DUNKIRK (2017)

Steven Spielberg, over the last 30 years, has adopted a practice that’s become known as “one for them, one for me,” which is how he chooses his projects. He makes one film “for them” — the audience who wants the big and fun tentpole — “and me” — the more personal and intimate story that he feels compelled to tell. Think Munich (“for me”) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Crystal Skull (“for them” — and thanks for nothing, by the way). Christopher Nolan, through his extremely successful (and profitable) tenure with Warner Bros., has been embarking on the same journey — and billions of Batman revenue has made the studio pretty amenable to keeping Nolan codified. But even then, his more personal films have still been bigger than life. His “one for me” films consist of The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar, all of which have still managed to find a wide audience while satisfying his itch to tell those less broad kinds of stories. Like Spielberg, these kinds of non-mainstream tentpoles also found success at the box office.

So it’s kind of appropriate that Nolan’s latest finds him in World War II territory, which Spielberg previously explored with Saving Private Ryan (perhaps his best “one for me” film).

Dunkirk shows Nolan at his most experimental since Memento — not because of the story he’s telling, but in the way he chooses to tell it. This wartime experience is told by three separate groups of people, who for the most part never share screen time with each other (including fighter pilot Farrier, played by Tom Hardy, who conceals his face for most of his screen time with his jet’s face gear). It’s not quite real time, but it feels damn close, and there’s an intent on both Nolan’s part, as well as composer Hans Zimmer, to never let the tension cut. Whether it’s two soldiers trying to “buy” their way onto a rescue ship by carrying a wounded soldier on a stretcher, or a father and son civilian team steering their boat to the Dunkirk coast to transport soldiers home, or a trio of fighter pilots trying to quell the enemy in the air, Nolan never lets the looming threat settle, and Zimmer’s music slowly, slowly, slowly builds, rarely taking a break.

There was some minor guff online about Nolan’s audacity in making a PG-13 war film, because war in real life is brutal, and hence… But once you see that Nolan isn’t interested in shooting something as grisly as Saving Private Ryan’s Normandy Beach invasion, all of that falls by the wayside. There’s very little blood in Dunkirk and almost no violence, but it never feels “missing” so much as it becomes known early on that it’s simply not necessary.

Where Dunkirk falters is in its characterization, with its various characters being defined as: scared, patriotic, and brave. In the case of the former, this unfairly taints the audience’s view of the few soldiers on screen who have every right to have been psychologically ravaged by war, but who don’t have the audience’s sympathies, anyway. The film opens with young soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) first running from enemy fire as his fellow soldiers are shot down, and then trying to take a shit on a beach, and then attempting to sneak on board a rescue ship, later defying orders from a superior officer to scram and hiding below the docks. This is our first impression of Tommy, who says more than once throughout that he “just wants to go home,” and he’s not someone the audience can become fully invested in. Between the treatment of this character, and things like Tom Hardy’s one-note performance, during which he makes the Tom Hardy face the whole time (and who I swear tries to sound a little like Bane in some scenes just to fuck with people), Dunkirk is better left to revel in its IMAX-shot war scenes than with the characters participating in them.

Dunkirk is a solid wartime film, and Nolan’s overall best since Inception, but its somewhat cold depiction of its characters muddy the waters of what the audience has come to expect by now of their on-screen war heroes. In this regard, it’s no Saving Private Ryan.

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (2008)

It can be difficult to create an all-encompassing documentary that looks at the history of cinema unless it’s on one very specific topic. How can you possibly cover everything that’s worthy of being covered? How can you convey what you want to convey when knowing you can’t possibly include everything that should be included?

Mark Hartley’s 90-minute documentary on Australian cinema, Not Quite Hollywood, finds a way. Split into three main sections — exploitation, horror, and action — Harley explores Australia’s movie making beginnings and the country’s efforts to at least get their movies into American theaters. Not Quite Hollywood excels not just as a respectable examination of Australian films and filmmakers, but also serves as a witness to the creation of the Australian aesthetic — a look and feel that would soon become known as “Ozploitation,” and which would aid filmmakers in transitioning from making films inspired by other people to establishing their own identity.

In the beginning, when filmmakers were focused on trashy sex pics, nearly soft-core porn, the influences of Roger Corman are almost tangible. Same goes for the horror phase, with obvious odes to Hitchcock, Spielberg, and H.G. Lewis. But once the doc transitions again to the action and adventure phase, much of which is vehicular in relation, you see filmmakers begin to step up and create their own works that would, in turn, inspire American filmmakers. George Miller, perhaps one of the few Australian directors to command the Hollywood box office (along with James Wan), most recently with Mad Max: Fury Road, is a notable exception of a director who, like John Carpenter or George Romero, started small with low budget productions and eventually changed the landscape of movie making.

