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
Singularly united with everything from avant-garde art cinema to particularly slap-happy children’s television in its haphazard deconstruction of normality, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is awful, but it is much more than mere irony. A textbook case in the value of logically inept cinema, The Room hedonistically exists in a state of blithe, blessed-out surrealistic irrationality, boldly and provocatively plunging forth without inhibition into a realm of new human possibility. Whether intentionally or by accident – and indeed, the intent of The Room has been the stuff of bad movie legend for many a year – this sort of implacably incompetent cinema is valuable not merely for cheap thrills but because, by buckling at basic competence and refusing to kneel before the platitude of human logic, it refuses to exist in a known or previously understood state. Rather than functioning obsequiously to modern society’s basic preconceptions of human action, rationality, and interpersonal relationship, Wiseau’s improbably disfigured creature joins many a great and many an awful film in daring to envision a ground-up reimagining of how humanity actually functions as a collective unit. 
Love & Friendship
Whatever your opinion of resident cinematic mad scientist Alejandro Jodorowsky, he’s not a docile creature. The Chilean director, whose El Topo ultimately helped found the inaugural class of Midnight Cinema, stages guerilla warfare against that often benighted subgenre of film with his second feature The Holy Mountain; as a work, it defies even the somewhat genre-bound surrealism of his debut and the relative sanity of most so-called midnight films which are, if more libidinous than most mainstream films, no more artistically provocative. An eyeful of imagery and a mouthful of anarchic social commentary, The Holy Mountain is a deranged field day. Replete with symbolism that Jodorowsky both embraces and mocks, this fragmented, fractal film feels like Jodorowsky’s attempt to replace all of film form with a medium more to his liking. 
With the pleasurably amusing The Nice Guys, writer-director Shane Black isn’t exactly treading on unstable ice; this ‘70s-riffing buddy comedy with a capital-B is the platonic ideal of a Shane Black movie released in 2016. Returning to his roots after his one-and-done tentpole picture Iron Man 3, itself an obvious get-out-of-jail attempt to rekindle Hollywood’s favor, The Nice Guys is a snarky, spiffy, not-too-smug time waster in Black’s best blowing-off-steam mode. It lacks the thorny neuroticism and paranoia of Black’s best screenplay, Lethal Weapon, or the zippy post-modernism of neo-neo-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his debut as a director. But the restless brio and cheery malfeasance of The Nice Guys is sufficiently delectable in a more straightforward, and refreshingly non-ironic, way nonetheless. 
Krull
I meant to get to these a few months ago, but they’ve lingered around. With Batman vs. Superman continuing Warner’s desperate investment in doing the Marvel/Disney thing, here’s a look at some franchise-fighters to have come before. A note: We’re keeping this literal this time, much as I wanted to get cheeky and include something like Kramer vs. Kramer. 
Meant to get to this a couple months ago, but better late than never. With that Daredevil “Punisher arc” raving up a storm, I thought a review of a real dust-kicker was in order. 
The late ‘40s were a high noon for the horror genre, easily the most desecrated ghost town era for a genre that has reinvented itself time and time again. From the irrepressible expressionist deviants of the ‘20s to the chiaroscuro nightmares of the early Universal films in the ‘30s to the sly, insidious Val Lewton carnival of the early ‘40s, horror was on a hot streak for decades until it hit the ice wall of WWII. Not that the real world horrors of the war inherently superseded the desire to thaw out the terror of the cinematic variety, but the will to nightmare was to be discovered somewhere else until the dawn of the atomic age ‘50s films, before horror would draw its fangs and get downright pernicious with the turn of the ‘60s and the prestige variant of the genre in the New Hollywood of the ‘70s. In the century of cinema thus far, only the late ‘90s can go blow for blow with the late ‘40s for sheer abandonment as horror packed up and went out to the country to cool its heels. 
