature murders were cut down as if being readied at the gate to be shown on basic cable. Fans’ demands for an unrated cut of the movie were silenced by the fact that Paramount completely disposed of all negatives containing the chopped footage.
Further interesting about The New Blood is determining its exact chronology. This franchise has had a special relationship with day-and-date since its first sequel. There are clues and, at times, explicit lines of dialogue that suggest that the second and third films take place within a few days of the first, which was shot and set in 1980. In Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, we are introduced to Tommy Jarvis whose maturity we follow through the next two movies. Given the fact that The “Final” Chapter takes place in 1984, when Tommy is 12, and Part V: A New Beginning takes place about six years later when a now 18 year old Tommy is released from a mental hospital, Part V must therefore take place in (at the earliest) 1990. Conservatively estimating the Part VI: Jason Lives takes place one year later, we are now in 1991.
In the overwhelmingly comprehensive documentary, Crystal Lake Memories, it is revealed that Part VII takes place ten years after the events of Part VI. Therefore The New Blood, despite being released in 1988, takes place in the year 2001. This would of course suggest that all the campers at Crystal Lake in Part VII are maximum hipsters. They are wearing the most egregious of 80s throwback clothing (shoulder pads and waist-tied sweaters abound) and listening to the very worst cassette tape pop. This also calls into serious question Tina’s mother’s rancid mullet hairstyle that doesn’t so much add to her character as it does allow her to closely resemble Cha-Ka from The Land of the Lost.
Going deeper, because why wouldn’t you at this point, given the gimmick of its title, if one were as obsessive as this writer and decided to utilize an Almanac, the events of these films can actually be timestamped to exact months once the dates are calculated. For example, knowing that Part VI takes place on a Friday the 13th in 1991, and given the prevalence of denim jackets and blustery winds in the opening, we can presume that Jason Lives takes place on Friday, September 13th, 1991. We can use this same technique to roughly estimate the date of the flashback prologue of The New Blood to be Friday, October 13th, 1995; a calendar in the prologue does clearly show “Friday October 13th” so this would make sense.
But for the sake of argument, let’s just imagine that perhaps you somehow don’t find the calculation of exact day and date of Friday the 13th sequels interesting. Ok, we’re not here to judge. The third and most dramatic controversy surrounding Friday the 13th Part VII is the contested offscreen fate of one of its cast members. In Crystal Lake Memories, during the segment on The New Blood, the actress who played uber bitch Melissa is referred to as “the late Susan Jennifer Sullivan.” Of course this is tragic, as this actress would have died so young, but apparently her death is the subject of some internet debate.
Horror site forums are vehemently refuting the claims that Susan has passed away in while another site produced this obituary from the Boston Herald. Commentors were quick to point out however the discrepancy that the thumbnail image associated with this obit are of a woman who looks nothing like Susan as well as the fact that it fails to mention her career as an actress. One anonymous poster even claimed to be Susan’s daughter and insisted she is very much alive. Another was resolute in his claim that Susan still lives in southern California and never lived in Boston. It is also curious that IMDB does not have a date of birth or death for Susan but does make mention of her marriage to Ed. K Taylor ended with “her death,” which appears to be pulling info directly from the Boston Herald obituary.
Of course, this could all be the product of ill-informed speculation and the desire to incite scandal where there is none. Also known as, the internet. But far more likely, if Ms. Sullivan is unfortunately deceased, is that horror fandom is so passionate that the thought of losing a fifth-billed character from the seventh installment of a slasher franchise is too much to bear. Death from an axe to the face on the big screen is, ironically, far more palatable than the more sobering reality of passing on from the real world due to cancer.
For more dissection of these and other Friday the 13th Part VII controversies, including one involving Fatal Attraction, check out this week’s episode of the Junkfood Cinema Podcast! We invite author/screenwriter/TV personality Jason Murphy to venture back into the dangerous waters of Crystal Lake.
As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to a weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!
A conversation about whitewashing, cultural appropriation, and how Hollywood just can’t stop itself from making things worse.
For this week’s episode of The Big Idea, my show in our fancy new One Perfect Pod channel, I’m tackling the issues of whitewashing and cultural appropriation. It’s a conversation that has reached its peak with the release of Ghost in the Shell. Here’s the thing: I’ve seen Ghost in the Shell and I’m not convinced that it’s a bad movie. In fact, there’s a lot about it that I like quite a bit. Scarlett Johansson, wrongly cast as she may be, kicks a lot of ass in an undeniably slick futuristic setting as Major, the first ever successful fusion of a human brain and an android body. The film, directed by Rupert Sanders (The Huntsman), blends a lot of futuristic technology with a pop grunge aesthetic and characters that, while very self-serious, do a lot of damage. As an action movie, it’s pretty solid. As an exercise in Hollywood rebooting and appropriating a popular anime from the mid-90s, it’s a minefield of problems.
To discuss in-depth, I invited Keith Chow of The Nerds of Color and Angie Han of Mashable onto the pod to talk about Ghost in the Shell and Iron Fist, the conversations around them, and how their creators just couldn’t stop making things worse along the way.
Listen to this week’s episode here:
Also this week, we’re doing a special giveaway for anyone who subscribes to our email newsletter. We have three (3) copies of the Blu-ray to give away. All you need to do to enter is be a subscriber to our newsletter. We’ll be selecting winners randomly next week and reaching out via email.
You can also watch an exclusive clip from the Blu-ray release here:
We've got an exclusive clip from the DVD release of The Founder to share with you (and a giveaway coming shortly, so stay tuned). https://t.co/IJkqmZDyCz
What Favreau’s choice for Nala says about the adaptation.
As Beauty and the Beast rakes in enormous sums, Disney’s next live-action remake appears to be coming together in big way. Varietyreported yesterday that director Jon Favreau is courting Beyoncé for the role of Nala in his upcoming reimagining of The Lion King. This announcement comes just one month after Favreau nonchalantly declared on Twitter that Donald Glover and James Earl Jones would be playing the roles of Simba and Mufasa respectively. While Beyoncé hasn’t confirmed yet, her potential casting provides us with a number of clues about how Favreau might be intending to adapt the classic story. Details on the project have been scarce, but irresponsible speculation is in order.
