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Jacking and Jilling

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Adventures in Success

by Rachel Willis

Fair warning – this film may be the most unpleasant experience you’ll ever have with the female orgasm.

Writer/director Jay Buim, along with co-writers Susan Juvet and Rachel Webster, has crafted one of the most uncomfortable, meandering and sometimes funny mockumentaries with the film Adventures in Success.

Focusing on the group Jilling Off, we follow “energy transformationist” Peggy (Pegasus) Appleyard (Lexi Mountain) as she leads a group of men and women to the Catskills to harness the energy of the female orgasm in “the womb room.”

Joining this group is newbie Erica (Yaz Perea-Beltran). At first, Erica’s seeming skepticism makes her feel like our straight woman among these guys and gals who use terms like “economic ejaculate.” A hilariously uncomfortable scene involving the extreme invasion of Erica’s personal space by another member is one of the film’s highlights.

There are several scenes that are so uncomfortable you can’t help but laugh. Otherwise, you might spend most of the film squirming in your seat.

As Peggy, Mountain embraces the role of sex goddess guru, and the film is better for it. A personal highlight was Peggy’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s I’m On Fire, but it’s mostly a moment that doesn’t fit well into the overarching story. The movie is full of these, as if the writers didn’t know how to fill 90 minutes about a group whose sole purpose is ‘jilling off.’

Another downfall is the fairly large cast of characters – not just the Jilling Off members, but townspeople who pop up from time to time (many more than once), usually to give their two cents on the group who’s descended on their town. It’s hard to keep track of everyone.

The film tries to make you care about the members of the cult, but so much time is spent making fun of them it’s hard to feel sympathy for their struggles. Some films can strike a good balance, but Success never manages to do so.

The film sometimes offers a strangely empowering message about women’s sexuality and female pleasure. It’s too bad the filmmakers’ mocking tone buries it beneath a lot of silliness.

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Mean Boys

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Mother Schmuckers

by Brandon Thomas

My relationship with gross-out humor is hit-or-miss. Like millions of other people around the world, I laughed uproariously as Cameron Diaz used the wrong “hair gel” in There’s Something About Mary. For 20 years, I’ve enjoyed the increasingly dumb antics of the crew from the Jackass films. On the other hand, Tom Green’s weirdo pet project Freddy Got Fingered remains one of the few movies I almost walked out of. Even revered cult classic Pink Flamingos has never been much more than a cinematic endurance test in my eyes.

Unfortunately for me, Belgian import Mother Schmuckers is less Mary and more Freddy with its unfunny bits and horrifically unlikable characters.

Brothers Zebulon and Issachar live a life of debauchery and chaos. When the two lose their mother’s beloved dog, they have 24 hours to find it or risk being thrown out on the street. Along the way, the two run afoul of a grocery store security guard, kill birds with a handgun, and parade a dead body around.

Mother Schmucker’s approach to comedy is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Directors Harpo and Lenny Guit definitely aren’t afraid to try anything and everything, even if it means the vast majority of the gags (pun fully intended) fall flat. Everything from force-feeding feces to animal kink shows up at one point or another. This “anything goes” attitude might work for a prank or other kind of reality show, but as a narrative feature it just comes across as unfocused and lazy.

There’s a chaotic energy to Mother Schmuckers that’s undeniable. The movie’s visual aesthetic feels closer to a mid-90s skateboarding video than it does a traditional comedy. The camera moves around almost as fast as the brothers as they scurry from one catastrophe to the next. While it doesn’t necessarily make the movie any better, it does keep it from becoming a complete bore.

I don’t want to sound too puritanical, but brothers Issachar and Zebulon are two of the worst degenerates to ever grace the big screen. I doubt the Guits intended for audiences to embrace these moronic characters, but the lengths to which they go to make us actively hate them is almost impressive. I don’t for a second believe that movie characters need to be likable to be relatable, but these two live on a completely different plane of obnoxiousness and cruelty.

Mother Schmuckers is a pointlessly mean-spirited endeavor. Gross cinema can be good – heck, it can even be great! What it should never be, though, is cruel.

