Few directors can consistently surprise you, can show such control and create such chaos, as Takashi Miike.
Miike makes Yakuza movies, he makes samurai movies, he makes horror movies, he makes kids movies. But it’s when he makes a mashup of a couple of those that he really defies expectations.
First Love is Miike’s tenth collaboration with writer Masa Nakamura. Their shared vision takes us through one night in Tokyo with a prostitute, a boxer, a cop, a mobster who wants out, and two warring gangs.
As one wistful participant of the evening’s adventure points
out, nothing’s ever simple.
Masataka Kubota (Tokyo Ghoul S) cuts a forlorn, otherworldly figure as Leo, the lonesome boxer. He fights for pay, but has no greater purpose. That actually puts him ahead of everyone else he’ll meet tonight because they all serve the wrong purpose.
As Leo stumbles headlong into an action flick in progress, Miike does what he does best. He zigs when you think he’ll zag, jukes when you expect jive. In First Love, Miike paint-by-numbers a romance film into the Jackson Pollack of a gangster shoot out.
Silly in its own way, as many of Miike’s greatest films are, First Love feels like an off-handed goodbye to the Yakuza drama. In between absurdities and viscera, the filmmaker’s tone feels pensive as characters look to their undetermined future in a profession that’s changing, even probably ending as they know it.
And then he switches to anime.
Because, honestly, if you’re willing to suspend disbelief enough to buy these gun fights, sword fights, fist fights and hallucinations, why not a one-time transition to comic book art?
In another filmmaker’s hands, this jarring one-off nuttiness might seem contrived or off-putting, but not on Planet Miike. His profession may be shifting sand beneath some feet, but Takashi Miike flies wherever he wants to go.
The fact that there is a character named Teddy McGiggles in writer/director/Aussie Abe Forsythe’s new horror gem Little Monsters—let alone that Teddy (Josh Gad) has to clarify that it is not his given name—tells you a lot about the film.
McGiggles, a beloved and boldly dressed kids’ show host, is
just one of the uninfected trapped in the souvenir shop at Pleasant Valley Farm
Petting Zoo (now with Mini Golf!).
Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o, glorious as always) has taken
her kindergarten class on a field trip. Little Felix’s (the criminally adorable
Diesel La Torraca) ne’er do well Uncle Dave (Alexander England) has tagged
along as a chaperone, but really he’s just crushing on Lupita.
Who isn’t?!
The petting zoo sits next door to a military testing
facility, one thing eats the brains of another and suddenly Miss Caroline is hurdling
zombies and convincing her class this is all a game.
Basically, Little Monsters is Cooties meets Life is Beautiful.
Even though the film is being compared to Shaun of the Dead, please go into this with your eyes open. Though it has an incredibly sweet heart and a bus load of insanely cute children, the film is definitely R rated.
Mainly because of Gad, whose character has, shall we say,
some bad habits and a pretty ugly catharsis on the playground. It’s pretty
funny, but a surprisingly mean kind of funny.
Still, Little Monsters is, in its own bloody, entrail-strewn way, adorable. Honestly. And so very much of that has to do with Nyong’o. Miss Caroline’s indefatigable devotion to her students is genuinely beautiful, and Nyong’o couldn’t be more convincing.
The enormously likable cast and a tight script elevate the film above its slight story and often borrowed ideas. But the pace is quick, the bowels are spilling, and I’ve never enjoyed Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off more.
Todd Phillips, director of the Hangover trilogy among other comedies, recently told Vanity Fair that he had to get out of comedy because woke culture made it impossible to be funny.
That sounds like a butthurt white guy nobody thinks is
funny. Doesn’t that actually make him the perfect person to reimagine Joker?
Directing and co-writing with Scott Silver (The Fighter), Phillips offers an origin story that sees mental illness, childhood trauma, adult alienation and societal disregard as the ingredients that form a singular villain—a man who cannot come into his own until he embraces his inner sinister clown.
It’s a dangerous idea and a dangerous film, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie. In many respects—though not all—it is a great movie. This is partly thanks to an ambitious screenplay, Lawrence Sher’s intense cinematography, solid directorial instincts with some beautifully staged violence and constant (indeed, fanboy-esque) nods to Scorsese.
But let’s be honest, it’s mainly because Joaquin Phoenix is a god among actors. His scenes of transformation, his scenes alone, his mesmerizing command of physicality, and in particular his unerringly unnerving chemistry with other actors are haunting.
