Author: Addison Engelking

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

W/ Bob And David

W/Bob and David (2015; dirs. Keith Truesdell, Jason Woliner and Tom Gianas)—
Last weekend I sailed into the Netflix maelstrom for the first time, and even though I occasionally felt like I’d stumbled across the 21st-century version of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, it wasn’t too bad. Aziz Ansari’s new series Master of None is pretty great, and that single-take hallway fight scene from the second episode of Daredevil is as thrilling as ever. But I was also happy to check out the four episodes of W/Bob and David, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ return to televised sketch comedy after a nearly two-decade break.

Odenkirk is best known as Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fame; in a just and fair world, everybody would recognize Cross from his role as Dr. Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development. Alt-comedy aficionados will remember these two abrasive, committed writer/performers as the co-stars of Mr. Show With Bob and David, which aired on HBO from 1995 to 1998. Mr. Show specialized in detailed, foul-mouthed, loosely linked skits that frequently pursued an idea up to and then far past its logical endpoint; at its best, it was the closest an American show ever came to re-imagining Odenkirk’s beloved Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There’s more of the same kind of thing in W/Bob and David, but this time around there’s a distinctly weird and confrontational Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! vibe in places. Take the animated opening-credits sequence, which depicts various characters dissolving into and bursting out of each others’ eyes and mouths while undulating rivers of Cross and Odenkirk’s heads flow by in the foreground and background.

Just like in the old days, organized religion and idiotic commercials are two of W/Bob and David’s biggest targets; in one sketch, a parent urges her child to stop talking about God as “some all-forgiving monster.” A courtroom TV show that has to replace a “no-nonsense” judge with a “some-nonsense” judge (before finally bringing in an “all-nonsense” judge) is one of several sketches as thorough and funny as the best Mr. Show bits. Not everything works; the behind-the-scenes look at a musical about a singing house is one of a handful of tough slogs. Throughout it all, Odenkirk proves a far nimbler, gentler, more sympathetic performer than Cross, who used to steal scenes with ease but now exudes an immobile surliness more often than he used to.

If you knew about this unlikely act TV necromancy before now, then chances are you’ve already scarfed it down. But if you aren’t sure whether it’s your thing, go find Rap: The Musical and the Lie Detector sketch online and see where they take you.

Grade: A-

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Film Features Film/TV

Suffragette

Sarah Gavron’s new film Suffragette looks and feels like a fresh hunk of Oscar bait.

Now, you might be wondering what exactly “Oscar bait” is. Although noted author and peerless Academy Awards handicapper Mark Harris hates the term and wishes it would go away, Oscar bait is real, but it is seldom spectacular. You’ve seen Oscar bait before. Perhaps you’ve even enjoyed some of it. Maybe you’re an Argo kind of gal; me, I’m partial to animal-centric heart-tuggers like Spielberg’s War Horse. Wikipedia defines movies like these as “Lavishly produced, epic-length period dramas, often set against tragic historical events such as the Holocaust,” that “often contend for the technical Oscars such as cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, costume design, or production design … The cast may well include actors with previous awards or nominations, a trait that may also be shared by the director or writer.”

I might also add that movies like these typify a strain of safe, grade-grubbing, color-between-the-lines moviemaking that’s engineered for mature adults uninterested in or unresponsive to important aesthetic qualities like vulgarity, coarseness, economy, and wit. They also arrive on schedule every autumn. Once the leaves start to turn and the superhero franchises go into hibernation, these simple, proper, “sophisticated” films start showing up in theaters like fashionably late guests trying to class- up a kegger.

At first glance, Suffragette fits the Oscar bait description. At 106 minutes, though, it’s merely a normal-length period drama that’s set in 1912 England. The tragic historical event that drives its story and galvanizes its characters is, thankfully, not World War I; it’s the women’s suffrage movement, a time when many brave women exhibited surprising courage and resilience but were met with patronizing indifference and/or brute force.

