A pair of surrealistic modern animations this week on Midnight Screenings.

A Town Called Panic

Gifting galvanic motion to the Art Brut movement – literally “raw art”, or “rough art” – the Belgian film A Town Called Panic is nearly outsider art, or at least, it bears the casual fibers of a work that dismisses rationality with an outsider spirit. The film is gifted a name that lovingly reintroduces old Western tropes (who couldn’t imagine Clint Eastwood sauntering into A Town Called Panic, eyes frazzled and mouth as closed and parsimonious as ever) but also suggests the ethos of the film: panic, pandemonium, bedlam, and beauty all rolled up into one terrifyingly tactile witch’s brew that applies not only logic but physical objects in the most fascinatingly tenuous of ways imaginable. A lose flash-bang grenade of a story about two minimalist plastic-base action figures – “Cowboy” and “Indian” – who react in a flurry of rushed stream-of-consciousness thought when a birthday present for their friend “Horse” goes horribly awry, A Town Called Panic is stop-motion with an emphasis on stop – stopping to renounce the rationalist norms of cinema – and motion – gallantly flying past any such notions, or any breaks at all, on the back of its own demented whimsy. Continue reading →

With Cutthroat Island as the never-off-the-ground bottom leg and Waterworld as the high-flying upright obelisk standing up on 175 million, the right triangle of box office halitosis spewing out from weird genre adventures in 1995 was completed with the dismal performance of Sam Raimi’s Sharon Stone-vehicle The Quick and the Dead. Which, in this metaphor, is the gnarly hypotenuse, the connective leg between Waterworld’s hyper-production-designed, outré weirdness and Cutthroat’s illogical idiocy. Continue reading →

So Rod Serling, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Hitchcock walked into a bar…

And out comes David Fincher, with everything in the world to prove after his gangbusters Seven swerved him from “that guy who ruined Alien” (which he didn’t, but that’s for another time and place) to “among the hottest new talents in Hollywood”. In the aforementioned triangulation, Hitchcock undeniably wins out unsurprisingly: Fincher, a director who exercises a totalizing jurisprudence over his contraptions and machines, making a film about a man who is a version of himself is almost impossible to not carry with it a distant whiff of Hitchcockian baggage. Continue reading →

Trespass

The often forgotten action poet Walter Hill stages kinetic, breathless pulp fiction with this modern-day Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a mixture of action-movie magnetization and post-industrial enervation. It’s a near horror-movie visualization of urban strife punched-up with vigorous conviction, if not depth, by Hill’s customary style – halfway between knuckle-dusting barn-burner and morality play where the near-amorality of the play is bracing without ever shuttle-cocking into sadistic. Continue reading →

Southern Comfort

Betwixt his only-now-a-classic neo-pulp comic book New York odyssey, The Warriors, and the even-then-classic trip out West to bad-tempered San Francisco with the anarchic buddy cop picture 48 Hrs., director Walter Hill’s bracing modernist thriller filmmaking took an intentional excursion down South into the fetid swamps of Louisiana. The resulting film, the mostly unknown Southern Comfort, lets itself be engulfed by the jaundiced spirit of the malarial bayou, resulting in a protoplasmic blast of downtuned terror in which awareness of one’s own impotency in a foreign land clings to you like molasses.

Released in 1981, only the most unawares viewer could possibly miss the Vietnam parable at heart in Comfort, an inverse of The Warriors, Hill’s masterpiece and a film more-or-less about the tentative, tenuous connections within groups just waiting for a chance to dissolve into entropy. In The Warriors, death isn’t catalyzed by some inadvertent journey to hostile, unknown territory but from thrashing about in lands one mistakenly assumed to be one’s own. In Comfort, in contrast, it is pitilessly apparent that America’s mental safeguard isn’t the assumption that America is always at home, but that America is innately better than the outside world. Continue reading →

Two modern William Friedkin films (the man responsible for the de facto midnight classic The Exorcist) from his generally underappreciated 21st century career. 

Bug

Borrowing the narrative efficiency of director William Friedkin’s previous film The Hunted but inverting the no-emotion-allowed melancholy and frightening objectivity, Bug is an affectively charged full-on assault of sticky predator-prey dynamics and visually and aurally hissing subjectivity. By some definition a head-scratcher, Friedkin’s adaptation of Tracey Letts’ esteemed play (here scripted by Letts as well) gallantly avoids the nullifying narrative histrionics of most ‘00s “screw with the audience” cinema. Rather than throttling us with narrative momentum and thereby affording his film no breathing room, Friedkin visualizes the subjective mental combat of the material by ricocheting us around a stylistic, mentally expressive pinball machine. Continue reading →

