Tag: Mia Goth

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MaXXXine

Mia Goth reprises her role as aspiring actress Maxine Minx, while Kevin Bacon joins the cast as a sleazy PI. (Photos: Courtesy A24)

In 2022’s X, the first of the three-film collaboration between director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, a newbie film crew descends on a Texas farmhouse intending to make a porn flick. Instead, they become the latest victims of Pearl (Goth, in heavy makeup), an elderly woman who bears a strong resemblance to Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. Only Maxine Minx (Goth, au naturel) escapes the carnage. 

In MaXXXine, our eponymous heroine actually visits the Bates Motel — the real one, which still stands on the Universal back lot. She’s there because her Hollywood dreams have begun to come true. But the past just won’t let her go. As Faulkner said, it’s not even past. 

West and Goth’s collaboration began on the set of X, when the backstory she had developed for the killer granny Pearl so impressed the director that he decided to make it a prequel. Pearl goes deep into the oppressive patriarchy of rural Texas in the 1920s that twisted a young girl’s ambition into a murderous psychosis. Sixty years later, you can see the same ambition burning in Maxine. It’s 1985, and she’s made it as a porn star in the Valley, the porn industry’s dark mirror image of Hollywood. Now she wants to go legit and get parts in “real” movies, which are filmed on the side of the Hollywood Hills where you can see the big sign. 

When she strides into an audition with director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), it’s clear she’s got the juice. She slays her monologue from memory, conjuring tears on demand, which impresses the stoic director. Then, Bender asks Maxine if she would take off her shirt so they could see her tits. Not a problem, says Maxine. Later that day, Maxine gets a call from her agent Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito). She got the part. Now she just has to live long enough to make the movie.

This is more challenging than it might sound. The Night Stalker serial killer is taking victims in Southern California, and dominating the headlines. When Maxine goes to what is hopefully her last day on the job at the peepshow, she’s followed by a mysterious figure in a wide-brimmed hat. After work, her friends Amber (Chloe Farnworth) and Tabby (Halsey) invite her to a big party in the Hollywood Hills, but Maxine declines. She’s got to learn her lines, and it won’t do to show up to her first day on the set with a hangover. It looks like she made the right choice when Amber and Tabby’s bodies are found wrapped in plastic and branded with Satanic pentagrams. 

Is it the Night Stalker? Maybe. But there’s more weirdness floating around. Maxine gets a lunch invitation at a swanky restaurant from a man named Labat (Kevin Bacon). He’s a private investigator who has been hired to find Maxine and threatens to frame her with the murders, which have become known as the Texas Porn Star Massacre, unless she goes to meet his client at a swanky address in the Hollywood Hills. Meanwhile, two LAPD detectives, Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale), come calling. They’ve noticed that Maxine seems to be the only person who knows all of the recent victims of the Night Stalker, but who is not yet dead. They offer her protection if she will talk. But they don’t understand who they’re dealing with. Maxine doesn’t need protection. She’s got dreams, a good agent, and her trusty pearl-handled pistol.

Mia Goth’s performances in X and Pearl were the revelation of a major new talent. In MaXXXine, she’s a cocaine-powered whirlwind of ruthless ambition. If she has to kill a few people to see her name in lights on the marquee, then people will die. This might not seem like the makings for a sympathetic character, but her enemies are so much worse. Kevin Bacon drips with sleaze as the utterly amoral private dick sent to retrieve Maxine. When he follows her into a strobe-lit New Wave club where Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” throbs through the sound system, the film shifts into overdrive. From there, West keeps the pedal to the metal. 

In true Hitchcock fashion, MaXXXine’s gonzo climax takes place in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. Ti West has studied Hitch and his disciple Brian De Palma’s early-’80s run of erotic thrillers like Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double. But MaXXXine is not a Tarantino pastiche of cool scenes from other people’s movies. There’s a difference between sampling and working in a mode. West and Goth transcend their influences. Yes, these films are in conversation with the past’s lowbrow classics, but they never lose sight of their primary mission: Make it kick ass. 