Not Quite Hollywood is also often very funny, getting a lot of mileage from frequently cutting back to Australian film critic and full-time curmudgeon Bob Ellis for him to dryly voice his disapproval over certain titles, certain directors, or certain entire cinematic movements. Hartley also occasionally lets his camera linger on certain certain subjects whom other interviewees have suggested as having, er…interesting or combative personalities, in an effort to offer an inkling that maybe there was something to those claims. Inversely, stories about the utter insanity that Dennis Hopper engaged in during the shooting of Mad Dog Morgan, when compared to the interview portions with Hopper (who good-spiritedly appears) that present him as very calm, reflective, and absolutely honest about his past behavior, are equally amusing.

It’s no surprise that Quentin Tarantino turns up as a talking head, and probably gets more screen time than some of the actual Australian filmmakers whose films are being discussed, but the overly excited director helps to represent that next generation of international directors who were clearly inspired by Australian cinema. James Wan and Leigh Whannell also appear, with Whannell freely admitting that the scene in Mad Max where Mel Gibson offers a bad guy shackled to a flaming car a handsaw directly inspired one of the main concepts of their then-hit horror film Saw. (Not Quite Hollywood was produced in 2008.)

Even if you don’t have a particular interest in Australian cinema, you’d be wise to embrace Not Quite Hollywood anyway. Though the accents may be different and the environments more desert-ridden than cityscaped, the spirit of low budget filmmaking — and all the trials and tribulations that come with it — are universal.

GEORGE A. ROMERO'S SEASON OF THE WITCH (1972)

 

In terms of social consciousness, Romero always thought big. In his horror films, he was skewering culture, government, militaries, communication, and societal responsibilities. He was always thinking and depicting things on a grand scale. With Season of the Witch (also released as Hungry Wives), a much more intimate film than even Night of theLiving Dead, he’s turning an eye to the life of domesticity among the woman half of a relationship, and is doing so through the eyes of exactly one bored housewife: Joan.

Romero regretted his inadvertent portrayal of women in Night of the Living Dead as weak-willed shrews either babbling incoherently on a couch, being bossed around by her domineering husband, or running brainlessly out into the thick of danger only to explode. Season of the Witch, an entirely female-centric satire on housewife culture, is obviously a direct response to that, but it also threatens to go a bit too far in that direction. Joan’s husband is a dismissive, angry, and demeaning man far more interested in his job then in being a loving partner to her or a patient father to their daughter. When Joan later meets another potential suitor, Gregg, a sort of free-spirited pot-smoking rebel, he does challenge her philosophically and provide to her the quasi sexual awakening she didn’t know she’d been seeking, but he still treats her dismissively and with a detectable air of pity. The men are broad representations of stifling male archetypes, which, sure, enables Joan’s transformation from victim to victor, but it’s handled in just a bit too heavy handed of a notion.

Season of the Witch is more engaging as a character study than as a horror film (it’s probably the least horrific of all Romero’s films while still being cataloged as a horror film), but it also plods along at its own pace, occasionally lapsing into sequences where the film can feel like it’s stopped altogether.

Season of the Witch has been described as a companion piece to Romero’s] vampire-esque drama horror film Martin, a film in which a young and confused man so identifies as a vampire that he begins attacking people and drinking their blood with the help of a razor blade. Both films are about lonely souls looking to reinvent themselves as something more powerful in order to escape the mundaneness of their unfulfilling lives, and while Martin has gone on to maintain a fairly loyal cult following, Season of the Witch has fallen into obscurity, likely thanks to its less horrific atmosphere and somewhat discomforting environment.

PILGRIMAGE (2017)

 

Your really clever movie fan will look at the synopsis for Pilgrimage and think, “Spider-Man and the Punisher in the same movie!” and assume they’re in for a light, high-action, bad-ass experience.

Ha!

Instead, Pilgrimage is basically a religious-thriller, hyperviolent version of the Indiana Jones series, filled with graphic combat scenes and hard-hitting human conflict. And it’s quite good — far better than you might expect considering chances are low you’ve even heard of it until now.

