Notes from the Underground

Hello again. Excuse me as I begin to wipe the cobwebs off this little corner of the Internet. Today, I have at long last renewed my domain for Panned Review. When the domain lapsed in July, I was unable to renew it because Google’s process is deep and mysterious, like a Christopher Nolan movie. And like Nolan, I would try to explain it to you better, only I don’t fully understand it myself. At any rate, it was not a simple one-click solution. In the midst of this, my feelings about writing movie reviews were all a-flutter, partly due to personal reasons, partly because trying to write movie reviews for fun can be a challenge when you teach English full time, and there are papers to grade and books to read. On the other hand, I’ve gotten to contribute a few pieces to another blog, Filmview, run by my friend Konstantinos Pappis. So the question loomed: Should I continue this long-running blog or not? For now, the answer is yes. I’m also happy to say that a new project is in the works: a podcast. More information about that when it’s available. For now, I’m enclosing some mini-reviews of movies I’ve seen this year but never wrote about.

Atomic Blonde – Those who say a female James Bond is out of the question are quickly proved wrong by this fast-moving, neon-enameled comic book of a movie, in some ways a companion to John Wick. In both films, the action scenes are extremely well-choreographed and the tension is almost always punctuated by some little bit of humor. Atomic Blonde is ultimately a unique and fascinating movie all on its own, even if the premise (an American spy facing off with Russians in Germany during the end of the Cold War) has already been trod endlessly. Charlize Theron delivers a convincing performance as Lorraine, a mysterious woman whose allegiance is never clear to us. Theron’s performance is icy and sharp, yet vulnerable, a combination that few Bond actors have ever been able to master, and James McAvoy makes for a worthy love interest/villain. But what strikes me most about Atomic Blonde is that it’s one of the most visually interesting movies I’ve seen in a long time. I found myself tuning out the dialogue (some of which was too functional and technical at times) because I was so fascinated by the images. And of course, it’s awash in 80s references, from the music to the costumes, and resembles, in its most exciting moments, a music video right out of the the early days of MTV. Directed by David Leitch. Also starring John Goodman.

Kong: Skull Island – Kong: Skull Island feels like it was made by people who obsessively watched Apocalypse Now, mining it for inspiration, but their commitment to showing the audience a good time is such a welcome thing that the film's ostentatious references to Vietnam movies hardly bothered me. Especially when so few movies like this (take note, Jurassic World) feel interesting or have any personality. Skull Island takes place in the 70s, so its strikingly ethnically diverse cast feels almost anachronistic. This motley group of scientists, soldiers, and other hangers-on embarks on a doomed expedition to the ends of the earth: Skull Island. The island is essentially concealed inside a dangerous hurricane-force atmosphere. And it's home to an ancient indigenous tribe and a variety of ghastly prehistoric monsters, not to mention the great King Kong. Kong once again feels like a lovable beast, one we truly care about, and while the film’s overstuffed Vietnam commentary may be somewhat forced and obvious, it sure does make for a colorful entertainment. Samuel L. Jackson plays a bomb-crazy colonel with the usual ideas about colonialism; Brie Larson is a war photographer, Tom Hiddleston a rogue adventurer, and John Goodman a government wonk. With John C. Reilly, who's genuinely touching as a WW2 soldier who's been stranded on Skull Island for 30 years, a godlike prize for the natives. It's a hodgepodge that works. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts.

Mother! – Darren Aronofksy is not a director after my own heart. I disliked Black Swan immensely, and I found Mother! pretty insufferable too. Jennifer Lawrence plays the young wife of a struggling poet, (Javier Bardem). This once happy couple lives in a beautiful country estate, the home Bardem’s character grew up in, apparently. They’re expecting a baby, and Lawrence’s character is wrapped up in redecorating the whole house, which is a bit of a fixer-upper. That’s when their domestic tranquility is shattered by the appearance of a strange couple, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. The movie descends into a kind of domestic nightmare as increasingly bizarre things happen and the wife feels alienated from her husband, whose commitment to hospitality borders on the pathological. It’s a surreal experience, one that may titillate some viewers with all its literary references (to the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, among others, and its more general pap about the artist’s struggle). But Jennifer Lawrence spends the entire film reacting in horror to the admittedly horrible things happening to her; I much prefer Lawrence when she’s strong or funny (like her deliciously arch performance in the otherwise middling American Hustle). Mother! is also a maddeningly ugly film, visually speaking, a far cry from the rapturous beauty of the film below.