The role of Nala in the original animated film, though vital, is actually a relatively minor one in terms of music. Simba’s queen only gets to sing a small part of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight,” suggesting that any faithful adaptation would cause Beyoncé’s vocal talents to go almost entirely to waste. It’s possible that Favreau and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson plan to import elements from the Broadway musical, which contains a number of additional songs, including two for Nala: “The Madness of King Scar” and “Shadowland.” That would make the upcoming film more an adaptation of Lion King The Property than the actual film. Ample liberties were taken in Favreau’s The Jungle Book to distinguish it from both the original Kipling novel and previous film versions, so one suspects that the same approach will prevail on The Lion King.
But as many have noted since the announcement of the remake in September, the very notion of a live-action Lion King poses some major concerns for all the songs in the film — not just Nala’s. However advanced the computer animation technology becomes, it’s difficult to imagine the characters performing the original soundtrack without access to the anthropomorphic gestures and appearance of the animated film. A real lion singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” might come across as frightening or comical. Most of the songs from the original Jungle Book animation were nixed in Favreau’s adaptation, so perhaps The Lion King is headed the same way.
What’s more, the original film features different voice actors for Simba and Nala as children and adults. A flash-forward occurs during “Hakuna Matata,” dividing the story into two parts. No announcement has yet been made suggesting that Glover will have a young counterpart, and it seems unlikely Beyoncé would be tapped to play just adult Nala, so the very structure of the narrative may be under review. Perhaps the role of Nala will be expanded. Perhaps this decision is even contingent on whether Beyoncé accepts the role (she’s currently undecided, given her pregnancy with twins).
Expanding the role of Nala would be one way to bring the story into a more modern context. When the film was originally adapted for Broadway, the role of Rafiki was made a woman because of the absence of any strong female characters in the cast. Developing Nala for the live-action film could have a similar effect. And even without exploiting her singing prowess, Beyoncé’s charisma as an actor could do much to bring the character to life. Though she hasn’t been in a feature film since 2013’s Epic, a number of critics called Lemonade one of last year’s finest films.
We remain ambivalent about the Lion King reboot, in part because of skepticism about the animation strategy, and in part because of protectiveness of the original film. But with each new casting announcement, it’s difficult not to get more and more excited about what Favreau is cooking here. Here’s hoping that Beyoncé finds the time to act in the film, and that the project is worthy of her talents.
Check out these essentials even if you don’t catch the new movie.
Another week, another live-action remake of an animated classic. Well, you could argue that most of Ghost in the Shell isn’t really live action, since there’s so much that’s CG. You could also say it’s not a remake so much as a new adaptation of a Japanese comic book. Regardless, a lot of it is a pretty faithful copy, so a good percentage of this week’s list of Movies to Watch could apply to the manga or the anime versions of the story (I’m making it a given that you should see the original). That’s good for any of you boycotting the new movie due to its whitewashing controversy.
These 12 titles are worth seeing either way:
The Creation of the Humanoids (1962)
Despite being a cheap, cheesy sci-fi B movie, this is a significant work for being possibly the first involving cyborgs who don’t know they’re machines with implanted memories. Set in a semi-post-apocalyptic future, when humans are nearly extinct and humanoid robots are taking over, a doctor attempts to save humanity by putting the consciousnesses of the recently dead into new bodies. Some of these unknowing cyborgs are even ironically members of an anti-machine terrorist group.
Blade Runner (1982)
If you’ve already seen it, this one should seem a given as soon as the future Tokyo of Ghost in the Shell (new or old) appears on screen, as well as when characters start talking about false biographical memory implants. “Ultimately, all movies begin as copies of others, and it’s impossible to avoid consciously or unconsciously copying things from other works,” the anime’s director, Mamoru Oshii, told the LA Times this year. “Any film set in a near-future world is influenced to some degree by Blade Runner, but I did my best to make [Ghost in the Shell] different from it.”
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1985)
Long before both Ghost in the Shell and The Lobster, this TV movie featured people being forcefully reincarnated as animals. Raul Julia stars as a computer programmer whose company punishes him by giving him a virtual vacation in the body of a baboon. His consciousness later ends up inside a simulation of his favorite movie, Casablanca, as his body is set for reuse, with a gender reassignment. The movie was originally an episode of the PBS series American Playhouse and was then featured and roasted in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Feel free to just watch the latter version.
RoboCop (1987)
The original Ghost in the Shell manga may not have been inspired by RoboCop — creator Masamune Shirow apparently wasn’t even aware of the movie, which itself probably was only accidentally similar to the ’70s Japanese series Robot Detective — but there’s no denying the parallels. Obviously both involve a robotic cop with a human brain, the memories from which have mostly been deleted (remnant material haunts the hero). Plus, the spider tank in the climactic battle sequence has long been compared to RoboCop’s enforcement droid ED-209. In addition to recommending this, I also direct you to read the Movies to Watch list for the 2014 RoboCopremake, which includes a number of relevant titles such as the 1990 anime short A.D. Police File 3: The Man Who Bites His Tongue.
Violent Cop (1989)
One of the highlights of the Ghost in the Shell remake is “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, who plays the Section 9 chief. It is his first Hollywood movie appearance since another cyberpunk action flick, the 1995 Keanu Reeves-led William Gibson adaptation Johnny Mnemonic. While that would seem a more fitting recommendation, I’d rather encourage checking out Kitano’s Japanese films as a director, starting with this, his debut, where he plays a tough detective. Then maybe the noirish 1993 Yakuza film Sonatine.
The Matrix (1999)
We now have an official redo of Ghost in the Shell, but the anime has been so influential over the past 20 years that a lot of the live-action version should seem familiar to mainstream American moviegoers. When the Wachowskis pitched The Matrix, for instance, the story goes that they played producers a copy of Ghost in the Shell and said, “We wanna do that for real.” They clearly didn’t mean for real for real, as in an unofficial remake, but they did borrow a lot. To the point that Oshii hates being constantly asked about the comparison. “I prefer their debut, Bound,” he adds.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)
The remake will probably never get a part two, so even if you don’t bother seeing the original, you could follow it up with this sequel to the anime. Maybe imagine in your mind what the live-action version would look like. Also directed by Oshii, this one has a bigger budget, a new protagonist (the Major’s partner, Batou — the Major has a supporting role), and a plot involving sex doll robots. After Innocence, check out a few artsy hard-boiled sci-fi films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Rainer Werner Fassbender’s World on a Wire, and Oshii’s own live-action feature The Red Spectacles.