What’s interesting about Pilgrimage is that it’s very similar in tone to Christopher Smith’s horror/thriller Black Death, which starred a pre-Game of Thrones Sean Bean and Carice van Houten, but isn’t a horror film at all. That’s not to say that horrific things and images aren’t a large part of Pilgrimage, because they are. But if you’re familiar with The Black Death, that’s the kind of unflinching, bleak, and discomforting experience you can expect.

Though he received more attention and praise for his role in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, as Diarmuid, Tom Holland is excellent here, looking incredibly comfortable speaking Gaelic and keeping his performance restrained and fearful for a large part of the running time. Joining him is Jon Bernthal, whose unnamed laborer remains mute for the entirety, but manages to convey a spectacularly powerful performance despite that. The bond that forms between him and Diarmuid is a large part of what makes Pilgrimage successful, although it’s not entirely a success.

Pilgrimage’s biggest shortcoming is its pace, which is understandably deliberate at first until the action component starts to pick up as the men find themselves being systematically attacked and their relic targeted. Once this happens, one would expect the pace to quicken, or at least remain quickened, until the finale, but this was not the case, and is what lessens the impact of the finale when it finally does arrive.

Honestly, that’s Pilgrimage’s only issue; otherwise, its story is unique, the performances powerful, and the religious/mystical undertones are thankfully kept ambiguous, never coming down on one side regarding the relic’s supposed powers. It’s brutal at times, both graphically and philosophically, and it just may leave you emotionally drained by its end, but it’s a journey well worth taking. For audiences who enjoy going back in time to faraway lands, Pilgrimage is one of the stronger titles out there to consider — so long as you have a strong stomach.

SUMMER OF FEAR aka STRANGER IN OUR HOUSE (1978)

Wes Craven based his entire career around teens in peril. This is a sub-genre that John Carpenter’s Halloween would essentially create, which would later pave the way for Craven’s seminal classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. But whereas Carpenter would eventually go on to focus on adults in horror (whoa!), Craven would continue exploring the angst of teenage fears, anxiety, adequacy, and sexuality and parlay that into a dependable career.

One of his earliest efforts was 1978’s Summer of Fear, based on the Lois Duncan novel of the same name. (If you’re unfamiliar with the author, think of her as the female prerequisite to R.L. Stine. If you’re unfamiliar with R.L. Stine, stop making me feel old.) Summer of Fear was a made-for-television movie back when that was just becoming a thing, as Steven Spielberg had just hit it big in this same format with his TV trucker creeper Duel, and was Craven’s immediate next project after The Hills Have Eyes. And this time, it’s The Exorcist’s own Linda Blair, who had just come off the disastrous Exorcist 2: The Heretic, playing the teen whose summer is fearful as she contends with her possibly witchy cousin. 

Summer of Fear is a very okay way to spend 90 minutes, though it’s hindered by a number of things, mostly that Blair’s distressed protagonist, Rachel, is sort of…unlikable. Even when the film hits its stride and definitely establishes Julia to be up to some sort of dastard, Rachel still manages to come off as whiny and self-serving. “My horse!” “My dress!” “My boyfriend!” My hives!” After a while, it’s all just too much. Not helping is that Blair’s hair is hilariously gigantic throughout, as if she’d undergone three consecutive perms prior to that day’s filming. Granted, her appearance wouldn’t matter in a less superficial world, but…come on. Just look at it. She looks like her head was used to test electric current. (Her character also keeps a framed photo of herself in a bikini in her bedroom — I guess so she can…look at herself in a bikini? It’s really weird.)

Most of Summer of Fear is very point-and-shoot, which, to be fair, was kind of Craven’s style in the early part of his career. Up to that point, he’d employed the use of the unrelenting long take, whether it was the rape of Marie in Last House on the Left or the strategically placed corpse of Mrs. Carter as bait in The Hills Have Eyes. He was more interested in what the camera could capture rather than how it might be used. Summer of Fear doesn’t really have the opportunity to deploy these kinds of tricks because much of the film is spent on Rachel piecing together the mystery, leaving Julia’s possibly witchy identity draped in ambiguity.

At some points you have to wonder if Craven is secretly making fun of the material, specifically during the “Rachel is pretty sad montage” which sees her flipping through a magazine called “The Horse Catalog” immediately following the death of her horse and her crying a lot about it, or Julia making out wildly with Rachel’s ex-boyfriend in the driveway as the camera pans over to show that Rachel is watching them sadly from her bedroom window. By film’s end, when Rachel and Julia are locked into a furious battle, throwing each other into bookshelves and grabbing each other by their gigantic hair, they look like two hooded Eskimos wearing bear-skin parkas engaged in warfare and it’s just the best.   

