As summer fades away and the world seems to take a turn towards despair, with wildfires raging and storms pummeling across North America, I seek the comfort of movies. The glow of the silver screen, the tales from eras long gone, the empathy we so desperately need to see more of in our everyday. This month at the movies…
Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar
Film comedies seem to be at the lowest point they’ve ever seen. While twenty years ago we seemed to have a dearth of great comedies with Judd Apatow leading the charge into the modern era, studios are now more hesitant to gamble on something that could be seen as unproven. But there are certain gems every year, and the theatrical experience many of us had with Barbie may lead to a renaissance of the high-budget, ultra-silly comedies we’re sorely missing. One film that will hopefully inspire crops of comedic filmmakers to come is Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar. An exceptionally silly, over-the-top fun film with hilarious flights of fancy, this film is one of the best comedies of the 2020’s.
Deeply unserious and playful, and from the comedic geniuses Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo (who also gave us Bridesmaids), the film follows two lifelong friends who travel from the midwest to the wonderful and almost magical Vista del Mar. There they fall in love, experience life for the first time, and stumble into thwarting an evil villain’s plot. Both Wiig and Mumolo play the doe-eyed leads with a beautiful charisma, their small town values never becoming overbearing or annoying. Wiig also does double duty, playing the villain with equal relish. Add in Jamie Dornan giving a hilarious turn as an evil himbo (who gets his own musical number that felt like it was a brother to I’m Just Ken) and you have a film that has so much joy and humor that it’ll be hard to forget.
Beasts of No Nation
Beasts of No Nation is not a film for the faint of heart. A brutal film about a child soldier being indoctrinated into a cult of personality during a civil war in a nameless African nation, the film is unflinching in its portrayal of murder, torture, and the corruption of youth. The young boy, Agu (played brilliantly by Abraham Attah) is torn from the quiet life he knew and forced into the brutal frontlines of a war he is in no way capable of understanding, and we see step by step as his innocence is ripped away from him by the inhumane acts of war. Director Cary Fukunaga’s camera is obsessed with Agu, with his eyes, these massive pools of white and black and brown that hold so much heartache and pain and rage, and through these eyes we see the change of Agu, the transformation from child to soldier to man in the span of a year.
Idris Elba puts in a career best performance as the Commandant, a nameless force of will that controls a group of boys in this raging war. The only adult any of these helpless children are able to turn to, he manipulates and abuses these boys, warps their minds into thinking that they are righteous and powerful and fighting for freedom. He is a con artist, a corruptor with an Uzi, and his force of will ensnares these boys who have lost everything. We, as adults, see him as the pathetic, weak willed man that he is, but the boys have no one else, and his exploitation of them for his own benefit is heartwrenching to watch. A powerful film in conversation with others such as Come and See and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Death Race 2000
Let’s take a quick excursion into grindhouse camp with Death Race 2000, a Roger Corman classic. Taking place in a dystopian world, a cross-country race wherein the racers get extra points for vehicular homicide, such a grisly and hilarious high-concept idea couldn’t have come from anyone else but the King of Schlock Corman. The film carries many trademarks of grindhouse cinema; cheap thrills, cheap kills, and needless nudity. It also has ham-fisted attempts at political commentary that feel like Corman was hoping to hit the hippie crowd five years too late. Featuring a pre-fame Sly Stallone and B-movie legend David Carradine, the film is not lacking in talent, simply lacking in substance.
Now I know what I’m getting when I sit down to watch a movie called Death Race 2000. I don’t think I’m raising my expectations to an unachievable level when I hope for blood, guts, and boobs. Unfortunately, the film fails to give us what we crave. The audience is indeed the bloodthirsty fans of the death race, and if it were any other filmmaker I would consider the lack of satisfaction with the quality of kills here a possible commentary. But when it’s Roger Corman I know it’s less an artistic choice and more of a budgetary concern. It’s possible that my imagination at the idea of a death race overtook what they were able to do (I recall seeing this at an impressionably young age and having a nightmare or two because of it) but in the end, the film falls prey to boredom that this type of film can’t afford to have.
Deep Cover
Deep Cover (1992)
The jungle creed says the strongest feed / on any prey that it can / And I was branded beast at every feast / before I ever became a man.
Watching crime thrillers from the early 90s one can’t help but mourn the state of modern thrillers. Compare the lavish, visceral, powerful filmmaking on display here with most films of the same ilk from today and you can’t help but find them wanting. Deep Cover, from writer/director Bill Duke, follows a police officer with a strict moral code as he goes undercover in the neon and coke-soaked Los Angeles. Laurence Fishbourne plays the hard-nosed detective who slowly has pieces of himself shaved away, all in a fight against a war he knows they are losing.