Fritz Lang’s infatuation with obsession, subterfuge, and the gossamer veil of social order are not precisely fascinating food for critical thought in 2016, but the progression of his fears might be. His customary debut to the big leagues of artistic cinema, 1922’s Dr. Mabuse: Der Spieler, is stupendous cinema, but it is sometimes assumed as the sarcophagus of his career, a film he more or less copied and only advanced a handful of times. Formally, the assumption is obviously incorrect; the advent of sound and Lang’s almost unstoppably innate understanding of how to inlay sound into his medium as a complement and commentator on the visual realm ensures that Lang was never formally stable or complete in the silent era. But what is often undervalued is how Lang began investigating his own image of a petrified world right from the get-go, transforming the horror of a man controlling the world in Mabuse into a vision of a world-as-thieves-den so robbed of humanity that any one human exerting dominance over it seemed almost passé and innocent in comparison.

By M, Lang’s first sound film, Mabuse had become a lie, a ruse, a figment of our imaginations embodied in a pasty, baby-faced child-man who was daringly and emphatically not the most damaging threat to Germany and the audience’s soul. The individual maestro behind the screen of our lives was now not an individual we could blame, but a cop-out, an excuse, a person to push blame onto to obfuscate and pacify our inner nightmares about our own souls. The moral rot was the populace itself, easing its crestfallen nature by looking for a singular entity to criminalize and thereby alleviate the social burden on the public as a whole. On the eve of Nazism, the statement was frighteningly apt and rebellious because it questioned the very Enlightenment values that, when corrupted, undergirdered not only Nazism but capitalism more broadly; if Nazism was a way to shift blame to social minorities, Lang posited, then it was only the nastiest and most direct manifestation of the latent nature of Western governance to interpret social rot as the failure of certain individuals. The solution to the anxiety and entropy running away with the mind was tethering the anxiety to certain “others”, stabilizing fear by linking it to a specific cause we can all unite in the harmony of blame. Continue reading →

If we were being prickly, we could say that David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead has set the director down a 40 year path of trying, and failing, to recapture the cinematic mayhem and malfeasance of his coming out party. That’s not entirely true – Dune, The Elephant Man, and The Straight Story don’t bother as much with explicit disruption, but they are failures of ambition all the more so for that very reason, effective films though some of them may be anyway. But Lynch’s greatest works – Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive– have all been formalist fever dreams that, if expressively advancing the terror of Eraserhead’s self-censuring dreamscape, also rein the Lynchian-id beast in ever so slightly so that they are perhaps less fully capable of exploring the broken-edges of experience. Their relative – and I emphasize relative, for this is Lynch we are speaking of – formal sanity in envisioning a world bent out of shape makes them feel less honestly afflicted with the terror of the world they depict. To some extent, all of these films are commentaries (fantastic commentaries), but only Eraserhead achieves genuine embodiment. While other films strive to “mean” something about discombobulated terror, the formally spasmodic Eraserhead is discombobulated terror. Continue reading →

A bit of a pocket interest this week on Midnight Screenings, with two instances of foreign masters exploring the thick, sickly world of the American Southern Gothic. 

A deep-water jambalaya of reptilian-brain sexuality, harebrained violence, delinquent cinematic disdain for social propriety, racial conflagration, and sensual tension overflowing in spurts of human combat, it is entirely fitting, and entirely Buñuelean, that one of the Spanish directors two meager English-language films manages to explode with traumatic awareness of American cultural disjunction better than arguably any other American film. A three-character barbecue of sun-scorched, humidity-flaring raw flesh left out to burn, the director’s foray into American racial and sexual politics is a political study only insofar as it slithers into the political found in the everyday terror of fighting for your life. This is no lecture, no dissertation on this director’s part; this is fetid, pungent, even foolishly carnal backwoods trauma of a corporeal, violently direct nature. It’s racial politics as out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire nightmare. Continue reading →

A bit of a pocket interest this week on Midnight Screenings, with two instances of foreign masters exploring the thick, sickly world of the American Southern Gothic. 

Admittedly, Jean Renoir – arguably the most astute visual master in all of cinematic history, likely matched only by Ozu – discovering America with a molasses-soaked, moonshine-glazed, grievously wounded Southern Gothic Faulkner riff is maybe the platonic ideal of a movie made for me, but, personal preference aside, Swamp Water is still pretty good. Although it’s hard for the choke-point of The Rules of The Game – the immediate predecessor of Swamp Water, the apex of Renoir’s career, and (no big deal) perhaps the greatest film ever made – not to suppress Swamp Water’s inimitable craft when viewed in relative terms, Swamp Water, on its own terms, is wonderfully tasteless – especially for a 1941 film – nonetheless. Continue reading →