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.

Batman Returns

Director Tim Burton takes us back to the comic book city of Gotham, now ensconced in winter and looking pretty gloomy, just in time for a new villain: the Penguin (Danny De Vito). After being abandoned by his rich parents because he was "different," the Penguin lived life in the Gotham sewers. Somehow he also managed to become a crime boss and maintain control over a whole cadre of actual penguins who were living down in the sewer. (Is this normal? Are there penguins living in every urban sewer?) DeVito is dreadful as the Penguin: he's too nasty, too sinister, too corrupt, to be entertaining, and he chews up every line before spitting it out at us. I missed Jack Nicholson's gleeful madness as the Joker.

There are other villains: the Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), and a greedy corporate executive (Christopher Walken) with a frightening shock of poofy grey hair. I was hoping that Pfeiffer would save the movie: she plays a flighty secretary who keeps getting ignored or taken advantage of by men and then finally creates the Catwoman persona. Donning a sexy, skin-tight outfit (all black) and a whip, as well as an endless supply of bad double entendres, she goes out to make her newfound power known. The first thing she does is rescue a woman from a would-be rapist, but quickly we learn that she's much more interested in getting her own name to the public than in protecting women who were once like her. This is perhaps more interesting, but the Catwoman comes off as rather shrill and thoughtless. She would have been a more compelling character otherwise.

And then finally Batman (Michael Keaton) comes back into the movie, but he's even less compelling than he was in the 1989 film. This is because in Batman Returns he seems so reactionary, so loosely connected to the other characters that his involvement feels superficial. Batman is a difficult character to act out: he's always brooding, and that doesn't leave an actor much room for any humor (except the bad puns that the series became famous for in this and other sequels). It's especially hard to take with Michael Keaton, whom we know is capable of boiling water with the intensity and sheer zaniness of his Beetle Juice performance.

Keaton doesn't get to be comically endearing in the Batman movies, and thus his character is lost in the shuffle of Batman Returns, which is truly a mess of a movie. The script is by Daniel Waters (who wrote Heathers), and it might have looked good on paper, but on film's it's like a circus that never ends. And the set design doesn't resemble the first Batman, further distancing the two films. Director Tim Burton's style is evident here too: this may be the movie that officially pushed him in that uber-Burton direction which would eventually be a road to careericide with pictures like Dark Shadows.

With Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Pat Hingle, Andrew Bryniarski, and Jan Hooks. ★½

Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows is the concoction of writer Seth Grahame-Smith, someone with an unoriginal imagination: he wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and now sinks his teeth into a comic re-imagining of the 1970s Gothic soaper. That not even director Tim Burton could inject any life into this massive heap is a testament to Smith's lumbering script.

Poor Johnny Depp, who has played every weird, pale character in filmdom at this point (almost always under Burton's watch, incidentally) is propped up on screen to try and sustain this mess for two hours as he, playing vampire Barnabas Collins, fumbles his way through 1972 Maine, trying to adjust to the culture shock. (He's a vampire who's been in the ground, chained inside a coffin, for nearly 200 years, thanks to the curse of a conniving witch who's in love with him.) When Barnabas gets released from his deep slumber, he shows up at the family mansion and makes plans to improve the Collins name, which has fallen out of fashion in the town which owes its very existence to the once great Collins clan. Nor is the family business, a fish cannery, successful any longer, having been usurped by a clever competitor, the witch from 200 years back (Eva Green), sustained in her youth and beauty by dark magic. Too bad she couldn't work some magic with this movie. It's abysmal, and you start to wonder how in the world everyone botched it so badly.

Whenever they don't know how to make a scene interesting, or even remotely energized, the makers of Dark Shadows insert some overplayed 1970s song, whether it means anything at all to the context or not, and this is meant to remind us how cool the 70s were, or how cool this movie is for recognizing how cool the 70s were. And usually Depp's character makes some kind of bemused observation to remind us that it's supposed to be funny that he's been displaced. Anachronistic wit at its most subtle and original.

The problem with Dark Shadows is that it doesn't know how to be a movie. Everyone has a lot to say, but nothing that moves the story along as much as one would hope. Exposition clutters the film, clunkily making itself known at every turn. Nobody seems sure how to tell this film's back-story succinctly or cleverly. Nobody seems sure how to get the plot moving succinctly or cleverly either. Smith is apparently fond of dialogue, but he doesn't have the garish sense of gab of someone like, say, Quentin Tarantino, whose talky movies are usually interesting because of what's being said, and also because of who's saying it, and how they're saying it. The actors in Dark Shadows haven't been given enough good material to really shine. And nothing interesting or original is happening in the first place.

Michelle Pfeiffer looks fetching, and she's still got the ability to command the screen, but Burton and Smith turn her into a deflated hag. She lumbers through the movie just like Smith's screenplay and hasn't anything all that interesting to do or say. She's the current representative of the Collins family and estate (along with her no-good brother, played by Johnny Lee Miller.)

With Helena Bonham Carter who is, not surprisingly, given nothing interesting to do, as the alcoholic live-in headshrinker. This film is as anachronistic as its character. It's a movie in search of a story, and the creators hoped that a lot of fancy set design and big stars and bad jokes (all of them seemingly aimed at getting into the movie trailer, which they did.); Bella Heathcote appears as a young woman who goes to the Collins mansion to be the new governess. (Her character gets ignored for much of the movie, which suggests that she is a character of convenience, contrived merely to stir up Depp's passion for his long-dead lover, whom she resembles.) Watch The Addams Family, or Beetle Juice, instead. With Jackie Earle Haley, Chloe Grace Moretz and Gulliver McGrath as the two children in the house, and, in a cameo appearance, Christopher Lee, who is also used for no good reason.