Intertwining a compelling narrative with a brash commentary on race relations and the war on drugs, Deep Cover is a familiar formula told incredibly well. The slow descent into hell, the points of no return that the undercover cop crosses, the spiraling loss of self. Combined with an indulgent but well-tilted performance from Jeff Goldblum, we have a crime thriller that has as much style as it does substance.
Do The Right Thing
The third film in my ongoing Spike Lee appreciation, and what many consider to be his greatest film and one of the greatest films in American cinema. Do The Right Thing follows an ensemble of characters across a single block in New York City. The melting pot of cultures, races, and people starts to boil under the heat of the sun and the underlying (and overlaid) tensions from the various groups. The bums, the workers, the skids, the freaks, all of them forced into this pressure cooker of a living situation, and everyone is about to blow.
The film has so many aspects that it is impossible for me to touch on them all in this brief review. And, as a white Canadian, the racial tensions and persecutions within America is only something I can view from a distance with any true understanding. But I do understand the persecution of our characters. In Do The Right Thing everyone who isn’t Mookie sees themselves as the victim, sees themselves as the underdog. There is no wrestling with the struggles of others, very little empathy is seen until the film explodes with violence. Only then are bonds formed, and by then it’s too late. This one aspect is but a drop in the bucket that is the brilliance of this film, one worthy of the deep studies it has received.
The Hit
The first of two Stephen Frears films I watched this month, The Hit at first appears to be a fairly typical crime/hitman genre piece. Two hitmen, an older one and his younger assistant, track down a former gangster who had ratted out his crime boss a decade before. Tasked with bringing the former criminal to Paris for execution, the trio set off, eventually adding a young Spanish woman to their unlikely road trip. While the setup isn’t something that you haven’t seen before, it’s in the execution and the talents of our four main actors that this film rises above typical fair.
More interested in discussions of death than displays of it, Frears plays the characters against the personalities we have become accustomed to seeing in these films. The doomed man openly embraces his fate, accepting death gracefully. The seasoned hitman is hard but not unfeeling, his lust for the young woman Maggie being palpable. Tim Roth as the young, inexperienced henchman is practically a teenager, exuberant and fierce but not cruel. And Maggie as portrayed by Laura del Sol is anything but the damsel in distress. A crime film with more on it’s mind than blood and guts, while still allowing itself to shock you with an unexpected brutality in its most vital moments.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
A period piece horror film will always grab my attention. While fighting monsters in modern times can be fun, there’s just something all the more horrifying when the characters have truly no way of knowing what they are facing. Thus is the case with The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a film taking inspiration from a single chapter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The lavish production design helps set us in a world of turn-of-the-century sailors tasked with unknowingly chartering the Prince of Darkness to England. Unfortunately, the film does not take advantage of its simple but effective plot, instead constantly falling into vampire film cliches.
The script for this film has been in development for almost twenty years, and it shows. It’s a sloppy mess of a script, with revelations being ignored in the next scene and motives being completely changed from one scene to the next. The film unfortunately begins at the end of our story before flashing back three months, robbing any tension from the film. Add to this the characters discovering all the vampire knowledge we the audience have been familiar with for decades (and at an achingly slow pace) and you’re left with a film that proves great design and acting can’t hide a poor script.
Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger (1959)
I know I'm a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me it didn't really matter.
A classic in British kitchen sink drama, Look Back In Anger follows Richard Burton, a dissatisfied young man, as he lashes out against everything and everyone in society. Burton plays Jimmy Porter, a man who was promised the world and instead runs a small sweets shop. Jimmy’s rage at the world is palpable, and he takes it out on his wife, his best friend, and anyone else who happens upon him. Frustrated that this is not what he thought he would be, and powerless to change it, Porter is directionless in his anger, simply an explosion of pain. The few moments he tries kindness on it he wears it like a misfitted coat, is suffocated by lacking his only way to express himself.
The film follows a simular tract as This Sporting Life, a film I discussed earlier this year. 1950s/1960s Britain was a place of broken dreams, and filled with young men who were filled with stories of war glory, forced not to fight an enemy but simply the every day. A generation of men who have no outlet, no way of expression, and are forced into a little box that was mid-century normalacy. While I found This Sporting Life a more sufficient and exacting story, the pure rage of existence on display in Look Back In Anger is commendable, even if a 30-something Burton is quite distracting as a 25-year old.
Meg 2: The Trench
I have previously expressed my love of truly trash blockbusters. There are few experiences as mindlessly delightful as devouring a tub of extra buttery popcorn and watching dumb characters you don’t care about get picked off one by one over a two hour runtime. This is the exact experience I received with The Meg, the original film that ended with Jason Statham stabbing a giant shark in the eye. So when I saw a sequel was coming, I readied the dumbest parts of my body and set out. Unfortunately, the sequel Meg 2: The Trench is the dull kind of dumb, the one that doesn’t numb the mind as much as put it to sleep.