MaXXXine
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The Best (and One Worst) Films of 2022

Elvis

It may not have been the best of times at the box office, but 2022 produced a bumper crop of great films. But before we get to my annual, non-ranked list of the best the year had to offer, we need to talk about the worst.

Johnny Knoxville gleefully provokes bees into stinging Steve-O’s nether bits.

Worst Picture: Jackass Forever

If I wanted to watch 96 minutes of recreational genital torture, I’d go to the internet like Al Gore intended.

Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis is electrifying.

Best Memphis Film: Elvis

Okay, so it wasn’t filmed in Memphis, and we’re still a little sore about that. But Baz Luhrmann’s epic musical biopic was a certified crowd-pleaser. And despite the … questionable choices made by Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, Austin Butler’s barn-burning turn as the King shed new light on the complicated psychology of the boy from Tupelo who became the most famous person the world has ever seen.

Jenny Slate voices Marcel.

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Marcel, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Who would have thought that a film starring a YouTube sensation from 2010 would be one of the most emotionally complex experiences of the year? Jenny Slate’s profound voice performance and Mars Attacks! animator Eric Adkins bring Marcel to life so convincingly, you’ll be hanging on this little shell’s every word.

Top Gun: Maverick

Best Cinematography: Top Gun: Maverick

Aerial photography has been an obsession of the movies since Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar in 1927. In Top Gun: Maverick, Claudio Miranda did it better than anyone ever has — and his work was rewarded with the top-grossing film of the year.

Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al Yankovich

Best Performance: Daniel Radcliffe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

In a year rife with good performances, no one committed to the bit like Daniel Radcliffe. Playing a well-known public figure like Weird Al Yankovic is hard enough, but Radcliffe went above and beyond in capturing the fabled accordionist’s unflappable manner and egalitarian worldview. He single-handedly carries this deeply strange biopic.

Mia Goth as Pearl.

MVP: Mia Goth

In X, the neo-slasher about a group of filmmakers and their exploitative producer who rent a farmhouse in the Texas countryside to film a dirty movie, Mia Goth plays both the young, would-be porn star Maxine and the elderly serial killer Pearl. While they were on set, Goth came up with such a compelling backstory for Pearl that director Ti West started filming the prequel even before the first film hit theaters. Goth’s ferocious performance in Pearl includes a chilling soliloquy for the ages.

UFOs invade California in Jordan Peele’s Nope. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Best Horror/Sci-fi/Western: Nope

Granted, it’s a pretty specific category, but even if Nope didn’t have it all to itself, it would still be one of the best films of the year. From killer chimps to a monster reveal that is downright beautiful, Jordan Peele’s latest is original, funny, and above all, creepy as hell. You’ll never look at a wind dancer the same way again.

Moonage Daydream

Best Documentary: Moonage Daydream

Over the course of his 50-year career, David Bowie had many collaborators who claimed he had a knack for bringing out the best in them. That’s what happened when director Brett Morgen got access to the Bowie estate archive and spent four years creating a phantasmagorical tribute to the artist. This powerful ode to the creative spirit is 2022’s most groundbreaking film.

Neptune Frost

Best Director(s): Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost

If it were only for the opening sequence, in which laborers sing a subversive work song in an actual Rwandan pit mine, Neptune Frost would still be one of the most stunning works of the decade. But it just gets better — and weirder — from there. This unique blend of Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, and Sondheim musical combines catchy tunes with revolutionary fervor. Most remarkably, it was made on a Kickstarter budget.

Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Every once in a while, a picture comes along that captures the zeitgeist so effortlessly it seems to have invented it from whole cloth. The elements of Everything Everywhere All At Once — multiverse stories, a renewed earnestness, a breezy visual style, and kung fu — were all floating in the ether, but it took Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to wrangle them into one fantastic package. Anchored by Michelle Yeoh at the peak of her powers, a comeback turn by Ke Huy Quan, and a game-for-anything Jamie Lee Curtis, this is the rare film that features both eye-popping visuals and a deeply humane philosophy.