I, Robot (2004)
It may not be what Isaac Asimov fans were expecting, but Alex Proyas’s take on the Three Laws of Robotics concept is still a decent sci-fi action Will Smith vehicle with great effects and futurist production design. Although some of it is a humorous stretch, as can be expected from Couch Tomato, below is his video likening I, Robot to the anime version of Ghost in the Shell, which probably influenced it. The comparison is also relevant to the remake.
Transcendent Man (2009)
For the obligatory documentary recommendation, I have to go with a film on Ray Kurzweil and the idea of technological singularity, part of which involves the theory that humans will one day achieve immortality by transplant of consciousness to machine. Maybe even to a robot cop shell? I’d actually sort of recommended this film, which introduced me to the idea, on the Movies to Watch list for Ex Machinabut focused on the then more relevant yet hokier doc The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil actually co-directed that one, but the earlier release will have you thinking more seriously about the subject. If you want a sillier take, you can also watch the fiction feature Transcendence.
Lucy (2014)
Ghost in the Shell lead Scarlett Johansson also stars in this ridiculous but entertaining sci-fi movie from Luc Besson. Again, Johansson plays a character living in an Asian city, here Taipei, but this time she starts out as white girl whose consciousness is uploaded to another form and is able to hack into computer programs. However, here her body is also transformed with her mind. As pointed out by The Guardian’s James Luxford, this was the actress’s third movie in a row with a similar theme, following Her and Under the Skin: “the characters are people, or beings, who evolve, mutate or vanish altogether.” Ghost in the Shell now joins them.
Advantageous (2015)
In Jennifer Phang’s indie sci-fi film, a Sundance winner and Spirit Award nominee, a woman elects to have her consciousness implanted into a younger body in order to salvage her job at the company introducing such a procedure. Like in Ghost in the Shell, the new body is also of a different race, though here that race is simply more ambiguous, which in addition to the age factor is better for the company’s public image. The feature is an extension of a 2012 short film version, which you can start with below.
Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele’s phenomenal hit is a perfect place to end on, not just because of the horror film’s dealings with race but also for a certain plot point. Both Get Out and Ghost in the Shell involve the transfer of a person’s consciousness into a more perfect body. In the former it’s an African-American human shell, while the latter has caucasian robotic bodies. If only Ghost in the Shell had tried to make some excuse or commentary on future Japanese society seeing white bodies, not just mechanical shells, as in vogue.
Everything you need to know about the director in one handy post.
Have a conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world about the greatest living filmmakers, and if the name “Martin Scorsese” isn’t one of the first two or three mentioned, leave that conversation immediately and never speak to that person again. Because Scorsese’s greatness isn’t up for debate, it just isn’t. For nearly a half-century now he has built film upon film into a diverse and heralded oeuvre that includes crime films (Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed), intense character studies (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, The Aviator), religious epics (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Silence), documentaries (The Last Waltz, Public Speaking, A Letter to Elia), and rollicking tributes to art and artists (New York New York, Life Lessons, Hugo). There is no doubt that no matter who comes after him, Martin Scorsese will always remain not only one of the greatest filmmakers ever, but also one of the most important. If you think we get Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers, or even Wes Anderson without the influence of Scorsese, you’re wrong. As a director, a writer, a lover and conservationist of film and film history, Scorsese has had an impact on pretty much every significant filmmaker who’s come after him, and that might sound like over-enthusiastic, hyperbolic mythmaking, but you know I’m right. He’s Martin Fucking Scorsese.
As such, in the last few years there have been droves of video essays, montages, and supercuts dedicated to both the broad strokes and minutiae of his body of work and the individual films therein. I’ve had the at-times dubious privilege of watching most all of them, and the list below represents the best, and also serves as a mini-course on the art, skill, and origins of a man synonymous with his medium. Whether you consider yourself an expert or a neophyte when it comes to Scorsese, there’s a lot to learn here, and it’s all fascinating.
Streaming overlords sign Channing Tatum to teach us something.
Ever since animation has been targeted at children, adults have thought it would be really cool if it was aimed at them instead. Once regulated to a late-night programming block of the Cartoon Network and a sub-genre of pornography, adult animated series are everywhere and chock full of the kinds of celebrities who were once called upon only to phone in performances on things like Shark Tale every so often. Adam Reed’s Archer has become a sweet moneymaker on FX and Raphael Bob-Waksberg Bojack Horseman has done massive inroads to make Netflix seem hip and with it. Which is probably why Netflix, per Deadline, has just signed on the voice of Channing Tatum to star in an animated movie penned by Dave Callaham, proud writer of “Untitled Zombieland Sequel,” which has yet to hit theaters. His feature-length movie for Netflix will be called America: The Motion Picture.
Matt Thompson, who is directing, is signed to Floyd County Productions, the same company handles Archer along with two animated programs on FX that were canceled after a single season. Like the Cold War theatrics of the first few seasons of Archer, America: The Motion Picture will, at least partially, take place in the past but will, instead, concern itself with what Deadline has agreed to call an “R-Rated revisionist history.” Channing Tatum’s voice, for instance, will perform as George Washington, the celebrated honest lumberjack who will be narrating Callaham’s journey into the caverns of American history. This is smart: revisionist history is the new grunge and plaids, everyone and their mother is into it.
Where previously the domain of either presidential advisor Alex Jones or one-time shots on TV shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or The Simpsons, blown-out historical fiction is having a moment. Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s insanely popular blockbuster musical, was not just dollars in the bank or Tonys on the wall but generated a response in the greater discourse that dwarfed similar popular reto-bangs like Les Mis or, I dunno, any of those musicals about newspapers that I assume takes place in the past because newspapers. Academics loved it. Our erstwhile President loved it. Our serial monogamist Vice President went to it.