Still, as far as early TV efforts go, Summer of Fear is pretty entertaining. Never boring, and reasonably well made with an engaging enough plot, there have definitely been worse made-for-television movies, take it from me. For Craven completists, it’ll be interesting to see something more restrained from the filmmaker who usually went for the throat in his theatrical works. (Also starring Fran Drescher as basically Fran Drescher.)

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (2020)

When Lovecraft Country was first announced by HBO, and the concept was loosely described as the stories and style of H.P. Lovecraft reimagined in the Jim Crow era to highlight the African-American experience, I was fully onboard. That Jordan Peele, director of Get Out and Us, was going to be an executive producer and spiritual consultant for the project was icing. Southern gothic storytelling has always been my jam, especially when it pertains to the horror genre, even if it’s so sadly underutilized. And with Lovecraft enjoying a mini resurgence thanks to Richard Stanley’s recent Color Out Of Space, his coming adaption The Dunwich Horror, and pop culture’s simmering infatuation with everything Cthulhu, it was the right time for someone big like HBO to get behind something prestigious like Lovecraft Country. Having read the source novel by Matt Ruff and now watched the series developed by Misha Green and produced by Peele and J.J. Abrams, I found myself both in awe of how beautifully made it was and baffled by the presentation of its story, both in structure and in tone.

Like the novel, the ten-episode series blurs the lines between a standard narrative and a very loose anthology. Each primary character, like Atticus (Jonathan Majors), Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and Montrose (Michael K. Williams) each have their own mini arcs throughout the series, with some of them feeling, at least at the time, very standalone (like Letitia’s recently acquired 13-room Victorian house that just so happens to be haunted), yet all these arcs, somehow, directly or indirectly, tie into the main thrust of the story being told. This particular device required that the source story choose one of two options: give each character a similar story to maintain consistency but risk redundancy, or give them diverse stories to maintain dynamism but risk a schizophrenic outcome. Lovecraft Country chose the latter.

The season opener, “Sundown,” along with its immediate follow-up, firmly embraces Lovecraft’s roots, eagerly introducing the kinds of indescribable monsters that often dwelt in the darkest corners or other worlds from his stories. Episode three, “Holy Ghost,” the aforementioned haunted house arc, feels a little more traditional and really ups the gore factor, giving everything a sheen of (intended) pulp fiction storytelling. Episode four, “A History of Violence,” is a full-on ode to the Indiana Jones series, dropping the more horrific aspects in favor of an action-adventure aesthetic that easily could’ve played as a short serial in movie theaters on Saturday mornings during the 1950s. Lovecraft Country continues this trajectory of reinvention throughout its run, sometimes confidently selling its everchanging tone and sometimes falling victim to it. (I could also whine incessantly about all the changes made from the novel that I would consider to be unnecessary and trivial right down to haphazard – along with all the added graphic sex scenes because HBO gonna HBO – but no one ever likes talking to that person so I’ll abstain.)

What’s firmly preserved from the source novel is the African-American experience, which is appropriately, expectedly, and significantly the backbone of Lovecraft Country. What’s witnessed here is ugly, sometimes mind-bogglingly so, and, sadly, doesn’t conjure reflections of “remember when?” but more like realizations of “this is now.” This will no doubt turn off certain viewers (as it did critics) who felt that the infusion of real-life tragedies into this otherwise fictitious series feels exploitative and sensational, so if you’re one of those folks who think that our current society is racially hunky dory, then this series is…probably not for you. 

Each episode is beautifully directed, utilizing a soundtrack that includes an array of Black artists from the 1950s up to the modern era – and in an unusual but fitting move, in place of standard musical selections, the soundtrack also utilizes spoken word performances by prominent Black orators. The “Whitey’s on the Moon” sequence alone is one of the most powerful in the entire series – from the words being spoken to the images it plays over.

The ensemble’s performances are pretty terrific, with few weak spots. Smollett is especially terrific as she reinvents Letitia as more of a fire brand, but it works well in the adaptation’s version of her. Majors, too, presents Atticus as a bit more alpha male; his intensity and his almost-unrealistic physique turns him into an intimidating hero who is hampered with complex emotional baggage – all of which stem from the people he loves, the people who love him, and the people who are supposed to.