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Pearl

Mia Goth executes a spellbinding performance as Pearl in this prequel.

What makes a person into a monster? Is it a response to a life of trauma and bad breaks, or were they born that way? Or is it a little bit of both?

In the fall of 1918, Adolf Hitler had been on the front lines of World War I for four years. He was sitting in a field hospital, where he was recovering from a mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blinded. When he heard the news that Germany had surrendered, he went blind again. Hitler never got over the emotional trauma of his army’s defeat on the battlefield, and the narrative that the Jews, the Marxists, and the racially impure had “stabbed Germany in the back” formed the core of Nazism.

One factor in Germany’s defeat that perhaps didn’t occur to Hitler was that 900,000 of their soldiers caught the flu. The 1918 flu pandemic started at an Army base in Kansas and was unwittingly shipped to warring Europe by American troop transports, where it spread like wildfire in the cramped, unsanitary trenches. When director Ti West’s new film Pearl opens, the rural Texas community where the title character, played by Mia Goth, lives is struggling to keep going as the second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic sweeps over them.

Pearl lives on a farm that will be familiar to those who have seen X, the slasher homage West and Goth released earlier this year. She lives with her mother (Tandi Wright), a German immigrant who is none too happy about the way the war is going, and father (Matthew Sunderland), who is paralyzed and completely dependent on his family. Though the carefully tended farm looks idyllic from the outside, the dynamic between Pearl and her stern, demanding mother is increasingly toxic. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is in Europe fighting with the Allied Expeditionary Force, and she’s chafing under the demands of farm life and caring for her invalid father. Pearl’s only escapes are the fleeting trips to the local movie theater, where she sees Thea Bera, film’s first sex symbol, as Cleopatra. It’s the dancing chorus girls in a “soundie” (short films played between features that were the precursors to modern music videos) called “Palace Follies” that really catch her eye. She plays out her fantasies of dance and fame before a captive audience of cows and sheep in the farm’s little barn, away from the disapproving eyes of her mother.

Maybe it’s the little hits of morphine she skims off the top of her daddy’s medicine, but Pearl doesn’t feel like other people, and the pandemic-induced isolation hasn’t done her state of mind any good. The only person who seems to understand her is the theater projectionist (David Corenswet), a self-described “bohemian” type who is pretty easy on the eyes. Pearl struggles with unfamiliar feelings of lust — she’s already married, after all — but when he offers to take her away to Europe, where they can rake in the cash making stag films, she falls for him. When her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) tells her of a dance audition at the local church for a touring vaudeville show, it sets her on a collision course with her family obligations that will end well for no one.

If you’ve seen X, you know that Pearl never does escape that farm. She’s too dangerous to walk among the normals, and she knows it. This prequel is all about the creeping revelations of her murderous nature, and the titanic failures of nurture that set her on a path to destruction. Goth and West came up with the idea for Pearl while devising a backstory for the villain in first film, and dove right into Pearl once A24 saw the early cuts of X and immediately green lit the prequel. Her final monologue, in which she confesses everything that’s been going on in her mind to a horrified Mitsy, is an instant classic, but she’s spellbinding in every frame of this film. West shoots Pearl like it’s a Douglas Sirk technicolor melodrama — think Imitation of Life, with more beheadings. There’s another Goth/West film in production, which finishes the story of Maxine, Goth’s porn star character in X. Based on Pearl, all I have to say is, shut up and take my money.

Pearl
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New On The Big Screen: Viola Davis, Pearl, and The Evil Dead

Viola Davis stars as General Nanisca, a real-life African warrior from the 1820s, in The Woman King.

August is traditionally a slow month at the cinema as the summer tentpole season plays out. But this August, we’re also seeing the downstream effects of the pandemic production bottleneck. The surprising upshot is that the dearth of megabudget projects has created openings for a wide variety of new films to hit theaters, many of which are well worth your time.