Yet in a few key ways, Suffragette struggles against its prestige-picture corset. The production design is shrewd and economical but unspectacular, the cinematography serves up the same gruel-like gray found in any movie about the miseries of early 20th-century factory work, and the makeup, hairstyling, and costume design, while impressive at times, probably isn’t ostentatious enough to garner awards. Nevertheless, there’s a trio of Emmy or Oscar-nominated actors (Carey Mulligan, Brendan Gleeson, and Helena Bonham Carter) knocking heads here, and about midway through the film one multiple-Oscar winner shows up to bless the proceedings.

Suffragette‘s weird, bellicose sentimentality is also atypical for Oscar bait. It feels like a byproduct of Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s attempts to identify and harness the numerous energies — domestic, political, paternal, spiritual — that powered the movement they depict. Unfortunately, such energies often dissipate when set against Alexandre Desplat’s insufferable, obvious orchestral score. To its partial credit, though, Suffragette is a messy, distracted film that, like its laundress-turned-activist heroine Maud Watts (Mulligan), isn’t sure what exactly it wants to be.

It begins as a lively, idea-heavy drama about the validity of violent revolution, narrows its focus to document the social cost of one woman’s gradual political awakening, and plays around at being a cat-and-mouse detective story for a scene or two before reinventing itself as a gauzy, delicately colored reenactment of a shocking historical accident that had a monumental impact on both the English suffrage movement and suffrage efforts from around the world.

The performances are fine: Mulligan is her usual incredulous, sobbing self; Gleeson assays a half-decent portrait of disgruntled middle-aged compromise; Bonham Carter is tiny and fierce; and rugged types like Anne-Marie Duff shine for a scene or two. But not everyone is watchable. Emmeline Pankhurst, the rabble-rousing ringleader of the English suffrage movement, is played by none other than Meryl Streep. Streep appears for a single scene, but when she delivers her fiery, inspirational balcony speech, she looks like Mary Poppins and sounds like Glinda the Good Witch. Plus, there’s so much crosscutting between Parkhurst’s speech and the British government’s attempts to nab her that what could have been a fun, hammy, Orson Wellesian drop-in is over before it lands.

Such eccentric timing exemplifies Suffragette‘s hyperventilating, wind-sprint-sense of pacing. One minute the camera is darting through crowds at high speeds, barely recording moments of triumph by the women or moments of violence by the police in charge; the next minute it slows way down for close-ups of tear-stained faces, newspaper photographs, and feet.

So is Suffragette Oscar bait or not? More than likely, it’s not enough of anything to matter much.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Amy Schumer Live At The Apollo

Amy Schumer Live at the Apollo (2015; dir. Chris Rock)—The title of Amy Schumer’s second stand-up special hints at a kind of unpredictable, potentially hostile collision between performer and audience not unlike the 2012 Late Show with David Letterman episode where Dave performed to an empty Ed Sullivan theater while Hurricane Sandy raged, or the 1997 Late Night with Conan O’ Brien episode where Conan did his show in front of a studio audience comprised entirely of grade-school kids. Schumer didn’t do her act on Amateur Night; in fact, I’m not sure there’s a single paying customer of color in any of the numerous crowd shots.

So instead of edgy, unpredictable performance art we get a pretty good show from a pretty good comedian still on a serious roll. Schumer is much more relaxed and conversational this time around; the disarming, shock-value-heavy “good girl who says ghastly things” part of her act has largely disappeared. And thanks to her work on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, she’s more comfortable dropping into different characters for a snarky line or gesture than she once was. Her continuing growth as a physical comedian is also one of the show’s many highlights.

Mostly Sex Stuff, Schumer’s first special, improved after multiple viewings; Live at the Apollo improves after the first 30 minutes and keeps getting better all the way to the end. Her okay bits are about massage parlors and her awkward adolescence. Her good bits are about low-hanging fruit like beauty pageants and dumb Family Feud contestants. Her great bits are about food and sex, two topics where guilt and shame and pleasure are layered on top of each other like hoagie ingredients or fatigued swingers. The food stuff includes her admission that she’s never forgotten to eat lunch; the sex stuff includes her own discomfort with being labeled a sex comic (“I feel like a guy could get up here and literally pull his dick out and everybody would be like, ‘He’s a thinker!’”). She closes with a riotous and humane disquisition about the humiliating sex positions dreamt up by lonesome horndogs and performed by no one that’s funnier than most of Trainwreck.