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Tinker Tailor Stylist Spy

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Huda’s Salon

by Matt Weiner

Western political thrillers have taken a big hit since the Watergate era and the fall of the Soviet Union. Not that there’s anything wrong with our homegrown paranoid style, but then a film like Huda’s Salon blows that all up with a shocking blend of tight suspense and cogent—and immediate—politics.

Emphasis on tight: After a few brief explanatory cards recapping what life in occupied Palestine is like for West Bank residents, director Hany Abu-Assad jumps right into an opening confrontation between two women that starts the clock on a lethal game of cat-and-mouse that brings together resistance fighters, spies, the Israeli secret service—and the women in society who are fighting a war for full independence on multiple fronts.

Salon owner Huda (Manal Awad) blackmails her clientele into sharing information with an Israeli secret service handler. Her latest victim, Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), has the same qualifications as Huda’s other unfortunate choices: her husband “is an asshole.” Reem spends her days taking care of her baby daughter, while her nights seem to be spent tolerating the boorish Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), who treats her more as an object of ridicule than an equal partner.

Where Huda is aloof and fatalistic about her small part in the broader conflict, Reem’s emotional range is played to great effect by Abd Elhadi. From vulnerability and terror to rage and her own fight for dignity, Abd Elhadi’s Reem is a remarkable woman—victimized by both the occupation and the events Huda and the men in her life have forced on her, but unwilling to stop fighting to be free from it all and simply live her own life with her daughter.

It becomes an urgent fight for her life when Huda’s treason is uncovered by a band of resistance fighters, with Huda taken in for interrogation and Reem trying to keep her identity (and compromising photos) secret, lest she be considered a traitor as well. As Huda and her interrogator Hasan (Ali Suliman) come to a begrudging mutual understanding, Hasan’s men fan out to track down Reem based on her cell phone location.

Abu-Assad, who also wrote the film, pulls off a delicate balance between intrigue and message. As a heart-pounding espionage thriller, Huda’s Salon is a contemporary heir to vintage le Carré, with the Berlin Wall giving way to the West Bank barrier. The constant hum of helicopters and jets provide an omnipresent soundtrack of anxiety, along with the tight framing around Reem as her world starts to collapse.

But the personal, as anchored by the two lead actresses, is just as engaging as the political. The film’s point of view isn’t subtle, but it’s not heavy-handed either. As Huda says of events during her own interrogation, it is what it is. If that reflection makes you uncomfortable in the current moment, so be it.

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The Darkest Knight

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The Batman

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

The question is plenty familiar.

“Who are you?”

But the answer isn’t the one we’re expecting, and it’s an early declaration that there’s a new cape in town.

“I am…vengeance.”

Talk about your dark knights. Director/co-writer Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson make Mr. Nolan feel like Mister Rogers in comparison. Anyone looking for the recent superhero giddiness of No Way Home will find none, while comic purists may finally discover the treatment they’ve been clamoring for all along.

For the rest of us, The Batman delivers a defiant, somewhat overstuffed vision, one that embraces darkness of theme and palette while crafting several truly dazzling visual set pieces.

Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In, Dawn of and War for the Planet of the Apes) wisely skips the backstory intro, giving us Bruce Wayne (Pattinson) some two years into his “Gotham Project.” Alfred (Andy Serkis) worries about the family finances, while Master Wayne is only interested in feeding his vigilante alter ego.

But while Bruce is watching the city, the mysterious Riddler (Paul Dano, taking the legendarily comic villain in a terrifying new direction) is watching The Batman, leaving personalized messages with each new assassination.

His puzzles draw Batman, Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and a resourceful waitress with hidden talents of her own (Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle) deep into the Gotham organized crime scene run by Carmine Falcone (John Tutturo ) and Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot (Colin Farrell under some astounding makeup). There is no shortage of characters at play, and Reeves struggles to justify all of them in one film.

At stake are long-held secrets about Gotham that the Riddler wants “brought into the light,” some of which will challenge what you think you know about the birth of the Bat. And that seems only appropriate for a film that challenges expectations of its genre with a narrative more reminiscent of Seven than anything we’ve seen from DC or Marvel.

So dark, and so rainy.