Suspiria (1977) – I’ve already reviewed Suspiria, but I must take a moment to rave about the experience of seeing it this October on the big screen, at Jacksonville’s own Sun-Ray Cinema. Before the movie began, we were treated to a brief intro by star Jessica Harper herself, which she recorded as a little gift to the fans. I’ve never considered myself a devotee of Suspiria, because the film’s plot is so haphazard. But seeing its garish colors on that massive screen turned me into a believer. The point of Suspiria is that it’s a chaotic, nightmarish experience, a frenetic symphony of artistic terror. Dario Argento doesn’t have the time, the patience, or the desire to nail every detail of the plot together, and why should he when he’s capturing a film this beautiful and terrifying? The horrifying double murder, minutes after the opening credits, is one of the prime examples: We never know where the threat is coming from, or what the threat is capable of. And the unreal, dazzlingly ornate set designs, which are more like the acid trips of an art major than actual movie sets, reinforce the feeling of otherworldliness. Suspiria has energy and vitality and spookiness to spare, and I’m so happy I got to see it with an audience.

Wind River – A surprisingly effective mystery-thriller, set in a desolate, snow-encased town in the Wyoming wilderness. Elizabeth Olsen plays a hotshot FBI agent who teams up with a somber, intuitive tracker (Jeremy Renner) to investigate a very cold case – the rape and gruesome murder of a young Native American woman, whose body was found deep in the mountains. Wind River becomes less about whodunit and more about the ways a place can be so hard and harsh that its conditions wear on your very soul. And yet, Wind River never feels like an inhuman film. The characters that populate it are interesting and all too human, only they’ve been living in isolation too long. The film takes a surprising turn at the end, revealing to us everything that happened, via flashback. It feels jarring at first, but director Taylor Sheridan’s focus is on the people, not the scintillating, pulpy surface story. That’s what makes Wind River such a satisfying movie. The standoff scene, between Olsen, several other agents, and a handful of methy bad guys, is tense and well-constructed. And Jeremy Renner, as always, lends a certain anchor-like presence. I can never not enjoy him in a movie.

"Split" seeks to understand its killer, but it's a less-than-satisfying horror thriller.

M. Night Shyamalan’s last film, The Visit (2015), gave me such a kick, that I found myself eager to see his next, Split, which opened this weekend. But where The Visit was inventive and playfully scary, Split is almost moralistic, and develops a rather peculiar message about empowerment that doesn’t quite work. In Split, three teenage girls are kidnapped at a shopping mall and held prisoner in some dark, windowless, labyrinthine place, by a man with 23 distinct personalities (played by James McAvoy). When he visits his idealistic New York headshrinker (played by Betty Buckley, who's wonderful in this, and whom horror fans will remember as the well-meaning gym teacher in the original Carrie) he presents himself as Barry, a likably awkward neurotic with a penchant for fashion. But of course, Barry is the docile cover for a whole menagerie of malicious personas, two of which have been “banned” from the sessions because they seem to be plotting a takeover of Barry’s mind.

Buckley’s character, Dr. Karen Fletcher, is an expert on Barry’s particular disorder, but she’s become rather precious about it: She lectures—via Skype—to a group of students in Paris about her patients achieving a higher form of existence through this disorder, which, she argues, is a kind of gift achieved only through intense personal trauma, a blessing wrought by a curse. Dr. Fletcher claims to have witnessed patients who can be blind with one identity but sighted with another; she claims another patient has one personality who’s diabetic, while the rest of his personalities are not. In essence, Dr. Fletcher argues, the mind has more control over our bodies than we realize, and our brains have the power to transform us into superhuman gods, if we know how to harness that power. (You can probably see where this is going.)