Similar success, if on a smaller scale, was awarded to Derek Waters’ Drunk History, a popular Comedy Central series with many celebrity guest stars with a comic take on the American history book. While some academics have made the case for Hamilton’s intelligence and insightful commentary on history and its consumers (and others, the opposite), Drunk History wasable to evade that level of scrutiny. A thinly veiled knockoff of Waters’ program debuted last year on network television, Julius Sharpe’s Making History. “I am an easy mark for this kind of stuff,” Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “I found myself happy watching Making History without feeling the need to make a case for its brilliance, depth or strength of satire.”
Recognizable celebrities dress up on Comedy Central’s ‘Drunk History’
Both adult animation and comical historic narratives share similar appeals: a folksy history lesson reminds viewers of the elementary classroom; cartoons remind viewers of the hours spent afterward, the episodes of SpongeBob or Arthur watched in the living room Of course, both SpongeBoband Arthur have been recontextualized as “dirtier” in their popular memory and its telling, in kind, that many popular adult animated shows, like BoJack Horseman or Archer,emphasize their interest in sexual comedy. Archer’s many longstanding bits like “Phrasing” or “Just the tip” are sexual innuendos that, in some sense, reflect back on themselves as salacious language hiding everyday usage, jokes with punchlines that are themselves fundamentally ironic. Less sophisticated offerings like Steve Dildarian’s The New V.I.P.s, which is airing as part of Amazon’s Pilot Season and which I’ve reviewed, draw out dicks and point at them.
Which is not to say that an adult animated program has to pretend its breaking some kind of boundary of the late-Victorian era or Hays Code in order to qualify for the quantifier “adult.” Don Hertzfeldt’s work, which many people in glasses like myself regularly enjoy, is mostly about death. And Bob’s Burgers, a show that I find to be the only thing in the world that’s possibly too twee but our Francesca Fau really likes, is earnest stuff. Adult comedy has already had a moment, about a decade and a half ago, when South Park was being commonly consumed as serious business and Seth MacFarlane was given lots of money.
While that burnt out fast than you can say The Cleveland Show, its revival comes in the guise of even more curious nostalgia. In a time when making meaningful commentary of political reality has become agonizing, not even Alec Baldwin wants to do it anymore, the retreat into a past stripped of its context makes a strong sell. People of all ages and races can find humor in, say, the wedding politics of Alexander Hamilton or the drunken ramblings of Benjamin Franklin on cable television. And, in casting living cartoon Channing Tatumas a cartoon, Netflix will savvily hit its audience over the head with everything its audience wants, like an episode of House of Cards that features Robin Wright negotiating with insidiously sincere terrorists. Yay.
This is no festive prank, these movies are hilarious.
Let’s face it, the world is a wreck. Every day things look bleaker than they did the day before. It’s gotten to the point where, if you can’t learn to laugh at our misery, you’re finished. If you need some help figuring out how to find humor in even the worst bits of the human experience, dark comedies work, Netflix has them, and we’ve made a list of the good ones. Click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.
I can’t think of another movie in recent times that’s been so good and gotten so little love and attention in return. Maybe that’s because the concept of a former 80s glam rocker who still wears his makeup (Sean Penn) tracking down the Nazi concentration camp guard who humiliated his late father in order to kill him feels like an impenetrable premise to some people. Or maybe, at first glance, it looks like Penn is giving a broad, showy performance here that’s all about artifice. None of that is actually the case. The film sounds silly, but it’s actually completely grounded in real emotional stakes. Penn’s performance seems like it would be big, but it’s actually smart and subtle, and it always feels completely authentic.
This Must Be the Place was made from a spectacular script that’s thematically deep, deeply quirky, and filled with so much snicker-worthy wit that you’ll be quoting it for weeks. It features one of Penn’s best performances ever, even though his role is so challenging. It’s got Frances McDormand too, and her powerful personality is on full display. The relationship her rugged firefighter character shares with Penn’s vulnerable artist character is so weird and wonderful and endearing. It’s amazing that something so sweet can exist in a dark holocaust comedy whose primary focus is our inability to let go of the past, or at least our inability to get the past to let go of us.
There’s a great gag from a classic Simpsons episode titled ‘Brother From the Same Planet’ where Bart is forlorn because his friends are sneaking into an R-rated movie and he can’t go with because he’s got to wait for Homer to pick him up from soccer practice. As the truck the boys are sitting in the back of peels off Bart looks forlorn as they begin to chant, “Bart-On Fink! Bart-On Fink!” Barton Fink is the perfect R-rated movie to name drop for this joke because it’s so deliberate and heady and strange, and it dives so deeply into the depths of depression and despair that it’s likely that group of rowdy 10-year-olds had their pants bored off by it. Suckers. We’re not stupid 10-year-olds though, we’re cultured and intelligent appreciators of art, so we’re going to spend our night tonight firing up Netflix and watching one of Joel and Ethan Coen’s best, most interesting, most despair-inducing films. We’re going to watch it and we’re going to have a great time doing it, for we are nerds.
Look, I get it. The Beaver came out way too close to Mel Gibson’s unhinged meltdowns where he revealed himself to be a hateful asshole and nobody wanted to see his dumb face at the time. Has enough time passed now for people to give it a chance though? Because it’s delightfully strange, it somehow finds real emotional depth despite its absurd premise, and it’s full of committed performances given by insanely talented actors. In addition to Gibson’s devastating turn as a broken man struggling to put his shattered mind back together, this movie also serves up a teenaged love story that’s more affecting than any other teenaged love story in recent memory, because it’s smartly written, it features characters who aren’t miserably annoying, and they’re played by Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence. Director Jodi Foster knocked the making of this movie out of the park, she just didn’t have the best timing when it came to releasing it.
