Friday, April 19, 2019

Movie 43 / 1/2* (2013)

It is impossible to write anything disparaging enough about “Movie 43” to disrupt the notoriety underlying it. Here is a film – if you can call it one – that stands against its criticisms with an almost agonizing immunity, like a virus adapting to severe shifts in temperature or climate. And while countless writers and film enthusiasts have slung ambitious piles of mud without qualm for well over six years, with some still calling it the worst major release of the 21st century, the general public continues to give it the sort of life generally reserved for the more obvious failures like “The Room” or “Troll 2,” which endure as cult hits in late-night revivals. Yet to hear a basic description or run-through of the premise does not suggest just how ambitiously the material goes off the rails. It essentially plays like a series of amateur pranks you would find in a YouTube playlist. To observe them in a full-fledged composition, however, is to sense a marvelous lapse in judgment on part of Hollywood agents, who have set their bosses – actors and filmmakers alike – adrift in an artistic whirlpool. So awful is the experience, so utterly perplexing and tone-deaf is the payoff, that you have no choice but to watch on with curious eyes while your jaw falls depressingly to the floor. By the end you can’t entirely be sure whether you have watched a film or participated in a eulogy for the careers of its participants.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Us / *** (2019)

For well over three-fourths of its tenure, Jordan Peele’s “Us” moves to a rhythm that casts doubt on the momentum of its characters. Questions emerge through a rolodex of possible outcomes for nearly every intricate twist: are these people living in the hell that they have been ensnared by, or is it all part of a psychotic state forced upon them by something too baffling to deal with directly? Answers eventually become critical, as they must, but not before the very nature of individuals is tested in what seems like rip in the continuum; they move through a nightmare that tests them beyond the rules of their existence, as if their very existence has been an elaborate façade cloaking a collapsed reality. There’s a great deal of possibility in that prospect, especially for Peele, whose own “Get Out” also visualized a subterranean dimension while underlining powerful social commentary. But here the fun ends just as abruptly as it begins, in a final explanation so painfully broad that it inspires confusion more than closure. There is no question in anyone’s mind that Peele is slowly emerging as one of the most exciting provocateurs of modern horror films, but is a picture like this not more rewarding when the riddle doesn’t inspire our collective scorn?

Friday, April 5, 2019

The Head Hunter / *** (2019)

“The Head Hunter” is a creature feature in which the most fearsome beast is man himself, set adrift in a moral wasteland, where civilized behaviors are seized by carnal urges running wild in a horrific wilderness. The first scene establishes his routine while simultaneously pointing to the undercurrent of his vengeful demeanor; as he wanders past the frame to slaughter an unseen villain (we only hear the impact of the sword and the cry of a creature), a small voice calls him back towards his prior location. It is his young daughter, concealed in a tent, needing to know her protector is nearby. They exchange smiles and she returns to sleep, but the morose voiceover indicates this is a memory from the past; one of the beasts has apparently killed her, and now his life has become a long hunt for the animal responsible for her demise. In the meantime, the main wall of his cabin becomes a monument to all the heads he has collected – some frightening, others bizarre, few of them based in any tangible reality. The first reaction is one of befuddlement: what possible villain could be more dangerous, especially when his domicile already looks like a scrapbook of the most diabolical movie monsters you have never seen?

Thursday, April 4, 2019

Climax / ***1/2 (2018)

Some movies announce themselves in celebratory spectacles. Gaspar Noé’s “Climax” lands in a howl of agony. Born from within a creative engine that relishes the pain it inflicts, here is the culmination of the director’s most masochistic instincts: a laboratory of excess that unknowingly becomes a living hell for all the unfortunate characters populating it. How strangely challenging it must have been for him to look at this material and find the desire to exceed his own trajectory. After “Irreversible,” containing the most painful rape sequence ever made, and “Enter the Void,” a visceral exercise that sickened (literally) many members of his audience, the chutzpah underlining his strange career seemed poised to linger in the corners, unable to escape into something more daring. But now he has orchestrated a work of genius that upstages all the unsettling rhythms that came before, essentially because he has now married the lurid tendencies of his style with an arc that is profoundly engrossing. These are people whom we share little common interests, yet who transition from one extreme to the next as if holding us hostage through a rapid descent.