I don’t ever need to see Split again, but it is a diverting thriller despite its flaws, and to Shyamalan’s credit, he resists the urge to turn the movie into a police procedural (Law and Order and CSI et al have permanently established those kinds of stories as the exclusive domain of television.) Indeed, I kept waiting for a bunch of New York detectives to enter the movie as supporting characters, but they never did. We’re either in the lair with the three girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula), with Barry (and his various other personalities), or with Dr. Fletcher, who gradually pieces together the fact that something is very, very wrong with her prized patient. (More wrong than usual, that is.)

But Split isn’t nearly as scary or crazy as it thinks it is. Shyamalan has created a monstrous character but isn’t willing to show him at his worst, because he’s so horrifying. (There’s none of the dread we feel, for example, when we see Buffalo Bill in his lair, making dresses out of skin, in Silence of the Lambs.) McAvoy tries very hard, and yet he’s never scary enough, or threatening enough, because Shyamalan wants to humanize him, so he creates another persona called “The Beast”, another identity that is welling up inside of him, one more terrifying and destructive than any other. Because Shyamalan is priming us for the Beast’s big entrance, he must restrain all of Barry’s other personalities (including the ominously docile Miss Patricia, who’s British and wears shawls and long dresses). Shyamalan attempts to grapple with a person who’s both good and evil, but his strategy doesn’t work, because by the end, he’s exhausted our patience.

The strongest scenes in the movie are the first two, perhaps because they are so compact: We see Claire and Marcia with Claire’s dad, at a restaurant, celebrating Claire’s birthday, while Casey, whom Claire has reluctantly invited out of sympathy, stands by a window, staring into the distance. In that scene, Claire bemoans having to invite Casey at all, but then congratulates herself on not being a monster, the kind of mean girl who excludes the weird kid from the party. Then, in the next scene, when the girls are kidnapped, Shyamalan structures it perfectly, resisting the urge to make us jump, instead letting the terror gradually wash over us: As Claire’s unsuspecting father loads gifts into the trunk of the car, the girls get inside: Claire and Marcia in the back, distracted by their phones, and Casey in the front, feeling alone but not being alone. Then a man gets into the driver’s seat: Barry, who’s presumably disposed of the father. The girls in the back don’t even notice right away; it’s Casey who realizes what’s happening, and, in a surprising and fascinating choice, Casey is given a moment to escape but chooses not to.

Casey, we learn through flashback, has suffered in life, as has Barry. And it’s that suffering that both unites them and ultimately empowers Casey to defeat Barry. Split elevates the damaged kid as a kid who has felt the broken reality of the world, unlike the Claires and Marcias of the world, who have lived sheltered, comfortable lives with stable parents. But Split is grasping for profundity in the most obvious way. Perhaps Shyamalan is congratulating himself for resisting cheap scares, and perhaps he’s apologizing for his depiction of people with psychological disorders as mad killers, by elevating the abused child as some kind of hyper-sensitive god. But he’s also given a scientific answer for why all those other movie killers—the Michael Myerses and Jason Voorhees of the world—could never be killed for good; they keep coming back for more teenagers. Perhaps those psycho-killers also possessed this “gift” of transforming into superhuman personas. Shyamalan has concocted a pseudo-scientific explanation for these movie killers, including his own, forgetting that what we don’t understand is always more terrifying than what we do.

Trance

Danny Boyle's Trance is like Inception meets Headhunters (the Norwegian film about a professional art thief who steals a priceless painting from a professional killer). In it, an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) tries to double-cross his partners during a heist, and winds up in the hospital after being hit hard on the head. When he wakes up he can't remember what he did with the painting (a Rembrandt, no less), and his partners-in-crime are furious and ready to kill him. He goes to a professional hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) to try and recover his memory and retrieve the painting. But that's only the beginning. What unfolds is a perplexing labyrinth of "who's playing whom?" type games.