Grade: A

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014; dir. Ana Lily Amirpour)—Like zombies, vampires are built to last. They’re scary, they’re sexy, and they’re walking metaphors for everything from urban ennui to drug addiction, bottomless greed to everlasting love. They also assimilate into other cultures with supernatural ease; the first time I heard about Amirpour’s self-described “Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western,” my first thought was “What took her so long?” Then I remembered some of Iranian cinema’s rules and restrictions—like the one that says actresses can’t be shown onscreen unless their hair is covered—and started wondering how anyone who lived there could tell a meaningful vampire story without showing the requisite orgasmic neck biting or arterial sprays. Besides, hadn’t Michael Almeryda already done something similar with 1994’s Nadja?

Still, I thought there might be something exciting about watching a skillful, creepy contemporary feminist horror parable that had to play by the rules of the American cinema during its Hays Code heyday. However, Girl begins with a surprising and shocking dose of sex and gore that upended everything I thought I knew about Iran and the movies. That is, until I discovered that the English-born Amirpour used Taft, California as a geographic stand-in for Iran. Turns out she didn’t need to worry about censorship after all.

The locational ambiguity of the fictional Bad City, Iran, fits Amirpour’s slow, lovely-to-look-at feature debut. Its nodded-out vibe lets it slowly float into an as-yet-undiscovered fictional space somewhere between the abandoned Detroit theaters of Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and the chilly Scandinavian hovels of Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. Highly aestheticized yet highly scuzzy—the story takes place in one of those broken cities where people dump corpses in open pits—Girl’s secret weapon is its sense of resigned playfulness, which wouldn’t be out of place in an old Peanuts cartoon. It may not be It Follows or The Babadook, but like its unforgettable image of an undead girl in a chador cruising down a dimly lit street on a skateboard, it’s an encouraging sign of life and fresh new blood.

Grade: B+

Horrortober: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)

The House of the Devil (2009; dir. Ti West)—The ‘00s were a terrific decade for horror fans because goodies arrived from every part of the world in all shapes and sizes. Visionary remakes like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, foreign monster movies like Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, grimy Southern Gothic trash like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, claustrophobic ersatz regionalism like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, and classy modern ghost stories like J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage were just a few of the films from the past decade that offered cold-blooded, skillfully-timed shocks for newbies and connoisseurs alike. Throw in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, David Lynch’s pair of psyche-strafing 21st-century dream labyrinths, and the decade’s finest horror movies look even stronger.

Jocelin Donohue

But don’t’ forget about The House of The Devil, Ti West’s slow-burning, highly effective period-piece about Satanic cults, full moons and the terrifying subtext of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another.” Devil was initially released in both DVD and VHS formats; the VHS tape came in a clamshell case that paid homage to all those cheap, long-forgotten, straight-to-video 1980s horror flicks that once lined the bottoms of countless shabby video store shelves. West’s film, about Samantha (Jocelin Donohue), a cash-strapped college girl who takes a sketchy baby-sitting job at an ominous country house, is a spare, nearly perfect attempt to convey what it might feel like for someone to discover that they’re inside a 1980s horror movie. The bloody, messy revelations of its final third matter much less than the luxurious sense of dread West cultivates like a crazed botanist who’s just discovered a strain of poisonous fungus long thought extinct.

Greta Gerwig

West’s film inhabits a grayish, stick-crackling late-autumn dryness that combines with his eye for telling, funny period details to revive universal horror imagery; when he zooms out to show Samantha alone in a mysterious upstairs room, or cuts in to show her clutching a kitchen knife in front of a heavy wooden door, it’s like he’s gone back in time to those precious moments just before Michael Myers burst onto the screen and sent everyone running for their lives. And with Greta Gerwig and Tom Noonan, West casts a pair of aggressive, twitchy, businesslike scene-stealers to play Samantha’s best friend and the guy who gets her to stay the night by quadrupling his initial offer. The double voyeurism throughout the film’s middle section goes on and on, its voluptuous dread punctuated by nonsense phrases like “Hello, fish” and the final words of the damned everywhere: “It’s OK. Everything’s fine. She’s fine.”