A couple of years ago Bob Roberts probably played more as a biting satire than it did as a dark comedy, but considering the bleak, soul-crushing, nightmare-inducing political reality that we’re currently living in, it’s certainly taken on a much darker tone. The film is a campaign mockumentary that sees writer/director Tim Robbins also star as the title character, a populist, moronic, extreme right Senatorial candidate who attempts to bully his way into office by spouting rhetoric that puts down all of the burnouts and lazy people who he perceives as leaching off of the state, and that espouses a libertarian, bootstrap-pulling philosophy that appeals to the Pennsylvania white folk who make up his constituency. Sound relevant? At one point the guy even oversees a beauty pageant. Anyway, Bob Roberts is funny, and it makes great use of the talents of Alan Rickman, who provides the film with a huge laugh the very first second that he appears on the screen. That guy was a damned treasure.
There will always be a special place in my heart for Cheap Thrills,because it holds the distinction of being the only film I’ve ever seen gross enough to make somebody puke in the middle of a crowded theater. The basic story here is that a couple of rich jerks played by David Koechner and Sara Paxton keep paying a couple of sad sacks played by Pat Healy and Ethan Embry an increasingly larger amount of money to perform increasingly more demented stunts. Things start off cheeky, start to get dangerous, and then everything goes completely nuts and before you know it you’re bearing witness to the sorts of sickening, insane acts that are gross enough to cause someone to puke in the middle of a crowded theater. If you don’t howl with laughter the whole time you’re watching this twisted movie, then chances are you’re probably a good person or something, and you should definitely look into doing something about that.
Here we have another one of those movies with a premise that looks ridiculous on the surface, but that actually plays out in a very grounded and emotional manner. Said premise is that a budding young musician played by Domhnall Gleeson joins a band that’s led by an eccentric genius who never takes off a giant, freaky papier-mâché head that he wears over his real head. Dude’s name is Frank, and he’s played by Michael Fassbender. Apparently this was based on a true story, but it’s weird as hell. The script is impressively clever, and the film as a whole manages to take a pretty deep look at mental illness, all while providing big laughs thanks to its dry absurdism. Gleeson and Fassbender are both great in their roles, but it might be Maggie Gyllenhaal as the band’s cruel theremin player who steals the show — her or the film’s show-stealing final song. Watch it and decide for yourself.
If you ever find yourself daydreaming about burning down the shallow, vapid society that surrounds you, then God Bless America is your movie. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys the delicious taste of schadenfreude any time you see something bad happen to a bad person, then God Bless America is your movie. It stars Joel Murray as an everyman who gets tired of reality TV and spoiled teenagers and everything else that sucks about the modern world, so he teams up with a sassy young girl (Tara Lynne Barr) in order to go on a shooting spree. It comes from the mind of writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait, so you know that it’s warped and hilarious, but also that it never loses its humanity. Actually, there’s quite a bit of heart at the center of this violent, cathartic explosion of righteous anger, which helps keep you from feeling like a total sicko as you watch it.
Is The Graduate actually a comedy? That’s maybe debatable, if you want to get strict about genre, but it would have definitely been considered a dramedy, if we were making up ridiculous words like that back in the 60s. Arguments aside, the movie is plenty funny, and it’s got plenty of dark stuff going on in it. Probably its biggest influence is the way it legitimized stories where people in their 20s get sad because they don’t know what to do with their lives, but the real powerful stuff in here is the way it depicts how soul-crushing being trapped in a loveless marriage can be via the Mrs. Robinson character (Anne Bancroft). This movie sees directing legend Mike Nichols creatingat the top of his game. It’s full of iconic images, iconic lines of dialogue, and iconic performances from very important actors. It’s so good that it cast Dustin Hoffman as a rich California kid and nobody even questioned it.
Grosse Pointe Blank is one charming, entertaining movie, to the point where there might not be anyone in the world that doesn’t like it. It’s got comedy, it’s got action, it’s got a great soundtrack, and it works as a great reminder that no matter how thoroughly we attempt to run from our pasts, eventually our history is something that we’re going to have to contend with. It’s the way it digs into those thematics that makes such a light, fun movie appropriate for a list of dark comedies. That and the fact that its protagonist is a contract killer played by John Cusack, and the film doesn’t shy away from the fact that he’s killing lots of people while dealing with the stress brought upon by something as mundane as a high school reunion. There’s something magic and hilarious that gets created by the juxtaposition of tones here. There aren’t too many other movies out there that are able to do so much at the same time without turning into total messes.
Even though The Life Aquatic is widely considered to be one of the messiest, least-complete films in Wes Anderson’s catalogue, it’s still better than pretty much anything else you’re going to watch in any given day. Yeah, its long, and yeah its structure is kind of meandering, but that approach kind of works given the lost, broken nature of its title character, Steve Zissou, who provided Bill Murray a chance to do some of the most powerful acting of the sad-faced-clown period of his later career. The relationship between Zissou and the character played by Owen Wilson lends this film a substantial dark heart, and it allows it to dive deep into matters of regret. Even as it gets dark, The Life Aquatic never stops being funny though. There are so many quotable lines in here that your head will spin deciding which one you want to casually drop into a conversation next. People need to revisit this gem of a movie and realize its greatness so they stop shitting on it just because it isn’t Rushmore, don’t you agree?
On its surface Manson Family Vacation plays very well as a straight comedy where a fairly strait-laced and successful brother (Jay Duplass) has to deal with his very eccentric, screw-up brother (Linas Phillips) coming to visit, so it’s got that going for it. What makes it interesting is how much darkness it manages to hide under that surface-level setup. It starts with introducing Phillips’ characters’ obsession with the Manson Family murders, and then it gets weirder from there. There’s a real tension here, where you wonder just how deep Phillips’ eccentricities go, and by the time you get to the third act you’ll be astonished with how out there this movie that looked like a simple situation comedy gets. Manson Family Vacation is absolutely made by Phillips’ performance, which is electric. This guy is really talented and he’s a really unique screen presence, and with the right roles he could really become something big.