Pattinson’s Emo Batman works well within the structure and aesthetic Reeves develops. He carves out a very different crusader, one more introspective and heartbroken than righteous. This Bruce Wayne views the bat signal as both a call and a warning, and Pattinson is able to effectively keep the tortured soul’s head above self-pitying water.

Dano’s exceptional, Farrell’s fun, and Kravitz develops an intriguing antihero of her own. People talk about Joker’s lineage, but Catwoman is another iconic villain. Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway have all left their mark, but Kravitz sidesteps broad stroke villainy in favor of something nuanced and human.

But ultimately, what makes this film most interesting is the way Bruce Wayne struggles to justify the consequences that The Batman has had on Gotham, and the surprising side of hero worship. Where is the line separating savior and sinner? And who gets to draw it?

Reeves isn’t the first to pull Batman into these relevant questions, but he raises them with a commitment fierce enough to generate excitement for yet another trilogy. And though there’s no surprise waiting after the credits here, keep an eye out for a villain to be named later.

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Driller Killer

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The Burning Sea

by Hope Madden

Man, understatement makes all the difference.

We don’t often see understated disaster films. The idea seems counterintuitive. We need greedy villains, a swelling orchestra, quick movements, passionate embraces…explosions…tidal waves! Falling rocks! Loud noises!!

John Andreas Andersen is having none of it. Even the imdb plot summary is low-key: An oil platform dramatically goes down on the Norwegian coast, and researchers try to find out what happened when they realize this is just the start of something even more serious.

Ooooo…even more serious.

Andersen is really underselling the dire situation facing his characters in The Burning Sea.

Kristine Kujath Thorp is Sofia, a scientist working with a robotics company in collaboration with Norway’s government and oil industry. She and colleague Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen) are called to use their tech to investigate a platform that’s gone down, only to discover an impending disaster worthy of Big Disaster Movie overstatement.

The filmmaker doesn’t avoid every trope with his oil rig catastrophe. The Burning Sea begins intriguingly enough with talking-head style interview, but immediately embraces the typical structure of a Hollywood popcorn muncher.

Still, by scaling everything back a bit Andersen leaves room for his cast to anchor the calamity at sea with honest performances of dimensional characters.

Thorp convinces you that Sofia is made of the stuff that defines heroes, but she does it quietly and without bluster. It’s an interesting approach, one that mirrors Andersen’s and gives the entire film a “based on true events” quality, even though it’s entirely fictional.

Thank God.

Andersen cut his teeth in the industry as a cinematographer, boasting some remarkable work. Morten Tyldum’s 2011 thriller Headhunters, in particular, is gorgeous and incredibly tense. It’s no surprise, then, that The Burning Sea looks great. The film basks in the rugged beauty of the Norwegian seaside before being stricken with the claustrophobic doom of creaking hulls and labyrinthine shipboard ducts.

In many respects, The Burning Sea is just another by-the-numbers disaster flick. But in dialing down the bombast, Anderson’s film creates a level of authenticity that’s much scarier.  

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Totalitarian Noir

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Servants

by Christie Robb

Set in 1980s totalitarian Czechoslovakia, director Ivan Ostrochovský’s Servants follows teenage Catholic seminarians at Bratislava Theological Faculty. Here even religious texts are prohibited, banned as a threat to state security.

A real-world association of priests outwardly loyal to the Communist leadership, Pacem in Terris, controls the school and works in tandem with the government to uphold the Communist party line. This forces freethinkers who want full access to religious texts to go underground, exchanging books and meeting in secret.

The film starts with a noir-style drive along a secluded road. Eventually, the car parks under a bridge,  two men emerge, and a body is dumped from the trunk.

One of the men is a priest, the other a State Security operative. Although they claim the dead man was a victim of a hit and run, it’s clear he’s been brutally tortured to death. The rest of the story is told mostly in flashback and relates the events of the previous 143 days.

Servants is a spare film. Shot in black and white, the camera often lingers—the white curl of smoke against a black background, the security operative’s bleak little apartment, overhead God’s Eye shots of the seminary boys playing in the courtyard, or agonizing behind the prison bar-like frames of their bunk beds about whether they should collaborate with the government and become informants or put themselves at risk of becoming targets.