Grade: A-

Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrotober: Audition (1999)


Audition (1999; dir. Takashi Miike)—The first twenty-five minutes of Audition feel nothing like Ringu, The Cure, Pulse or similar J-horror masterpieces; in fact, they are so mundane and quiet that you might start to wonder whether someone has replaced the gory provocation you expected with a sweet and sour Japanese rom-com. What’s all this about a middle-aged widower named Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) who, with the help of his film producer buddy Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), sets up a series of casting calls for a nonexistent movie in hopes of finding Aoyama a new girlfriend—preferably one who’s “beautiful, classy and obedient”? What’s with the sprightly elevator music playing in the background during these light-comic audition scenes? Is this the same film that sent droves of people from the theater during its premiere at the Rotterdam film festival?

It is. Be patient.

At first, you probably won’t notice the tiny cracks and fissures threatening Audition’s tone, subject matter and structure early on. However, like thunder on the horizon, they portend grave danger if you’re unprepared. Twenty-seven minutes and forty-five seconds into the film, Aoyama takes a break from the auditions, wanders into the waiting room and notices Asami (Eihi Shiina), a young girl dressed in white who’s sitting at a table and reading, her back turned away from the rest of the eager, friendly girls eager for their big break. This is the girl for her, Aoyama thinks. Eight minutes later he’s calling her up and asking her out. She says yes.

Thirty-seven minutes and ten seconds into the film, Yoshikawa tells Aoyama “something isn’t right” about Asami’s background story. At 41:32, Yoshikawa informs Aoyama, “We can’t reach anybody who knows her” and urges his friend to “Cool down a bit.” At 43:22, there’s a sudden cut to Asami in a small apartment that’s empty save for an old stereo system, a giant black rotary phone, a pair of pink ballet slippers, and what looks like a large folded-up tent in a canvas sack. At 47:45, Miike cuts to an extreme close-up of Asami in profile, her lips opening into a smile that suggests a venus flytrap closing around an unsuspecting insect. At 48:10 comes the most bracing cinematic shock since Jaye Davidson dropped trou in The Crying Game.

That’s also when everything, including a reliable and conventional sense of narrative or cinematic time, falls apart. Asami and Aoyama’s dreamlike weekend getaway by the sea is suffused with a miasma of pedophilia and bodily mutilation. As she talks, Asami—tall, bony, distant, slightly asymmetrical—starts to sound less like the perfect woman of Aoyama’s dreams and more like a mythical demon who’s temporarily assumed human form. Barriers separating facts, speculations and dreams gradually crumble. An afternoon-to-evening time-lapse sequence lingers just long enough to remind you what conventional film poetry looks like before it’s trash-compacted into oblivion.

Sixteen years later, Audition’s notorious finale still stands above and apart from its misbegotten torture-porn children like a buoy afloat on a sea of blood and body parts. It’s notable for the way it combines the psychological scars and deviant psychology of the greatest J-horror films with the ultra-violence of Asian action cinema. But what makes it really great—as far as these things go, anyway—is that it doesn’t stop there. It pins moviegoers to the wall, forces you to cover your eyes and ears and won’t stop until it goes deeper, deeper…deeper, deeper…

Grade: A

Horrotober: Audition (1999)

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Horrotober: The Thing (1982)

The Thing (1982; dir. John Carpenter)—A sled dog, pursued by a pair of rifle-toting Norwegians in a helicopter, runs across a frozen landscape. So begins John Carpenter’s starkly beautiful, nauseatingly suspenseful song of ice and fire about a shape-shifting alien that sneaks into an Antarctic research facility and turns it into a polar inferno. If you still haven’t seen The Thing, consider yourself warned: this is Olympic-caliber horror that gags your throat so you can’t holler none, sets you in the water and doesn’t stop until the bubbles come up. It’s bad like Jesse James, and it gives new meaning to the words “I had a friend one time/’least I thought I did.”