Phoenix is Arthur Fleck, (or Afleck, if you were giving points for Batman references) wannabe standup comic and put upon outcast in 1981 Gotham City. The garbage strike has everyone testy. Rich, entitled Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s dad) isn’t helping matters with his bid for the mayor’s office and his disdain for those who are struggling.
Since Phillips genuflects to both Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, it is appropriate that Robert DeNiro, with some snazzy new teeth, participates as Murray Franklin, the late night legend that Arthur and his mother (Frances Conroy) watch every night.
More than once, Phillips does not trust his audience to stay with the direction he’s taken, and it’s unfortunate. These “look what I’m doing here” scenes drag the film, but as long as you never take your eyes off Phoenix (and who could?), you’re not likely to notice.
A pivotal moment where Arthur crashes a posh screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is Phillips’s less-than-subtle reminder that it has always been the clowns in this world who reflect society’s reality back to us. It’s a wise move to make this an alienated-to-the-point-of-violence white guy who takes his frustrations out not on the powerless, but on those with power, thus becoming a kind of hero himself.
Of course, the inclusion of Chaplin could also be read as a direct admission that Joker is a comment on our modern times. Superhero universe? Fanatical throngs blindly following a sociopath? Checks out.
But similar to Phillips’s approach with War Dogs three years ago, an uneven tone lessens the intended impact. Alongside the straightforward Scorsese homages are left turns into Oliver Stone territory a la Natural Born Killers. That black comedic satire is a tough nut regardless, even more so if comes in fits and starts.
Credit Phillips for a damn the torpedoes vision that’s damn near palpable, but it’s impossible to imagine this all meshing as well as it does without Phoenix. His presence is completely transfixing, always convincing you that he is here to fulfill this legendary character’s destiny.
Remember when we thought Nicholson could never be topped? Then Ledger did it. And now Phoenix makes this the darkest, most in-the-moment Joker we’ve seen.
And it’s chilling.
So, Phillips succeeded in making an anti-comedy and anti-comic book movie because bro culture totally rules and comedy is dead and that’s not a privileged cop out at all. But then, it is possible to separate art and the artist.
It’s an unusual opening line for a documentary about that icon of SciFi horror, Alien. And yet, Memory: The Origins of Alien is an unusual documentary.
Alexandre O. Philippe takes you deep into our collective
psyche, our “cauldron of stories,” to explore the alchemy behind the lingering
success and haunting nature of Ridley Scott’s film. Though the story starts
long before Scott’s involvement.
Philippe begins by mining writer Dan O’Bannon’s influences
and preoccupations.
“I didn’t steal from anyone,” he said. “I stole from
everyone.”
A Nebraskan whose father once staged an alien landing, O’Bannon’s
out of the ordinary young life and preoccupation with comics fueled his short
screenplay, “Memory.” But it was his battle with Crohn’s disease that inspired
that pivotal scene that moved the tale from short to feature.
Then came H. R. Giger, whose “Mythology of the future” offered
visual entryway to the world the film would imagine. Joined eventually by Scott,
who saw their genius and raised it. Philippe’s joy at displaying the way these
three imaginations coalesce to form the greater vision spills off the screen.
But why, after 40 years, is Alien still a heart-pounding success?
If you buy the film’s thesis—and Philippe does make a good
case—we basically had no choice.
Alien is both the lovechild of H.R. Giger, Dan O’Bannon
and Ridley Scott—each as seemingly necessary for this product as the next—and
the culmination of primal images and ideas mined from the collective unconscious.
This is more than undulating fandom aimed at the object of adoration. It’s a deep, immersive dive into how Alien evolved to become the masterpiece that it is and why the film remains as haunting today as it was when John Hurt’s chest first burst in 1979.
Documentarian Michael Beach Nichols (Welcome to Leith) looks at just about every side of that unusual argument with his sly documentary Wrinkles the Clown.
Ostensibly, Beach Nichols digs into the story of the man behind Wrinkles, a shady older gentleman living in a van in Fort Myers who failed as a traditional clown, so he improvised. Placing stickers around town with his masked face, clown name and phone number, Wrinkles offered to frighten your misbehaving children for a fee.
Yes, it is sort of genius.
As we ride around the beach town for the aged in a lived-in
conversion van, we’re privy to the voice mails recorded at the Wrinkles number.
Reprobate that he seems to be, Wrinkles is still considerably less frightening than
the parents hoping to take advantage of his behavioral services.