Do you ever feel anxiety in social situations? How about situations where you’re not entirely certain whether the stranger you’re talking to is trying to fuck you or not? The Overnight is a ridiculous, hilarious little ensemble piece that milks those anxieties for about an hour and twenty minutes. Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling are the new couple in town who don’t know anybody. Jason Schwartzman and Judith Godrèche are the nice people they meet at the park who invite them to dinner, and who might be swingers? Hilarity and awkwardness ensues. This movie also does a pretty deep dive into how we can still be driven by our insecurities even into adulthood, and how we can let small poisons in our relationships slowly rot them over time, which makes it a pretty dark watch. There’s also a scene where Schwartzman propositions Scott to pose for a butthole painting, which is some dark journey into the soul shit, and which plays out in a powerfully funny manner. These people all have such great chemistry.
Not only is Slums of Beverly Hills one of the most clever and endearing indie films from the indie heyday of the 90s, it’s also one of the best coming of age stories of its era, and it’s one of the best depictions of being poor and struggling in the modern world that the cinema has given us. It deals with all sorts of dark subjects like loneliness, addiction, disappointment, and self-loathing, but it still manages to be consistently hilarious all the way through. I guess with a cast as funny and talented as Alan Arkin, Marissa Tomei, Kevin Corrigan, David Krumholtz, Carl Reiner, Jessica Walter, and Natasha Lyonne it kind of had to be funny. This movie would have made Lyonnea huge star if there was anything else interesting in Hollywood for a female her age to follow it up with at the time. It’s cool to see that she’s started finding solid things to do again recently. Go back and revisit her beginnings with this one.
This movie is obsessed with bodily functions. Vaginal secretions and the after effects of butt wounds mostly. It’s very needling in its attempts at sussing out what an audience will accept and what they won’t, and then pushing past those boundaries. There’s lots of gross-out stuff in here, lots of immature attempts at being controversial, but that’s because its main character is a mixed up, angry teenager who’s desperately trying to gain the attention of anyone who will validate her existence. She’s raging at her confusion with the world, acting terrible, and daring everyone to hate her, so everything fits together rather nicely. Wetlands is a temper tantrum of a film that does a great job of recreating the experience of being a young person, all while wrestling with questions of trauma, female sexuality, and how the two are often forced to mingle. Dark stuff, indeed, but there are still a ton of laughs that manage to blossom out of it.
Here we have the second Bobcat Goldthwait written and directed film on our list. He must be a dark dude. Really though, he comes up with some twisted stuff. If you thought the child-assisted shooting spree in God Bless America was a dark premise for a comedy, get a load of this tale about a pathetic high school teacher (Robin Williams) who exploits his douchebag son’s death for fame after the kid accidentally bites it while erotically asphyxiating himself. Like he always does, Goldthwait takes an insane premise and still somehow imbues it with humanity though, by introducing you to horrible people but always making sure that you have reason to sympathize with and relate to them. This movie will make you laugh, this movie will make you cringe, and there’s also parts of it that could very well make you cry. Is this the best work Williams did in his legendary career? Maybe not, but maybe. A case could be made.
A pool-managing horse is just where the film begins…
It’s Friday and as such I like to try and leave you with a Short of the Day that will linger in your mind over the weekend, and boy oh boy have I found one in Bath House, a stop-motion animated, 15-minute short from Swedish director and animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr that involves a humanoid horse working as a pool manager, a fox couple, and a gang of mice. As you might can tell from this conglomeration of characters, something goes wrong. A few somethings, in fact.
Bath House feels like a short David Lynch might have made if he was feeling playful, or like a foreign interpretation of a Far Side cartoon come to life. The animation is seamless to the point you’ll forget it’s animated in parts, and von Bahr’s decision to use very little dialogue — teamed with the fact that what dialogue there is is in Swedish — heightens the film’s hallucinogenic absurdity.
If you like brain-blowing animation, Bath House’s got you; if you like heady experimental filmmaking, Bath House’s got you; and if you like cool-looking weird shit, Bath House’s got you there, too. In short it’s a short that delivers the goods on a few fronts, so stop reading and start watching.
A Lost Classic Reviewed in This Bonus Podcast Episode!
For over three years now, Junkfood Cinema has been Film School Rejects’ premier b-movie podcast. We examine the cheesiest, greasiest, most nutritionally devoid film snacks, but snacks we genuinely love devouring.
Every so often however we also highlight flat-out great films they have not gotten their fair shake. This cinema archeology can occasionally yield immeasurably significant finds. Case in point, this beloved, but strangely totally forgotten comedy from 1994.
Joined by writer/TV personality Jason Murphy, in addition to this week’s main episode on Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, we recorded this bonus episode on a classic supernatural romp. Want to take a trip down the foggiest stretch of Memory Lane? Your wish is our command.
As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to a weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!
‘Ghost In the Shell’ Is Pretty Except When It’s Not
Eye-catching designs and an intriguing performance by Scarlett Johansson aren’t quite enough.
It’s a new world, one where cybernetic enhancements are the norm to aid people in everything from vision and movement to the quicker absorption of alcohol, and Major Killian (Scarlett Johansson) is the shiniest toy on the shelf. While others are human with electronic additions, she’s a human brain inside a synthetic shell. A terrorist attack one year earlier left her body ravaged, but thanks to the work of Hanka Robotics and Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche) Major is now a top agent with the city’s anti-terrorist unit.
Her latest assignment sees her tracking a mysterious threat named Kuze (Michael Pitt) whose digital wizardry and armed goon squads have led to the murder of several Hanka executives and scientists. The closer she gets to him though the closer she gets to a truth about herself destined to threaten everything she believes to be true.
2017’s Ghost in the Shell is an overly familiar tale regardless of whether or not you’ve seen Mamoru Oshii’s classic 1995 anime (or read Masamune Shirow’s original manga). Rupert Sanders’ new film presents a world where technology has become an evolutionary force, where the hybridization of (wo)man and machine leads to questions of identity and struggles for control. We’ve seen it in films like Blade Runner and Robocop, but while this one ups the ante on the visual front it still pales beside the depth, commentary, and relevance of those decades older classics.
And no, I didn’t say “pales” as a sly reference to this film’s arguable whitewashing of a beloved Japanese character and piece of pop culture. But we’ll get to that.
Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) once again proves himself to be a capable, workman-like director of CG-heavy action light on character and narrative weight, and along with cinematographer Jess Hall he delivers an attractive-looking movie. The city-scape is a less atmospheric and ambient take on Blade Runner, but its brightness and blend of color and hi-tech touches like flying crafts and building-high hologram-like billboards succeed in presenting a believable environment. Action scenes are a bit cramped at times, but they usually succeed at raising the tempo if even temporarily.
As impressive as most of the visuals are there are more than a few wonky CG shots that feel either unfinished or less than polished. The transitions between flesh and blood Major and the CG version glimpsed in some large-scale action are too distinct, and some of the traffic shots featuring CG cars can’t hold a candle to what Luc Besson achieved two decades ago for The Fifth Element.
The futuristic look can’t hide the stale story though, and the dialogue — courtesy of a trio of screenwriters — is a series of obvious genre beats and dull observations. Most of the cast fades into the wallpaper along with what they’re saying, but a few manage to stand out from the crowd. Pitt finds some personality and pathos in his “villain” while ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano is just a blast to see onscreen on principle alone. His section chief gets a couple of fun moments guaranteed to leave you hungry for more (in which case I recommend Boiling Point, Brother, and Battle Royale).
As is befitting the film’s lead role though, it’s Johansson who truly engages with her commitment to the character. A human trapped in a mechanical body, she carries herself like a tool or weapon constantly at the ready for action. From the way she walks to the expressions she wears in conversations or silence, she succeeds in feeling like an alien among humanity. It’s not nearly as dramatic as her mesmerizing turn in Under the Skin, but it’s noticeably affecting. One step removed from the film itself, Johansson’s attraction to roles like this, Under the Skin, Her, and Lucy reveals an interesting element to the idea of a woman struggling with her identity as a human/other composite. Her excepted, these other three films offer an intriguing and compelling contrast between Johansson’s own perceived physical beauty and a differing, sometimes frightening reality beneath the surface.
That about sums up the nuts and bolts of Ghost in the Shell for most viewers, but the accusations of whitewashing deserve attention even in the context of a review. Skip to the final paragraph if you’re uninterested in the topic or want to avoid what amounts to a minor spoiler for the film itself. While simply transplanting a story of foreign origin to a Western construct does not alone constitute whitewashing — sorry those of you complaining about Netflix’s Death Note — swapping a white face into that existing world most likely does.
Major is an iconic Japanese character, and her eventual embrace (in the original) of technology’s ultimate calling feels a part of the culture’s own open-armed approach to the advancements and possibilities inherent in humanity’s merging with the inhuman. The American film makes this character an unmistakable white woman — as opposed to an animated creation whose appearance allows for interpretation — and changes her name from Kusanagi to Killian. It’s still set in Japan though, features a majority Japanese cast (albeit in supporting/extra roles), and — this is the kicker — reveals Major to actually be a young Japanese woman.
It would take a mind greater than mine to determine if this decision stems from subversive brilliance or giant balls of stupidity, but it seems to undermine any argument for Johansson’s casting in the first place. Why embrace every last surface detail that identifies as Japanese except for the actual race of your lead actress?
Ghost in the Shell is ultimately as slight and neutered of a reboot as José Padilha’s Robocop was of Paul Verhoeven’s original. It’s glossy and features the latest technological upgrades, but beneath its shiny surface sits the essence of nothing.
A closer look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s handling of religion.
Throughout his filmography, Paul Thomas Anderson has covered a myriad of highly specific topics. Whether it’s Hard Eight’s focus on the gambling underworld, Boogie Nights’ portrayal of the pornography business, or There Will Be Blood’s handling of the oil industry, Anderson rejoices in exploring the nooks and crannies of the lives that exist within these strange worlds. His 2012 film The Master was no exception to this, and is perhaps the most dangerous example of them all.
Based heavily on the teachings of Scientology — as well as the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard — The Master explores the cryptic relationship between the unstable, primal sailor Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) and the intellectual Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). This relationship is dissected and observed in many ways throughout the film, but never as engrossingly as during Freddie’s “processing” scenes with Dodd. These sequences, based off the infamous “auditing” upon which Scientology is built, involve Dodd prying personal and psychological details from Freddie through a hypnotic interview process. The sequences also make for incredible two-shots, a specialty of Anderson’s cinematic palette.
Here to help us understand the complexities and specifics of how Anderson and The Master adapt Scientology is a new video from The Nerdwriter. Providing a detailed reading of the film itself while incorporating research on Scientology and its practices, the video is an insightful document that illuminates the hidden meaning of Anderson’s elusive opus.
We chat with the show’s production designer about everything from ‘The Leftovers’ to Andy Warhol.
Brian Yorkey’s 13 Reasons Why begins in a high school hallway but doesn’t stay there. Its branches can be felt in every inch of the Northern California suburban town. Adapting Jay Asher’s bestselling Thirteen Reasons Why into a 13-episode series that Netflix dropped last weekend, the series explores the world surrounding Hannah, a teenager (Katherine Langford) who kills herself, and Clay (Dylan Minnette), a friend whose relationship to the deceased is among the show’s central ambiguities.
To some, framing what feels like a Twin Peaks-esque murder-mystery around an issue like suicide comes off as dangerous. Hank Stuever, of the Washington Post, called it “an especially cruel experience.” But suicide, the third leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 24, has long been a fixture in teen literature, from Sharon Draper’s award-winner Tears of a Tiger, long a middle school staple, to Asher’s own novel, itself owner of a pile of awards from institutions as diverse as the International Literacy Association to Kirkus Reviews. And, of course, there’s Heathers (1989), that ultimate satire of the teenage suicide movie. But 13 Reasons Why is genuinely interested in teenage grief, and Minnette’s performance is Emmy-worthy if they handed Emmys out for pure restraint, for doors shut on the typically voyeurous camera. Beyond Yorkey, a Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright, Netflix brought together a bevy of acclaimed talent behind the camera: from Academy-Award winners like Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) to low-budget indie artists like Gregg Araki (Kaboom).
