Tag: Imogen Poots

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Black Christmas

In his 1995 documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, Scorsese pointed out that sometimes directors in the capitalist Hollywood system have to be smugglers of ideas. The popular perception of Douglas Sirk’s films of the 1950s, such as Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows, was that they were shallow weepies made for a none-too-bright female audience, and thus could be safely ignored. But if you looked closer, you would see that these melodramas also happened to be some of the most intelligent and insightful discussions of race and class in popular culture at the time. Artists like Sirk discovered that if the powers-that-be don’t take you seriously and the audience supports you, you can say whatever you want.

Horror has long been at the top of the genres that “serious people” don’t take seriously. There has been a long tradition of smuggling ideas in seemingly disposable horror films. They Live was a cheap exploitation movie starring professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, but John Carpenter always knew he was making a mutated version of Network. The recent art-horror movement has built on those pioneering moments, with films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a stiletto aimed at the heart of white supremacy.

Imogen Poots (above) stars in Sophia Takal’s holiday horror remake, Black Christmas.

Filmmaker Sophia Takal attempts something similar in Black Christmas. On the surface, this is a remake of the 1974 horror film by Bob Clark that is one of the major progenitors of the slasher genre — and a direct inspiration for Carpenter’s Halloween. (Clark, by the way, is better known as the director of another holiday classic, A Christmas Story.)

As with any good slasher movie worth its fake blood, Black Christmas starts with a murder. Lindsay (Lucy Currey) is walking home through the snowy campus of Hawthorne College. After apologizing to her sorority sisters for missing the holiday party, she is hunted down through the college’s gothic architecture by a trio of cloaked, masked figures.

Across campus at the MKE house, another clutch of sorority girls is plotting a stylish revenge. They’ve been invited to perform a skit at the AKO fraternity’s annual Christmas party, and they’re brewing up a doozy. Riley (Imogen Poots) was roofied and date-raped by the former AKO president Brian (Ryan McIntyre), but he was never brought to justice. So with her sisters Kris (Aleyse Shannon), Marty (Lily Donoghue), and Jesse (Brittany O’Grady), she has written an incriminating little Christmas carol, along with some provocative choreography, to deliver to the brothers.

The women smuggling an in-your-face tirade against rape culture into a modest holiday party production is a pretty good metaphor for what’s going on in this movie. While they’re getting ready at the AKO house, Riley goes looking for the prematurely drunk Jesse and stumbles into a fraternity ritual that’s apparently not in the official chapter literature. Pledges dressed in some familiar-looking cloaks kneel in front of a bust of college founder Calvin Hawthorne and are smeared with the black blood-like substance streaming from his eyes. It seems the advancement of patriarchy pedagogy requires the occasional blood sacrifice, and if that blood comes from the bodies of young co-eds who challenge male dominance, well, all the better.

Takal is an alum of multiple Indie Memphis festivals who first got attention in the lead role in Gabby on the Roof in July, the 2011 comedy that was smarter and more insightful than the festival circuit mumblecore movies it got lumped in with. Always Shine, her 2016 homage to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, is one of my personal favorites of the last few years. Takal has a strong affinity for her actors, and it shows in Black Christmas‘ performances. Poots, with her square haircut and vulnerable affect, grows convincingly from wounded victim to avenger. Cary Elwes is especially strong as Professor Gelson, the Camille Paglia-quoting literature teacher with a secret knowledge of the more arcane and black magical aspects of Greek organization ritual.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a subgenre with misogyny baked in deeper than the slasher flick, which makes Takal’s overtly feminist appropriation of the form a pretty audacious move. On some level, horror films are the barometer of what people secretly fear at the time of their production, and it’s significant that this film’s violence ultimately flows from a backlash to speaking out about sexual assault. But Riley is no “final girl,” saved from sexually charged murder by her own purity and wits. Her solution to the mysterious killer(s) stalking the campus is to organize threatened women and fight back.

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Popstar: Never Stop Stopping

In 2005, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, collectively known as Lonely Island, were the right guys in the right place at the right time. The second comedy short they produced for Saturday Night Live, a parodic rap video called “Lazy Sunday,” came along just a few months after YouTube’s debut signaled the beginning of the web video era. When people started getting the hang of uploading and sharing videos, “Lazy Sunday” was among the first links passed around, making the Lonely Island guys the template for YouTube celebrity.

The group’s latest venture into cinematic comedy, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is true to the group’s roots in that it features a passel of new, funny, pop hip-hop songs performed by Samberg as Conner Friel, aka Conner4Real, the former boy band frontman who has gone solo and blown up to Justin Bieber levels of celebrity. But the film also sees Lonely Island acknowledging their influences. Popstar is a mockumentary that applies the Spinal Tap equation to the contemporary music biz.

And I’ll have to say, it’s about time somebody did this. The Biebers and Kanyes and Katy Perrys of the world long ago elevated themselves to the same level of mockable self-importance as arena rockers circa 1983. That was when first-time director Rob Reiner gathered some former sitcom stars, including Michael McKean from Laverne & Shirley and SNL member Harry Shearer, to make a real-seeming documentary about a fake band. This Is Spinal Tap was not hugely successful upon release (partially because people, including Ozzy Osbourne, weren’t clear that it was fake), but it became a cult classic that inspired a generation of comedians. The improvisational style pioneered by Reiner and later perfected by Tap member Christopher Guest in Best In Show, has been hugely influential on modern comedies, including those created by Popstar executive producer Judd Apatow.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping starring Andy Samberg

Handing Lonely Island $20 million and unleashing them onto the pop music landscape is a no-miss proposition. As you would expect from the guys who put Justin Timberlake’s dick in a box, they have the setting and references down cold. Conner starts off as a member of a trio called the Style Boyz who look a lot like the Beastie Boys. But fame goes to their heads, and a dispute over the authorship of a verse leads to Lawrence “Kid Brain” Dunn (Schaffer) leaving the group and retreating into seclusion at a Colorado farm. Owen “Kid Contact” Dunn stays on as Conner’s DJ, whose job is reduced to pressing play on the iPod while Conner preens in front of an arena full of screaming girls.