I will say that the third act finally gets exactly what I wanted out of this movie; impossible to survive encounters, plot armor thicker than your grandmother’s quilt, and lots and lots of people getting chomped on by giant sharks. But it is an absolute slog getting to that third act, as the filmmakers decided to hamfist an eco-terrorist moral into the story, and spent the entire first half not even having the giant sharks be the villains of the giant sharks movie. On top of this, the special effects just don’t hold up to what can be accomplished today, and as a blockbuster it simply doesn’t meet the standard of entertaining. Dumb, and not in a good way.
Midnight Run
Have you ever watched a film that was referencing cliches and stereotypes in film and thought “where did that cliche come from anyway?” Midnight Run is a likely answer. The 1988 buddy-crime-comedy road movie is chockful of running gags, hilarious antics, and 80s movies cliches, and yet is able to feel completely fresh. It’s th perfect balance of humor, with a touch of heart, and a little bit of menace from the villains, with the fantastic odd couple casting of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin holding the film together.
Following the odd pair as De Niro’s bounty hunter must bring Grodin’s bail-jumping accountant from New York City to Los Angeles in one week, the outlandish setpieces and comedic gags never feel unmoored from reality, and work perfectly with the tone of the film. The duo is chased by everybody from the FBI to fellow bounty hunters to the gangsters Grodin betrayed, and the constant two steps forward, one step back cross-country journey is an absolute delight to watch. But the real selling point is the chemistry between De Niro and Grodin, both of whom are straight-laced, uptight, and exacting, and it’s only the circumstances they found themselves in that have led them to be on opposite sides. The banter they share and the blossoming of friendship is both hilarious and affecting, and easily makes this one of the best films of the 1980s.
My Beautiful Laundrette
A queer cinema classic, and the second of two Stephen Frears films from this month, My Beautiful Laundrette is surprisingly light on its feet and in its presentation while dealing with such heavy themes are queerness in the 1980s and racial tensions under Thatcherism. Following young Pakistani-British man Omar as he sets out to cut his own path in London, and the relationship he develops with a former friend and now white supremacist street punk Johnny. The two rekindle a friendship while fixing up a rundown laundrette owned by Omar’s uncle, and eventually begin a secret romantic entanglement.
The romantic tensions between Omar and Johnny are mirrored with the tensions of the Pakistani and British communities in London at the time, as white power movements gained more mainstream ground and backlash to the emigrants lead to violence and bloodshed in the streets. The little paradise these two make in the back of their laundrette acts as a sanctuary, a place out of time and space, where whoever is in there are the only people to exist. We see through the relationship of Omar’s uncle and his white mistress that even straight interracial relationships will not be tolerated. Despite the pains of hiding their love, the film is not bogged down in being overly serious, instead deciding that the light is better than the dark, and so light the film shall be.
Odd Man Out
Odd Man Out (1947)
In my profession there is neither good nor bad. There is innocence and guilt. That's all.
A beautiful noir film from Carol Reed, Odd Man Out follows a criminal, Johnny, as he wanders the city looking for safe haven after a heist goes wrong. As he goes about the city, injured and near death the entire time, he comes across various citizens, all of whom have different ideas of what the virtuous thing to do with the criminal would be. All the while Johnny is pursued by the police, the gang that left him behind, and the woman who’s been cursed with loving him. The film, like many noirs, wants us to ask what is right, what is good, and what is the difference between those two moral points.
The townsfolk in Odd Man Out all react to the discovery of Johnny in their own unique ways. Some want absolutely nothing to do with him, see him as a brute and a murderer, and cast him away without a second thought. Some pity the dying man, give him shelter, give him moments of grace. It’s in these moments of grace and sympathy that Odd Man Out truly shines, as we see the kindness of everyday people applied to someone in the shadows of society, a criminal who to many deserves no such treatment. Others see Johnny as a meal ticket, a bargaining chip, whether for money or freedom or power. No matter the person who comes across the man, they have an agenda and a moral ambiguity that seems to grow with each person.
Throughout this, Johnny is delirious, near death, and delusional. He is simply passed from one person to another, and his only moments of clarity come when the consequences of his crimes are repeated to him. He’s a lot cause, no matter how much love Kathleen or his men hold for him. His spiraling condition but unwillingness to concede defeat parallels the cause he fights for, his nationalist beliefs for Belfast. He fights a losing battle, one where there will be no winners. The civil war he fights is reflected in the dying light of his eyes. A moral loss, a personal loss, a victim of time and consequence, a morally bereft tale that’ll leave you with an ache in your bones.
Past Lives
Past Lives (2023)
It's true that if you leave you lose things, but you also gain things, too.