A lot of the lingering shows the routine minutiae of life—eating, bathing, practicing a musical instrument, for example. This is in contrast to the oppressive feel of constant surveillance and possible eruptions of violence.

Combined with a very understated score, this illustrates how normalized the culture of censorship and menace became. But it also makes Servants a little hypnotic. It can be easy to let the mind wander to other things. Other banned reading materials. Other stirrings of authoritarianism.

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Tongue Tied & Twisted

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Cyrano

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Joe Wright hits and misses, but always with panache, which is why I look forward to each of his films. His take on Cyrano was especially appealing because Peter Dinklage plays the titular poet, and he never misses.

If your only experience with this material is Steve Martin’s 1987 rom-com Roxanne, prepare yourself. Wright’s reimagining is a musical version of Edmond Rostand’s 19th Century play, with an adaptation courtesy of Dinklage’s wife, Erica Schmidt. And it’s definitely not funny.

Originally, Cyrano de Bergerac was a man with a massive nose. Too ugly for his beloved Roxanne, he agrees to feed brilliant lines to the dim-witted Christian so that he may instead woo the lovely lady.

Molding the tale to fit Dinklage is the film’s greatest accomplishment. The brash, angry romantic has never been so heartbreaking or sympathetic, with every flash of pain, indignation and outrage playing across Dinklage’s face. Plus, he can sing!

Wright’s staging sometimes beguiles, sometimes bores. One musical number boasts intoxicating theatricality, the next resembles a seasonal fragrance ad. Still, the set design is astonishing throughout, and there is no denying this cast.

Haley Bennett’s sumptuous Roxanne cannot help but seduce you, while Ben Mendelsohn’s unseemly De Guiche drips with villainy. Kelvin Harrison Jr. brings sincere tenderness to the role of Christian, and the infamous scene where Cyrano speaks for Christian, winning him the first exquisite kiss, takes on a beautiful tenderness thanks to Harrison Jr.’s chemistry with Dinklage.

Schmidt’s script streamlines wisely enough, but something feels unbalanced in the material. The result is unwieldy and messy, though Wright captures a number of remarkable sequences. Every moment between Cyrano and Roxanne is exquisite, and the balance of the cast wrings emotion from each interaction.

Aside from one, the songs by Aaron and Bryce Dressner of The National are forgettable, and the one that does hit feels contextually tangential—as if they had a great song that had little to do with the story, but they wedged it in, anyway.  

This new Cyrano is another hit and miss for Wright, but Peter Dinklage retains his crown as the most endlessly fascinating and watchable actor on the screen. He’s reason enough not to miss this movie. 

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Fruitopia

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Strawberry Mansion

by Hope Madden

Smart, whimsical and decidedly analog, Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Strawberry Mansion turns dystopian dreamscape into retro children’s television.

Audley and Birney co-write, co-direct and co-star in this pop-surrealist romance. Audley plays James Preble, mild-mannered government employee. Preble is an auditor for the agency that taxes dreams.

Let’s say there’s a buffalo in your dream. A dream buffalo apparently runs about 5k, which costs around a nickel in taxes. Likewise, a hot air balloon, a flower, a nice view—all of it taxable. But somehow Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller) managed never to turn in any dream taxes, compelling Prebel to pay her a visit in her titular abode.

Once there, Prebel must work his way through thousands of VHS tapes of Bella’s dreams (rather than the digital downloads that were made legal requirements years ago) to assess back taxes.

Strawberry Mansion tells a story of government overreach, corporate greed and capitalist dystopia. But it spins this yarn of a near-future surveillance state within a weird and charming, vivid dreamscape. It’s Philip K. Dick meets H.R. Pufnstuf. Nostalgia becomes the filmmakers’ escape.

The dream sequences are unpretentious, jubilant nonsense that develop a parallel plotline. Tyler Davis’s cinematography of saturated colors celebrates the childlike tactile quality of the set design and creature design, which are both handcrafted magnificence. Dan Deacon’s evocative score meshes with the directors’ vision to blur the lines between dream and reality, life with death.

There’s a toad waiter, rat sailors, and more buckets of Cap’n Kelly’s Fried Chicken than a person could reasonably consume. Strawberry Mansion’s cynicism butts up against a wholesome romantic nature in one of many ways that the filmmakers’ form perfectly matches their purpose.