You will likely find yourself being pulled into this murky yet lithe, enticing thriller against your will. The script by Joe Ahearne and John Hodge thrives on keeping the audience in the dark, and Boyle doesn't seem to mind this a bit: we're never able to trust where it's all going, and much of the plot seems unnecessary except that we're counting on some big twist at the end to suddenly connect all the seemingly loose threads to each other. It may help the viewer to know that this does happen, but only at the end, and I did spend much of the time frustrated that there would be no relief to this deliberately complicated movie.

The saving grace of Trance is that, pointless as some of its story developments seem, it's a very entertaining movie. It's like chewing bubblegum and not knowing how long the sweetness will last. But you're content while it does, and it provides enough of the sensations promised to justify its existence. The casting is very good too: McAvoy convinces as the somewhat pathetic auctioneer whose life is in jeopardy; Vincent Cassel makes for both an intimidating and suave mastermind with Danny Sapani, Matt Cross, and Wahab Skeikh playing his cohorts, and Rosario Dawson exudes a kind of sexy control over all the male characters.

The questions Trance raises about our very unreliable memories are probably the most fascinating thing about the movie. These have been asked before, perhaps most recently in Inception (and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). But Trance goes the route of science rather than dreams, allowing that the right person with the right training and knowledge can erase someone's memory or help him recall it, and this proves to be a site of anxiety for the movie to exploit. After all, much of if not all of one's identity ultimately finds its grounding in memory and the idea that we are free agents who do things which become indelibly etched into the past, our past. Our memories prove that we have lived. McAvoy's character becomes helpless because of his inability to remember the crucial piece of information--where he put the damned painting--and Dawson becomes a sort of memory shaman.

Trance has a preposterous "what-the-hell" quality that simultaneously puts it in the ranks of the purely entertaining thriller and the purely ridiculous one, depending on the moment. But it's exciting and fun despite (or perhaps because of) its mock-cleverness, which makes it a very hard movie to resist. 101 min. ★★★

X-Men: First Class

A friend of mine accused me of being out of sync with popular culture because I expressed a lack of desire to see Thor. I had an equally strong feeling of malaise when it came to the new X-Men movie, particularly because I remember seeing X2 a number of years ago and being bored out of my mind. X-Men: First Class was better than I expected, but not by much. The characters were fairly interesting, but the movie suppressed any of the humorous aspects of its plot. Every time it let loose for a moment to be light and let you laugh at the weirdness of its characters, it seemed like the director was pulling on the reins, reminding everyone that this is a serious freaking superhero movie, people.

The dialogue was rather mechanical. But most of the audience seemed conditioned to it, so hardly anyone laughed at how ludicrous some of it was. More ludicrous still was the movie's attempt to engage with recent political history, inserting X-Men into the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. (Who knew it was mutants that averted World War III?)

Meanwhile, the coming attractions were ominous and depressing: nothing but wretched apocalyptic superhero movies all summer, as though turning off your brain is the only option at the movies between May and September. It's so unfortunate that the good movies are shoved into one tiny part of the calendar. There are always surprises, but they are the exceptions. X-Men: First Class was okay for what it was, but after a while it's all the same, and you keep wondering why people are still paying to see this stuff over and over again? The 2009 Star Trek was much better.

Popular culture includes, but is not limited to, mindless superhero fodder. Unfortunately, it seems like the only thing studios are willing to risk any money on during the summer. We're at the mercy of people who care about money much more than they care about the movies. It's like we're supposed to feel lucky X-Men was mediocre. But should we be content to settle for mediocrity and elevate it to a status of greatness simply because it's not quite as bad as the rest of the drivel out there?

Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Lucas Till, Caleb Jones. Directed by Matthew Vaughn.