Past Lives is an absolutely beautiful film that follows a woman, Nora, in three different moments of her life. We see her as a child, her family about to immigrate from Korea to Canada, and the friendship she’ll be made to abandon because of this. We see her fifteen years later, a hard-working, hungry college student, rekindling a relationship from her distant past. We see her in her mid-30s, a working professional, in a loving relationship, coming face to face with what was left behind. Each of these acts is tinged with tragedy and love, they unfold with a sense of true discovery and reality. These characters are completely realized, and we see ourselves in their actions and emotions. We recognize the little smiles we have given, the longing glances we have taken, in these characters, moments put on screen that so few filmmakers are able to capture.
The film is about the deepest yearning we can imagine. A yearning for a love we lost decades ago and the life that love could have lead to. A yearning for the life we have now, and the sacrifices that were needed to lead to our current happiness. The yearning for a complete encompassing of our soulmate, to know everything about them, to breathe them in with every breath. We all love so deeply and so broadly, and we sometimes must sacrifice one growing love to allow another to fully blossom. This is a film in mourning, not because the love we tended to is not enough, but the love we lost is still love, and the loss of love will forever be deserving of mourning.
The Pit and the Pendulum
The second Corman film of the month and the first in his series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, The Pit and the Pendulum is a creepy, campy gothic horror that may be some of Corman’s best work behind the camera. While not having much to go on from the original source material, the film is able to build a confident and genuinely creepy narrative. A brother looking for answers, a husband mourning his lost love, mysterious goings-ons that slowly drive people to their breaking point, Corman crafts tension and suspense into every scene in the film.
While some of his more inspired choices are to the overall detriment of the film (such as when the film starts alternating colours at random as a way to indicate horror), the gothic setting and minimal camp make this one of his better Poe adaptations. Vincent Price is a pleasure to watch as always, and his heartache in the film is deeply sincere. A worthwhile watch for any gothic horror fan.
The Raven
The third Corman directed film I saw this month and the second in his series of Poe adaptations, this one had a much larger battle to overtake in order to become a film. There is only so much inspiration one can muster from a poem, no matter how grand that poem is. And while my expectations were something forlorn and bittersweet in it’s gothic atmosphere (as that is what I would do with the poem) what we get instead is a highly camp comedy featuring a battle between wizards. A truly bizarre turn, and one that is not entirely successful, but that still holds some gems in it.
It features the closest Corman ever came to an all-star cast, including the always delightful Vincent Price, a passed his prime but still fun Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre in one of his final roles, and a very young Jack Nicolson. With a cast as talented as this you arebound to stumble into some interesting portrayals, even if the script was drunkenly scribbled on a bar napkin near closing time. The cast keeps things as interesting as they can, and there are some genuine laughs from all of them that help elevate the film out of pure dullness, but they can also only do so much. The threadbare story combined with a budget that must have started in the red leads to dull storytelling and scenes that are bound to put even the biggest camp fan to sleep.
Theater Camp
Theater Camp, the Sundance comedy hit from earlier this year, is a great film for the theater nerds out there, a group generally underserved in the cinema. Following a group of counselors and campers as they all pursue the art of the stage, while the new manager of the camp tries to keep it from going under, the film has some truly laug-out-loud moments for theater fans and non-fans alike. The characters are fatastic caractitures of the pretentious but incredibly sincere people who find within the fandom, and the skewering they receive is accurate an outrageous. Jimmy Tatro is hilarious as the audience surrogate, an outsider forced to keep his mother’s dream alive while knowing nothing of the theater world. Ben Platt and co-director Molly Gordon also give the film some great comedic moments as a pair of lifelong friends taskedwith making the big ed-of-summer original production.
The film has lots of ideas, and lots of characters, and tries to pack in almost too much in it’s ninety minute runtime. As a result, some charaters are given a single quirk and then left to the wayside, and interesting ideas are touched on before being abandoned completely. Some elements feel like they could have sustained an entire narrative on their own, such as the one straight kid at the camp, or the non-actor who lied on her resume to get a job. The film also presents itself as a mockumentary, but does nothing with this, and for the most part seems to forget that is it’s narrative structure. These somewhat messy elements are to be expected in a first time future, and the laughs and heartfelt moments are more than enough to compensate for these shortcomings. A fun film, and a promising debut.
Wings of Desire
Wings of Desire (1987)
Must I give up now? If I do give up, then mankind will lose its storyteller. And if mankind once loses its storyteller, then it will lose its childhood.
The film featured in this month’s paid subscriber special, you can read about purpose, longing, and humanity here.
I recently saw Deep Cover for the first time and was favourably impressed - and Odd Man Out is an old reliable for me - I think I've seen it every couple of years since I was about ten years old! Nice to meet you here :)