Tipping the addled, agitated, and affronting aesthetics of the Bourne films over the edge into quasi-parody, American Ultra furnishes its very filmic form with the spasmodic, alternately jittery and slackened emotional register of its panic-stricken main character Mike (Jesse Eisenberg). A deactivated hitman for the CIA who brings new meaning to the word sleeper agent, Mike’s daily life upgrades ephemera to a principle of being. Once he is targeted for elimination, the style of the film, noticing flickers of comic minutiae amidst the murder, effectively sells the overlooked mayhem of everyday life. Obviously, the most overt such gesture in the film is its ribbing at the potential weaponization of any domesticated object, finding hidden, albeit brutal, purpose for objects through acts of mental reconsideration. Although favoring the path of most-violent resistance when it comes to reanimating everyday bric-a-brac with alternative imaginative potential, there’s an endearingly ambling sense of cribbing outlines from other (action) films and then scribbling them in haphazardly, spicing them up with unkempt anti-grace in the process. Continue reading
“I guess Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart should be a thing…but with better films as their third wheel”: American Ultra
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Exsanguinating Hammer Horror at their own game, Thirst’s stupendous opening teases arguably the greatest classical Gothic pastiche of the ‘70s. Set in a faded castle, the film immediately injects fresh blood (OK, I’ll stop) into the corpse of the once-young hooligans in Britain. Hammer, of course, was not immortal, unlike its money-maker Dracula (and seemingly their star Christopher Lee, who acted until the ripe old age of 95). By the out-of-control coaster that was the 1970s, the company had ironically aged into the very old fogey, Universal Horror, that Hammer had once upstaged. By the mid-70s, the heads of the company were desperately clawing at the ground around them to keep up pace with young upstarts like the American slashers, the Italian giallos, and a slew of murderous little Aussie numbers from down under. Horror’s claws (see, I didn’t say fangs) had sharpened in the intervening years, and it would require new blood (drum, drum, cymbal) like Thirst to re-ignite the fire. 
I’m hardly infatuated with this series, and as with any anthology, it misses as often as it hits. But that also means Charlie Booker’s witch’s brew of dyspeptic stomach-acid churn and quasi-futuristic chic does hit. More than once or twice, it even marshals something truly bracing, beyond the mere satirical sucker-punches most of its kindred television brethren manage. It’s uncanny glass-eye vision of society rapidly running out of sand in the hour glass often feels so pretentious and conceited as to be glimpsed through a monocle. But the episodes that do hit definitely nail the view-askew camera-obscura pleasures of classic Rod Serling, updated with the fangs of 21st century cynicism. Let us have a look-see. 
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s sweaty cold splash of a film, The Guest, is a remarkable improvement on their previous collaboration, You’re Next, which was more of a conceited, self-hating concept in disguise as a sincere slasher. In comparison, The Guest is one or two fewer “explain the fear away” scenes away from a genuinely great, greasy slow-burn thriller that ignites for a climactic convulsion that is all rascally convulsive energy and Joy-Division-concert gloom. Whereas You’re Next was mostly just ugly and nihilistically neutral in its critical perspective (anti-everything), the pair of filmmakers has also ginned up an honest-to-god sense of tonal specificity this time around. In this case, The Guest is not only awash in reverie for that wonderful anxious-laconic tone of John Carpenter’s films (call it “strenuously relaxed”). But The Guest also secretes a variant of sensual sadness and even downcast sexuality straight out of Near Dark. 
He Never Died
We Are Still Here
Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos asks us to feel with our ears, to hear with our eyes, to taste with our bodies. Charged with a tickling eroticism and hyperbolically fetishistic aura, this lascivious work of high camp and low culture is infused with an alternately infatuated and critical attitude toward the throbbing iconography of American lore. Automobile autoeroticism at its most perverted, Anger plays around with blood(womb)red imagery to suggest the American garage as the birthing canal of masculine Americana’s dreams. More specifically, Anger locates the womb of American industry in the male heart, dressing a boy working on a car in vivid, lurid hues and equating the desire for procreation with symbiotic and parasitic ownership of metal material that bears somewhat striking implications for the notion of offspring as parental property. All of this, of course, is without even glancing at the implications of the title (or the title’s initials, more accurately, peerlessly stitching together homoerotic American masculine machinery as a sort of color-blind populist front or a vanguard for the white power movement, but that thread is hidden deeper in this film than in most of Anger’s more famous works, so we’ll leave it for someone else to find). 
Meshes of the Afternoon
Who could think of a better near-opening for a Pedro Almodovar film than a delirious scene of a Spanish dubbing of that holiest of holy cinephiliac films Johnny Guitar? (Nicholas Ray being, with the possible exception of the more obvious Douglas Sirk, the largest costume in Almodovar’s wide-open carnival-closet of cross-national cinema). Even better, the sequence actually adds to Ray’s film rather than merely name-checking. It extends Ray’s emphatically neurotic melodrama to new cultures and across eons while teasing out its fiendish gender complications and tragicomic compulsions even more overtly than Ray, a rebel trapped in the Hollywood closet, was able to do. Almodovar’s mission statement is already clear: in the arena of melodrama, a purgative for your cynical ways. 
With anthology horror prowling all through the house throughout the ‘80s and into the early ‘90s (a byproduct of the decade’s conservative turn and ensuing ‘50s/early ‘60s fetish), 1990 was the watershed moment for when the monster mash got nasty. The A-list-courting Amazing Stories show from nostalgia-babies Steven Spielberg and friends meant to tingle your spine while it was patting your head to sleep. But when HBO latched its greasy, sleazy claws around the trend, it soured into the venomous, loud-and-proud midnight haunting hour likes of Tales from the Crypt by the decade’s end. (Robert Zemeckis, one of Spielberg’s cronies, was involved in the transition and directed three of the best, although not always the bloodiest, Tales when he decided to let his hair down and unscrew his A-list credentials for something grubbier and more robustly exploitative). 
The Long Take 