The biggest release this weekend is The Woman King. Viola Davis is the only Black woman to have achieved the “Triple Crown of Acting” — winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony. She’s one of the elite group of actors who have an entire Wikipedia page devoted to listing her awards. Now, at age 57, she finally gets the big action role that all movie stars get these days. Davis stars as General Nanisca, the leader of the Agoji, an all-female group of warriors who defended the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Think The 300, but with Black women.

The surprise success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out spawned a mini-wave of cheeky murder mysteries. The latest is See How They Run. Yes, we’ve gathered you all together because one of you is a murderer. Maybe more than one. We’re not sure. It’s complicated. This one is set in the 1950s, when a hit play in London is being adapted for a Hollywood movie by director Leo Kapernick (Adrian Brody). When the director turns up dead, Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie Constable Stalker (Saorise Ronan) are assigned to crack the case. The suspects are an all-star cast of pretentious theater people including Ruth Wilson and David Oyelowo. Watch Ronan’s hilarious deadpan in this fun trailer.

Ti West’s X was another surprise hit last spring. Now, the director and his star Mia Goth return with a prequel to that juicy bit of neo-exploitation cinema. Pearl tells the origin story of the elderly killer in X by flashing back to the silent era, where the titular Texan only wants to get out of the sticks and get famous. Early reviews have generated Oscar buzz for Goth, who, as you can see, is absolutely killing it.

It’s Time Warp Drive-In weekend, and if you’re a horror fan, this one is a can’t-miss. Sam Raimi scored the year’s second-biggest box office hit with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You can see how he got his start with 1981’s The Evil Dead. Now considered a masterpiece of horror, The Evil Dead was shot on a shoestring budget in East Tennessee, and gained a big enough cult following to greenlight a sequel. Evil Dead 2 returned star Bruce Campbell to the Rocky Top hills, this time with more money and more know-how. Just look at this incredible scene, a masterclass in both practical effects and walking the thin line between horror and comedy.

The evening at the Malco Summer Drive-In will conclude with the third Evil Dead film, 1992s Army of Darkness, in which our not-too-bright hero Ash is transported back in time to save a medieval kingdom from the Deadites. Listen up you primitive screwheads! This is how it’s done!

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X

Mia Goth in X.

Two strippers, a sleazy club owner, an aspiring film director, and his sound recordist girlfriend set out from a Houston shake joint in a van marked “Plowing Service.” They drive to an isolated Texas farm where they intend to shoot a porno movie. The farm’s owner is a creepy old man with a wife who stares at the city folk from an upstairs window. 

If that scenario just screams “slasher movie” to you, you’re going to love X. Ti West seems to have set out to create the kind of movie Golan Globus Productions would buy based on a pitch and a poster and release in a double bill with Ninja III: The Domination. RJ (Owen Campbell), who serves as West’s alter ego, insists he can make a “good dirty movie.” That’s West’s attitude towards this audacious genre exercise. X is the inevitable moment when the “elevated horror” movement crashes into trash horror, and y’all, I’m here for it. 

I always say that all you have to do to get a good review out of me is get the fundamentals right, and West, an indie film vet who has taken his lumps in the studio system, absolutely does that. X is shot through with bodyslam jump scares, but it’s also a work of great directorial elegance, such as the breathless scene in a darkened bedroom where West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett ratchet up the tension with a simple focus pull. 

West is not shy about his influences. The opening title card announces that it’s 1979, the year of Alien, The Amityville Horror, Phantasm, and Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer. RJ name-checks Psycho, then has a breakdown in a familiar-looking shower.

RJ (Owen Campbell) Bobby Lynne (Brittany Snow) Jackson Hole (Kid Cuti) and Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) get ready to make movie magic in X.

All slasher movies worth their salt need a great final girl, and X’s long windup is all about guessing which one of the three women it will be. Overt sexuality is always punished in slasher movies, so odds are it’s not going to be the brassy blonde porn star Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow). Maxine’s (Mia Goth) blue eye shadow and predilection for skinny dipping seem to mark her for a grisly death. That leaves Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) the wide-eyed sound girl as the obvious choice — at least until she asks to shoot a scene with veteran woodsman Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi aka Kid Cuti).  

