That Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning exists indicates something is wrong with the world. That it is, against its better judgment, a near masterpiece, at least in terms of filmmaking principles and matching those principles to its narrative concerns, implies something is far worse with the world than anyone could have imagined. But yes, the fourth or eighth or ninety-sixth film in the bro-fest science fiction routine slaughterhouse that is the Universal Soldier series, tangled up in its Roland Emmerich-directed roots and choking on them for decades now, is good. In fact, in its own way, it’s fairly great. And how shocking that this way approximates ’70s art-house horror/crime/thriller/ sci-fi that only passingly gestures toward any idea of “action” and even then does wonders to detach “action” from anything resembling Roland Emmerich. What a strange, strange film. Plus, if it means anything to you, it is probably, by several orders of magnitude, superior to anything Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme have starred in (although the post-structuralist JCVD, a sly little nightstalker of a film, comes pretty close for the latter star). Pleasures abound in this weird, weird world of ours, folks. Continue reading
Midnight Screenings: Weirdly Good “Who Asked For These” Sequels Edition: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and Curse of Chucky: How Many Colons Can We Fit Into Our Article Title?
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So much has been written about American Sniper over the past few months, about its unkempt, pro-war patriotism and its torn apart anti-war expose of human trauma, that it is somewhat shocking how little has been said about the one thing that really reveals its essence: Clint Eastwood. Whichever stance Sniper takes, it is unquestionably the work of its director, the old individualist who loves to raise the American male up on a pedestal of his own making and tear him down again, and the only filmmaker working today who understands the old-school spirit of mid-century genre pics by the likes of Sam Fuller, Sam Peckinpah, and John Sturges. American Sniper is at its best, and its worst, when it is most similar to its subject Chris Kyle, knowing his clean, blunt efficiency to a fault, and sharing not a little of his single-minded apprehension for anything out of its sights. 
Stop Making Sense is, and this is not nearly as common and ubiquitous a statement as you might imagine, a truly singular film experience. Sure, there are great concert films; Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is very likely a superior concert film with more to say about the nature of music as it exists in the ether. But Stop Making Sense isn’t a concert film, at least in the traditional sense. It is a film about cinema, and about what cinema can do to transform the ethos of a concert beyond what a concert is in person. If this extends it beyond the realm of a concert, it also does more to make us think about what a concert entails as a realm for voyeurism and socio-spatial art. Stop Making Sense does not merely hit the mark for a concert film; it transforms it. 
“Gimmick” is a word that critics and viewers throw out with wanton abandon for films like Unfriended, and this film invites the usage. It is a lazy, amorphous critique thrown out whenever a film tries something new. It was a gimmick when Stanley Kubrick brought in cinematographer John Alcott to film Barry Lyndon as if it was an 18th century painting so that he could dissect the falsity and artifice in the lifestyles of the film’s characters, explore the ways in which film is always fictional, discover the limits of cinematic attempts at “realism”, and champion cinema all the same for the ways it can use fiction to explore the cosmic regions that lie in the murky waters beyond realism. What matters is not that it was a gimmick, but whether it was an effective gimmick, and, in that particular case, it was a masterful one, perfectly suited to its film and alive as passionate cinema.
I don’t know, man. Death Proof isn’t really a movie. It’s an idea, and as an idea, it can’t be separated from the way it was released. Its release was very much the whole point of its existence, even separate from the actual film that was produced to facilitate that release. On its own, there isn’t a whole lot going on in Death Proof, although small pleasures, including an awe-inspiring final reel, abound. So…
Rare is a film of such purity as Kill Bill, and rarer still is a film of such purity that is never less than fully confused and unsure of itself. From beginning to end, Kill Bill is entirely the artwork of an unabashed enthusiast and filmmaker, but it is a deeply perplexed film, perhaps intentionally so, and perhaps to its unmitigated benefit. Purring like a kitten on the surface but deceptively self-critical underneath, Tarantino’s most violent film also has more to say about violence than any of his films. It is a work that is simultaneously enraptured in love with itself and tearing itself apart in disharmonious hate, and thus certainly his most fascinating, conflicted piece yet. This doesn’t make it necessarily better or worse, but it may make it his most worthwhile film, especially because it never once allows us the confidence of our views in it. We can’t even really be sure if Tarantino “gets” it, and auteur theory isn’t going to help us one lick, unless of course it’s there in the background reminding us that Tarantino just can’t make an uninteresting film– even when doesn’t have a clue himself. Kill Bill can’t make an argument that Tarantino understands his own particular brand of proudly filmic anti-film commentary on the nature of cinema and violence. It may be him missing the forest of his own genius for the crimson-red trees of flailing arms and heads. But what a forest. And what trees.
Quentin Tarantino “does” blaxploitation conjures a certain post-modernist genre-kitsch image in the mind. Clearly, it conjures the same image for Tarantino too, as his latest film, Django Unchained, exists wholly in a postmodern blaxploitation-by-way-of-Western stew. Yet Jackie Brown, despite its would-be blaxploitation credentials, couldn’t be further from the playful violence and comic grit we might expect from both the genre and Tarantino. Maybe it’s just the not inconsiderable fact that this is the director’s only film to date that bears another source, in this case Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. The fact is, Tarantino very much proves primarily invested in honoring his source material without transforming it in any notable way. It is Tarantino’s most humble film, and anyone who knows him would never dream of that descriptor anywhere near him. Either way, it just doesn’t feel like any other Quentin Tarantino movie, and for a guy who is easily stereotyped and put in a corner, it’s a pleasure to see him exploring, especially in 1997, perhaps the height of his critical darling days when he could seemingly do no wrong. 
Because I reviewed Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End and couldn’t stand the gap in the middle…
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright simply “get” genre comedy. They may be the only ones to really nail it since Sam Raimi, and for the same reason. What Raimi understood is that making a comedy out of a noted “serious” genre was about more than making fun of it. It was about teasing out the fundamental intersections between emotions and exploring how filmmaking – that is the literal process of shot to shot structuring of a film – could divulge different and seemingly contradictory emotions simultaneously. His preferred contradiction, of course, was between lingering dread and gut-busting Warner Bros comic anarchy. His masterpiece Evil Dead II was not simply about scaring us and then making us laugh, but about dissecting the language of film to explore the intersection of technique and emotion in prismatic, multitudinous ways. Put simply, it was about exploring the way that something, be it a shot or a performance tick or a line or the film itself, could be both funny and scary, rather than, say, take a funny scene and follow it with a scary one. 
What a great time to be a horror fan the past year has been. After a several decade lull in the medium that felt like an eternity, a collection of scrappy filmmakers with minds and styles to match have turned to the horror genre with remarkable consistency over the past few months, constructing deliberate haunts and melancholy ghouls that deserve the lingering spirit of the classics of the genre. Even better, they do so without openly copying the specifics of horrors that have been before; rather, they divulge their understanding of the past but skyrocket the genre into the future with tools and tricks only fringe, obscure talents could dream up. Under the Skin, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Alone at Night, and now It Follows, have all shocked the world in the past year or so, and they’ve done it without mimicking each other either. Whether it’s the prismatic abstraction of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, the classical formalism of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, the omnivorous sensual high-style of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Alone at Night, or , now, David Robert Mithcell’s high-flying, postmodern sepulcher to the slasher genre, all are great films. And they are four giants with their own individual voices.
The Long Take 