Essential to any teenage drama, however, is the everydayness that it fills with its pain, wizardry or vampires. To be a teenager is to dwell in the ordinary, where anything that doesn’t occur between school bells, exams and driving in cars ricochets with strangeness. For most, it’s the last time that ordinary things can feel interesting, where time can be spent doing nothing. For that reason, I was excited to talk to Diane Lederman, the show’s production designer who was able to take me on a conversational tour of how Netflix was able to transform a few corners of Vallejo, California into a certain version of Everytown, USA.
Lederman has had an interesting career, one that has stretched from (re)-constructing Andy Warhol’s Factory for Mary Harron’s debut I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) to designing the weird suburbias of the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers and the last few seasons of FX’s The Americans. I was interested in what brought her to the world of working with young adult literature and I was also interested in just how she got Warhol’s foil right.
FSR: So, tell me, what brought you to 13 Reasons Why?
Diane Lederman: I felt like the story was important because it felt like the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. Even though we made the choice of setting it in California, I felt like it was something that we made that teenagers anywhere needed to see and something that I thought had a real chance to get out to an audience wider than everyone who had read the book.
How did you go about creating that everyday universe?
I remembered when I was driving through Vallejo, I thought this is going to solve the problem of how we create the world of our story. We had the empty space where we set Monet’s Coffee Shop, which is where all the kids hang out after school and a lot of the pivotal scenes happen. Giving it that identity was very important, obviously, and it was one of my favorite sets.
And so we took over, and we created a coffee shop. Then, an old furniture shop that was a jujitsu studio became our movie theatre [where Hannah and Clay work]. We designed the entire lobby to look like a vintage movie theater, which was really beneficial to shooting because a lot of movie theaters are now multiplexes and don’t have the grand lobbies that once populated these theaters. So in order to have a playing field for multiple scenes that happened there, we created something that allowed us a lot of freedom for shooting, it allowed the directors a lot different opportunities to explore that lobby atmosphere. And people thought I was crazy, but I had this idea to transform this other storefront into a marquee for the theater. It was great. Part of my job as a production designer is to make sure directors have the ability to put their camera in multiple places, so that we’re not seeing the same camera angles time and time again. So, that was a really important part of my job, to read a script and envision how one might shoot it and afford those opportunities to our director. And I was able to successfully achieve that and we’re really proud of what we did with the story.
source: CW3 PR
How much of the town did production take up?
We had three or four blocks that we took over and we really wanted it to feel idyllic, so we added hundreds of trees and bushes and plants to the blocks that we took over. I was challenging but we wanted it to feel and have that idyllic feel and a lot of California is kind of barren. So, we added all our own greenery. And just doing the different storefronts really changed the look of the town. It was really fun to do and, to me, really one of the most satisfying parts of it was how the town reacted, all of its inhabitants were so grateful for our presence and they kept the murals we created for the show, and we all signed it they kept them all and they’ll be there forever.
Any highlights?
One of the main murals that we did took the little French town in [Van Gogh’s] Starry Night and turned it into the main street of the town we created, with the theater marque right at the center. And they loved it.
13 Reasons Why, like a lot of the work you’ve done, is a TV show that maps the psyche of characters who are forced to look at a place through different lenses as the story progress. How do you approach that task as a production designer?
For 13 Reasons Why, we wanted to start from a place of neutrality and then build from there because, as we learn about Hannah’s story, we learn that her world has crumbled and has fallen apart and it definitely got darker as the story progressed and I tried to support that as much as I could.
How did it compare to work you’ve done on, say, the first season of The Leftovers? That’s also something of a suburban story.
The kind of everyday story that we needed to do in creating The Leftovers was a really different kind of everyday. We wanted to sort of lull the audience into this unsuspecting mood of not understating what was really happening in the story. [laugh]
We wanted to start it in a place of where the audience would feel like everything was completely normal and, move on from there as the season progressed. We tried to empathize, then, that this was a world that was falling apart. But at first glance, everything wanted to feel completely normal. Which was largely why we opted for a suburban landscape that, like in 13 Reasons Why, was a place that people identified with and felt comfortable with and, when they see it, they know what it was and they understood where they were at and who the people in that kind of place were. And, as the story progressed in The Leftovers, we really wanted them to feel that decay and feel the world around them crumbing.
What kind of things did you use from your own life to access that kind of ordinary aesthetic?
Everything in my design draws somewhere from some experience of my life. Production design, for me, is just another form of storytelling. So, absolutely. Things that I remembered from my childhood growing up in parts of Queens. It was a sorta fairy-tale little town, with a very prominent main street and lots of little shops and I drew from that when I was thinking about what shops should look like in something like 13 Reasons Why.
What were some of the first sets you worked on, as a production designer?
One of my favorite first films that I ever worked on was I Shot Andy Warhol. I was working with a friend of mine who was doing production design and we worked together to create the world of Andy Warhol which was really very challenging but it was just so much fun and satisfying. We had the help and support of the The Andy Warhol Foundation [for the Visual Arts] who lent us a lot of Warhol’s original slides to recreate all of his art work. We had to catalog everything created, photographically, and then, afterward, provide proof of destruction of all pieces because, in essence, we were recreating real Warhols. Since almost all of his works were created by assistants, anyway, if you’re using his files and recreating his sculptures, you’re basically making more Warhols and we can’t have that.
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) dir. Mary Harron
So, we had to destroy them all after the film was finished shooting. Of course, we also had spent two twenty-four-hour periods putting aluminum foil on the walls of an old warehouse in order to create the Factory. It was a monumental task and the film only had a thirty thousand dollar budget, so it was difficult, but it was very fun.
What was it like working with someone like Brian Yorkey or Tom McCarthy?
Brian Yorkey was constant inspiration and definitely one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with. Tom was also really inspirational. I’ve learned so much working with him and his process and how he breaks down a script and brings that world to life. He, really, is a great storyteller. I’ve learned a lot working with him. Both Tom and Brian were uncompromising in their vision and I think that, oftentimes, you have to comprise as part of the process, but we really didn’t.
As a woman, I’ve found that women tend to want to please more and learning to not give in goes against the grain a little bit. Which is why think it’s really important, when you’re trying to make something special, that you have a team that doesn’t demand those compromises.
The first season of 13 Reasons Why is streaming on Netflix now.