Lovecraft Country didn’t fully land with me following my first viewing, but I’ve been thinking about it since then, so obviously an impression was left behind, and I may just give this another spin at some point down the road. Naturally there will be literary folks out there even snobbier than I who turn their noses up at the way this series both acknowledges H.P. Lovecraft as a real and flawed person (along with one of his controversially-titled poems, “On the Creation of N-ggers”), as well as visualizes some of the monstrous archetypes he created, but the overall point of the series is what’s important, and that particular conversation is far more important than its source of inspiration. The below selection, lifted straight from the book and paraphrased in the opening episode, is not just the crux of the story, but a response to our current climate of cancel culture and our ongoing challenge of seeking ways to reconcile the fact that our heroes are sometimes not just unheroic but villainous inside their own minds:

“...stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. … I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes. Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”

ARCHENEMY (2020)

Re-examining the anatomy of the superhero movie isn’t a new idea, with two polar extreme examples being the 2008 alcoholic superhero movie Hancock with Will Smith and up to 2019’s Brightburn, which asked a heady question: what if Superman had been born evil? Archenemy, the newest to join this fold, comes courtesy from SpectreVision, aka producers Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, and Josh C. Waller. If you have been paying attention to the horror genre for the last several years, there’s no doubt you’ve both seen and appreciated their most recent output – the two Nicolas Cage vehicles Mandy and Color Out Of Space. Based on these two alone, it’s evident that SpectreVision aren’t interested in the obvious, the easy, or the norm. If nothing else, Archenemy, directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer (Daniel Isn’t Real), feels like both a visual successor to and the third part of a spiritual trilogy begun with those two horrific tales of vengeance and the otherworldly. Like those, Archenemy boasts insanely beautiful visuals founded on fluorescent pastels, but which takes one step further by combining them into comic-book-pane-inspired animation to explore Max Fist’s backstory – the crux of his character and the backbone of the is-he/isn’t-he sub-conflict. Archenemy takes a familiar concept, deconstructs it, and rebuilds it from the ground up, borrowing conceptual elements of Christopher Nolan’s ultra-realistic take from the Dark Knight trilogy, but without abandoning the comic book aesthetic that created this genre in the first place.

Archenemy is at its best when it forces the audience to wonder if Max Fist (Joe Manganiello), a drunken, swaggering, beaten up homeless man who rambles about his former home, Chromium, is telling the truth when he talks about being a former a superhero who tried to inspire his people before a violent blowout with Cleo, the “villain” of the piece, caused his expulsion from their world. The other possibility? That Max Fist is “a schizophrenic who lives under a bridge,” and has invented this version of himself to help him understand and compartmentalize a past and unknown trauma. Though filmed in New Mexico, the rundown city where Archenemy takes place is only ever called Hamster City (a possible egotistical nickname bequeathed by Hamster, one of the main characters), but modeled to look like Detroit, which can’t help but conjure memories of Robocop, another pulpy tale in which the leftovers of a former hero are re-purposed to commit major violence against the scum of the city. Though Archenemy never reaches those same glorious violent heights, it proceeds with a confidence in itself that makes its scenes of combat feel like more than just going through the motions. Archenemy works much better – and is, in fact, much more of – a character study about a broken man with a broken mind trying to navigate a new world he doesn’t understand. 

Manganiello is terrific in the role, offering the kind of range he is seldom offered the chance to embrace. With a low and gravelly voice straight from the throat of current Dolph Lundgren, Max has lost every reason he ever had to live in the first place, spending his time binge drinking and fist fighting concrete walls. It’s only when he comes to begrudgingly befriend aspiring writer Hamster (Skylan Brooks), who yearns to write for a BuzzFeed-ish outfit that produces viral content, when Max rediscovers what it means to fight for someone else. Though this new friendship reawakens his sense of purpose, it also manifests a bloodlust that has either been dormant, or which has been triggered for the first time, turning Max Fist into a man both heroic but uncontrollably dangerous. When Hamster’s sister Indigo (Zolee Griggs), a street-level drug dealer, gets herself into trouble with her psychotic boss known as The Manager (Glenn Howerton), let’s just say the slow-motion blood flies all over the screen.

Archenemy has a lot of big ideas, but, despite a somewhat shorter running time than other films from this genre, it feels overstuffed by the end and doesn’t quite land a handful of third-act twists. Still, it’s already earned enough goodwill and genuinely wants to end on an earnest note that it’s easy to forgive such shortcomings. The truth is, Archenemy should be like catnip to comic book junkies. From its design to its familiar but altogether new story, and of course, its violent artistry, it’s a confident twist on an old classic; it’s a quieter title when compared to any of your typical Marvel movie juggernauts, but unlike those blockbusters, Archenemy at least has its own identity – however flawed it may be.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]