Prebel treads in others’ dreams, a voyeur in a nonsense world where nothing makes logical sense, but everything feels weirdly accurate. The same experience waits for the film’s audience.

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Dogs of War

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Dog

by Hope Madden

Dog—the new Channing Tatum film about a former Army Ranger driving cross country with another former Army Ranger, this one an angry Belgian Malinois named Lulu—is not what you expect.

I wish that was a good thing.

Because what you expect is likely not that good to start with: hunky but irresponsible man learning love and responsibility from an anxious but lovable hound. And you do get that. The emotional trajectory of Dog is no more in question than whether the two bedraggled messes will make it on time to their final destination, the funeral of a fallen comrade.

But if you are expecting to laugh, even once, you are in for a surprise.

The film, co-directed by Tatum (his first effort behind the camera), makes a number of weak attempts at comedy. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all of them. Not a single one lands, and each supposed joke is so lazy, so telegraphed and tired.

Dog is a road trip film, which is often an excuse to string together random comedy sketches. Sometimes this works (Vacation, The Mitchells vs. the Machines). Usually, it doesn’t. Certainly, Dog doesn’t take advantage of the opportunities for hilarity inherent in the cross-country trip.

But don’t dismiss Dog as simply a decidedly unfunny comedy. Tatum and co-director Reid Carolin, who co-wrote the script with Brett Rodriguez, use the gags as a sweetener on top of a very dark story about PTSD and living with the emotional and physical damage of war.

What lies just beneath the weakly attempted comedy is an incredibly dark film. Not a dark comedy—not by any stretch. Tatum and gang are not going for laughs at the expense of these two scarred veterans and their collective trauma.

Lulu is every embattled, broken veteran and we don’t want anything bad to happen to Lulu. Why, then, are we so careless with our broken and embattled veterans who are not also beautiful Belgian Malinois?

It’s a worthy message trapped in a sincere, tonally chaotic, humorless, lazily constructed mess of a movie. Dog has merit I did not expect going into it. I wish it was a better movie.

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Going Hungry

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A Banquet

by Hope Madden

From its unsettling opening moments, Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet sets a tone that never eases. Holly’s (Sienna Guillory) life is certainly never the same.

The event that kicks off the film puts a generational horror in motion that flirts with the supernatural, bringing allegorical focus to the rippling effects of trauma in a family. As a caregiver, Holly likely blames herself for what happened, which makes it harder for her to focus properly on mothering her two teenage daughters, Isabelle (Ruby Stokes) and Betsey (Jessica Alexander).

At first blush, it seems Betsey has the worst of things. Having witnessed the trauma, she’s been particularly needy of her mother’s affection. Or is she hoping to prove to her mother that, indeed, Mom’s love is the cure she’d hoped it might be? Is Betsey trying to prove that to herself?

Or is there some larger force at play, as Betsey claims when she stops eating?

Justin Bull’s screenplay braids ideas associated with this theme of trauma, from anorexia to neglect to guilt and grief and isolation. Details unfold slowly, uncovering lived-in resentments and traumas that heighten tensions.

Paxon sets these ideas loose among an exquisite cast. A brittle Guillory carries the unforgiving emotional complexity scene to scene with appropriate weariness. Alexander brings an enigmatic quality to the role, while Stokes mixes heartbreak with anger to surprising effect.

The great Lindsay Duncan, whose grandmother character haunts the first act and delivers a bracing presence throughout the second, is magnificent.

Paxon’s camera ogles food, which is a trigger in the film, both a tool for caregiving and for Betsey’s rebellion. There’s so much to like about A Banquet — which is why it’s such a frustrating film to watch.

Paxon can’t decide where to take things. She’s filled the screen with exceptional performances, each character exploring fascinating, dark emotional corners. The filmmaker flirts early with body horror, diverts quickly to something more psychological, dips deeply into family drama and never lands on a tone.

This same lack of clarity or commitment begins with Bull’s script, which builds slowly to an energetic if fizzling climax. For all it has going for it, A Banquet answers none of the questions it asks and leaves you wanting.