Says one father, his child wailing in the background, “I
want you to eat her.”
Wrinkles’s response? “My favorite kind of scares are the ones that pay the most.”
This kind of dry, deadpan humor fuels a film that explores the most peculiar sociological experiment.
Who would call? How will their children react? Why are clowns so effing scary in the first place? A solid documentarian, Beach Nichols understands that these are the deeper questions to be addressed. Admittedly, continually flashing the image of a grampa-faced clown holding balloons and peeking into your sliding glass door late at night is his excellent way to keep your interest as he digs into these concerns.
We hear from folklorists (with still-packaged action figures mounted to their office walls, so you know they’re legit), child psychologists, pro-Wrinkles parents, anti-Wrinkles parents and one traditional clown.
Poor Funky. “There’s a whole generation growing up with no
positive image of a clown whatsoever,” he laments, happy face in place.
It’s a fascinating look at the function clowns have served since their medieval beginnings, as well as the internet’s way of amplifying folk tales.
And while Beach Nichols, like the great showmen, performs his own sleight of hand, the film itself is more interested in the primal, collective unconscious tapped by those Wrinkles wrinkles.
There are a limited number of reasons people become and
remain friends. Some of those reasons are just nonsense. And yet, three friends
of dubious worth to one another gather to repeat their familiar patterns, which
land them on a yacht for an apology daytrip.
Richard (Christopher Gray) — brash, spoiled and quick to anger— is apologizing. Jonah (Munro Chambers – Turbo Kid!) —bruised and bloody—is probably too quick to forgive. Sasha (Emily Tyra) has plenty of reason to be tired of both boyfriend Richard and bestie Jonah.
The fact that Jonah and Sasha bring along Richard’s birthday
gift clarifies how little anyone in this triangle has learned.
And so, Sasha, Jonah, Richard and Richard’s new harpoon set
off on an unplanned, ill-advised, seafaring jaunt.
Drinks all around!
Co-writer/director Rob Grant keeps events snarky with a voice-of-God narration (assuming God’s a sailor) performed by a brilliantly deadpan Brett Gelman. As far as this nameless narrator who inexplicably sees all is concerned, the dangers facing this volatile threesome have less to do with their pathological history and more to do with the sailing omens they ignorantly flout.
Give an irrational drunk prone to fits of rage the gift of a
pointy projectile weapon? Meh. But bring bananas on board—now that’s really
pushing things.
The darkly silly commentary adds some tang to the friends’
foolhardy adventure, but Grant’s themes are not entirely comedic. He strands
the trio at sea for days on end, their survival instincts overtaking their
petty sniping as they find a new reason for friendship: the common good.
Grant offers a nice balance here between dark humor and
genuine tension born of realistic performances. Chambers, Tyra and Gray offer
frustratingly recognizable characters, the kind that make idiotic choices, less
because it forwards the action of the script (although it does) and more because
people are stupid and they fall into familiar roles.
The film makes more than a few convenient moves, but it
packs a lot of surprises and showcases very solid performances.
We needed a drink, so we threw back a few and brainstormed the best bars in horror movies. Some of them were dives we’d love to haunt. Others were just really, seriously scary. All of them set the stage for something important in horror.
Who wants a cocktail?
6. The Slaughtered Lamb (An American Werewolf in London, 1981)
What is going on with these guys?! How hard would it have been to just ignore the yanks and let them hang around? What harm could have come of it? But no! They ask one silly question and the next thing you know…
“Enoof!”
5. The Gold Room (The Shining, 1980)
“Little slow tonight, isn’t it Lloyd?”
Great line, even better delivery, in a scene—and a room—that haunts Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece interpretation of Stephen King’s best novel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJVVGzEbJC0
4. Mahers (Grabbers, 2012)
Sea monsters have come to Ireland. They crave the water but they hate alcohol. The only way to save yourself is to get blind drunk and stay inside the pub.
Most Irish movie ever.
3. The Winchester (Shaun of the Dead, 2004)
It’s familiar, you know where the exits are, and you can smoke. It’s The Winchester, best place to hole up and wait out the zombipocalypse.
How’s that for a slice of fried gold?
2. Titty Twister (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)
A couple of nogoodnik brothers go from frying pan to the pit of vampire hell as they and the family they kidnapped wait out the night at a strip club of death.
1. Green Room (2015)
You may not catch its name, but that’s OK by the clientele. This Boots & Braces establishment likes its music loud, its patrons white and its dogs bloodthirsty.