Following the Tap template, Conner’s new album is not good, despite the fact that he hired more than a hundred producers to make it for him, and what was envisioned as a triumphant world tour is slowly smothered under a blanket of public fiascos. But that’s where the Spinal Tap comparisons cease to be useful, because where Reiner’s film was a strictly vérité affair with only minimal scripting, Popstar‘s screenplay has clearly been honed through several drafts. Spinal Tap plays out like a D.A. Pennebaker documentary, with long, single takes producing laughs by revealing character quirks. Popstar is a more conventional comedy, resorting to over-the-shoulder dialog shots and a throw-it-all-against-the-wall approach to gag delivery.

The supporting cast is a who’s who of comedy in 2016. Sarah Silverman nails the Fran Drescher role of put-upon publicist, while SNL legend Tim Meadows is Conner’s conniving manager. Imogen Poots and Bill Hader both create memorable characters as Conner’s girlfriend and roadie, but there’s not enough time to get to know them amid a flurry of cameos. The movie’s first big laugh comes courtesy of a bit of effortless schtick from none other than Ringo Starr, who leads a cast of musical luminaries including Questlove, Snoop Dogg, Mariah Carey, Pink, RZA, and Seal, who steals the show when he is attacked by wolves.

Befitting our current cultural condition, Popstar is brash and direct where Spinal Tap was sly and stealthy. It may not be groundbreaking, but it’s consistently funny, and it proves that in the music biz, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Green Room

There’s nothing a group of musicians love to do more than swap stories about bad gigs. The guitarist got drunk and puked onstage. The promoter was a crook. A brawl broke out. But in the long and sordid history of bad shows, I dare say none comes close to what happens to the punk band the Ain’t Rights in director Jeremy Saulnier’s new film Green Room.

When we meet the Ain’t Rights — Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) — their tour of the Pacific Northwest is already faltering. After a disastrous afternoon show at a pizza parlor in Seaside, Oregon, the band figures they’ve hit rock bottom and decides pack it in and go home. But to get back to the East Coast, they need money, and the pizza parlor gig only paid out $8 each. The mohawked promoter, Tad (David Thompson), feels guilty and sets them up with a show at a club 90 miles away where his cousin works. “Just don’t talk about politics, and you’ll be fine,” he warns.

As with everyone else who has ever told a punk band not to talk about politics, his warning falls on deaf ears. When they arrive, they find that the venue where they’re booked is not so much a punk club as it is a white power movement compound hidden in the middle of the Oregon woods. Naturally, they open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” which is certainly the punk thing to do, but not the best choice in terms of long-term survival. Still, by the end of the set, they seem to have won over the crowd and are feeling pretty good about the situation until they return to the green room and find the lead singer of the headlining band standing over a dead girl with a knife in her head.

Callum Turner,Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat in Green Room

At this point, Green Room shifts gears from Decline of Western Civilization in the PacNor to a claustrophobic cross between 12 Angry Men and Assault on Precinct 13. Just when it looks like things can’t any worse for the band, Saulnier pulls the rug out from under them again. What could be worse than being locked in a room with a murderous, 250-pound neo-nazi named Werm (Brent Werzner) by a pack of eerily disciplined skinheads? How about when Darcy, the leader of the skinheads, shows up, and it’s Sir Patrick Freakin’ Stewart. Darcy calmly takes command like the evil Mirror Universe version of Captain Picard, and the casual brutality of his evil is bone chilling. He effortlessly throws the police off the scent and proceeds to clean up the mess left on his property with the help of a squad of “red laces,” as skinheads who have killed enemies of the movement are known. As the band tries to escape first the room and later the club, they discover the secrets Darcy has been hiding, which explains why he is so eager to wipe out the witnesses.

As you would expect, Stewart’s chilling precision is the film’s acting highlight. Shawkat as the cool-girl bass player sporting an ever-fashionable Dead Kennedy’s logo shirt and Imogen Poots as Amber, a local punk desperate to escape the skinhead underground, outshine their male compatriots, most of whom read as transparent murder fodder or inhuman killing machines.

Green Room is billed as a “horror thriller,” and Saulnier, whose previous work was the acclaimed indie Blue Ruin, can throw a jump scare with the best of them. But there’s quite a bit of 1970s-era hostage movies like Dog Day Afternoon in Green Room‘s DNA, so I would hesitate to call it horror. The director’s primary concern is ratcheting up the tension, one excruciating turn at a time. His most effective weapon is his grungy sound design that he uses to incorporate wailing feedback as a plot point and the goopy plop of a disemboweling for shock points. The director clearly has a broad knowledge of and affection for this musical milieu, which makes the whole proceedings feel more real and grounded and helps audiences gloss over the occasional logical lapse. Green Room is punk as hell, and it makes me eager to see Saulnier’s next outing.