Yet for all its malevolent bluesman cool, Carpenter’s big-budget remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World has its flaws. When it comes to transforming laconic male bonding sessions into meaningful cinematic philosophy, Carpenter falls far short of his idol Howard Hawks. He also slathers on an unnecessarily thick coat of mystery by prematurely punctuating many early scenes with narcoleptic fades to black or white. And most of the time, the cast runs around outside in the Antarctic cold without hats and jackets like it’s a brisk autumn day. (Take it from me: shoveling 10 inches of snow in sub-zero temps merits its own circle of hell, one that the rugged men of The Thing have never visited.) But such misgivings gradually evaporate over the course of the film, and they disappear altogether during an extended blood test sequence that features a half-crazed, half-frozen Kurt Russell, a hot metal wire and a bunch of pissed-off, panicky dudes tied up together on a rec-room couch.

The Thing is a film of nerve-roasting stillness and deliberation whose last half-hour pierces you like a giant falling icicle; its long-simmering set pieces are capped by flourishes of special effects so disgusting they trigger a visceral, almost preconscious revulsion. The film is smart, but as film critics Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson pointed out on a recent episode of their podcast The Canon, the men in The Thing are pretty smart too. They suffer none of the logical lapses and commit none of the boneheaded errors that doomed hundreds of dumb teenagers in hundreds of inferior ‘80s horror films.

It’s also worth noting that, in a harsh, whited-out world exclusively populated by manly men of all ages whose death throes nonetheless retain an element of Marlboro manliness, the most expressive onscreen essay in mercenary masculinity comes from a malamute named Jed.
Grade: A-


Horrotober: The Thing (1982)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

TV Review: Drunk History

Octavia Spencer as Harriet Tubman in Season 3 of Drunk History


Drunk History, Season Three (2015; various dirs., including Jeremy Konner and Derek Waters)—One of those rare, obvious, so-stupid-it’s-actually-brilliant comic conceits that’s both infinitely renewable and funny as hell, the third season of Derek Waters’ soused, civic-minded riffing on our great nation’s landmarks, legends and lore remains far better than it has any right to be.

Although it has moved from its earlier home at FunnyorDie.com to Comedy Central, Drunk History remains as pure and simple as a shot and a beer. Each week Waters, a gentle, short-armed, kind-eyed deadpan artist, visits a new city, sits down with some people he likes who either live there or were originally from there, has a bunch of drinks with them, and listens to them talk about a key or overlooked moment in American history. Meanwhile, Waters, his supporting cast, and a surprisingly varied lineup of game guest stars perform period-appropriate re-enactments while lip-synching the words of their increasingly loaded narrator.

As Season Three guest narrator Tess Lynch pointed out in a recent interview on Previously.tv, the show is far more structured and deliberate than it appears. Each narrator has to memorize a script; each narrator is encouraged to research their topic independently; the final story involves plenty of rehearsal and multiple takes; and a medical team is present at every taping in case the boozing gets out of hand. But the final product—loose, colloquial, surreal, often hilarious—somehow feels like it was made up on the spot by a perfectly bombed barfly savant who’s tapped into a level of historical knowledge and comic invention unimaginable in our increasingly timid and calumnious high school social studies textbooks.

The high point of the season so far is Crissle West’s version of the adventures of Harriet Tubman, the “regular-ass person” who, after freeing 750 slaves during the Civil War (allegedly) declared, “This shit is dope as hell!” Tubman is played by Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, which is hardly surprising in a fictional cosmos where 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer appears as both Clarence Darrow and Andrew Jackson.

Grade: A-

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Film Review: Big Fan

Big Fan (2009; dir. Robert Siegel)—If you don’t give a damn about professional football, then pat yourself on the back. But also take a moment to pity the millions of passionate NFL fans out there whose Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays just got a whole lot more exciting. You know, fans like me, who are—or should be—finally starting to question our devotion to a sport that rivals bullfighting and Roman gladiatorial combat for the ways its savagery and ethical gray areas compromise its entertainment value. If you’d like to understand how we football fans can not only live with but altogether ignore the latest horrifying information about former players suffering from brain damage, set aside some time for writer-director Robert Siegel’s debut, one of the most perceptive films about American sports fandom ever made.

Comedian and noted sports agnostic Patton Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, a working stiff from New Jersey who loves the New York Giants as much as he hates his mom, whose basement he lives in. Big Fan is the story of Paul’s obsession, and it works even when it’s trying too hard to mean something more; you don’t have to be a Dostoevsky scholar to connect the dots when Oswalt intones “I am so sick…” while scribbling his talk-radio call-in show notes from the underground parking garage where he works. You also don’t have to be a sports-movie fan to sympathize with Paul and his pal Sal (Kevin Corrigan) as they sit outside Giants Stadium on game day and run through the full range of anger, disbelief, black humor, exaltation and exhaustion that every NFL fan will recognize from countless Sunday afternoons on the couch.

But Oswalt’s a tick too smart to transform completely into a lonesome, starry-eyed prole whose every interaction with the world goes about as well as a medieval de-nailing. Michael Rappaport, who plays the trash-talking Eagles fan Philadelphia Phil, offers a truer, ruder portrait. A master builder of pitiable and self-hating goons, Rappaport salts his exuberance with profanity and meanness—his casual obscenities sound even dirtier when contrasted with Paul’s labored hot takes. There’s no real exit from this sad character study, and like Frederick Exley noted long ago in A Fan’s Notes, there are few if any indications that being a fan is anything other than a dead end. Against such impossible odds, Big Fan still believes that hope springs eternal; its final scene catches Paul dreamily muttering “It’s gonna be a great year” from behind prison glass.

Grade: A-

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The Rules Of Attraction

James van der Beek and Shannon Sossamon in The Rules Of Attraction.


The Rules of Attraction (2002; dir. Roger Avary)—Last weekend I was on my way to a donut shop near the University of Minnesota when I noticed a group of well-dressed young women lined up on the sidewalk in front of a large, three-story house. They were listening attentively and obediently to the slightly older, slightly better-dressed young woman addressing them from her perch on the nice front lawn only she was allowed to stand on. It was impressive; everyone seemed to be taking this bit of absurdist undergraduate street theater completely seriously. But once I remembered it was pledge week at the U, it quickly became sort of tragic.

Few movies about college life dare to acknowledge the unspoken sadness and longing to belong that gnaws away at the insides of aspiring fraternity brothers and sorority sisters like the ones I saw on Saturday. The Rules of Attraction, Roger Avary’s audacious adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ second novel, is a major exception—maybe the only major exception. Set at a small, East coast liberal-arts college, Avary’s time-jumping network of interlocking romances is riddled with crossed wires, misread signals and dropped connections. In spite of a handful of darkly funny, taboo-busting scenes that might align it with the Animal Houses and Old Schools of the world, it is a work heavy with pain and heartbreak.

The Rules of Attraction also offers further evidence that Ellis was and is a screenwriter who happens to write novels. On the page, his characters’ opacity and general vacancy grates and vexes. But when those same characters appear on screen, they are reborn as mysterious, sexy, and compelling—especially when they’re embodied in such youthful objects d’art as Jessica Biel, Ian Somerhalder, Kip Pardue, and Shannyn Sossamon.

Classically Romantic yet starkly modernist, slick-looking yet unafraid of atmospheric smoke and grime, cold-hearted yet deeply sensitive to the smallest emotional slights, The Rules of Attraction is of the most underrated films of the 2000s. It’s so good it will probably make you wonder about the untapped acting potential of James van der Beek. And it ought to make you wonder about Avary, the Pulp Fiction co-writer who hasn’t released another movie since.

Grade: A