The answer is actually surprising. For even though X is a self-conscious genre exercise, it’s also a subversive deconstruction that has its own theories about why and how sex and violence intersect in this kind of horror film. But maybe extended discussion of the subtext (although is it really a subtext when the author keeps waving it in your face?) distracts from the questions that matter most to horror fans: Is it scary? Is it gory? Is it fun? Yes to all three. West has taken the familiar beats of VHS-era horror and smoothed them down like a producer crafting a perfect pop song. He knows that editing and sound design are the key to making a good scary movie. And it also helps that his cast, which include Goth playing two characters, is game for anything. X is an instant horror classic—a guilty pleasure you shouldn’t feel too guilty about. 

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Sundance in Memphis: The Potter-Lynch Generation

Mayday

On day 4 of Sundance, patterns are beginning to emerge. It’s probably perilous to declare any kind of new trend from a limited sample of moves. Maybe it’s just the films I decided to watch, which are similar. But nevertheless, there are common elements visible on the drive-in and virtual screens.

Take Karen Cinorre’s Mayday. Ana (Grace Van Patten) is a cater waiter working a wedding with her musician boyfriend. When the venue’s electrical systems start shorting out, she is sent downstairs to trip the circuit breaker. Her boss follows her, and assaults her in the freezer next to the ice sculpture. In a dissociative state, she goes to the industrial kitchen and feels called by the oven. She turns on the gas and sticks her head inside, but instead of dying, she falls into an alternate reality. She wakes up on an unfamiliar beach where she meets Marsha (the excellent Mia Goth) and a male pilot who has also washed up lost. Marsha rescues Ana, and as they’re driving away on her motorcycle, the pilot is killed by an unseen sniper.

Ana is adopted by Marsha’s group of women guerrillas, based in a mini submarine, who are embroiled in a vaguely defined war pitting women in against men. The guerrillas are like sirens from Greek myth, attracting men to their deaths on the rocks by sending out fake distress calls. At first, Ana is okay with the new arrangement, and discovers her own excellent eyesight makes her a deadly sniper. But eventually, she starts to question this weird limbo existence and plots ways to return to the real world with the help of a friendly female mechanic (Juliette Lewis).

Carlson Young in The Blazing World

A character escaping their trauma by going into a fantasy world, and who must then decide whether or not it’s worth it to return to the real world, is also the basic plot of writer/director/actor Carlson Young’s The Blazing World. In this case, the situation is more prosaic: Margaret (played by Young) has to return to her parent’s ostentatious mansion to help them move out. She is haunted by the memory of seeing her sister drown in the pool when they were kids, an event which was both caused by and exacerbated her parents’ toxic relationship. Margaret’s inner struggle manifests as increasingly florid, candy-color hallucinations.

Are we seeing the work of a generation of young filmmakers raised on Harry Potter-damaged YA fantasy who discovered David Lynch in film school? When I write that, it kind of sounds derogatory. But the influence of Lynch’s psychotropic epic Twin Peaks: The Return is everywhere at Sundance this year, and I for one am here for it. Indie social realism is all fine and good. The cheap price point of such productions means that we will never have a shortage of that aesthetic. But in the world of 2021, the desktop computer-based digital video technology that has enabled the digital indie revolution since the turn of the century has advanced considerably. Where it used to take up all the available computing power to just render the video and edit shots together, now apps such as Adobe After Effects are available in any homemade editing suite. Now we’re seeing an explosion of visual creativity as a result.

The problem with both Mayday and The Blazing World is in the writing. Both choose style over substance in a way that cannot be excused merely by the film’s budget limitations. But hey, if we’re going to continue to watch movies about the problems of privileged white people (some things never change in the film world), at least it looks cool.

In the Earth

The outlier among my day 4 Sundance viewing was In the Earth. English filmmaker Ben Wheatley is one of millions of people who spent the pandemic year of 2020 working on a new art project. The difference with Wheatley is that he managed to make an entire feature film and get it in Sundance. Wheatley, who previously directed both the chilly J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise and the gonzo gun-fu thriller Free Fire, seems liberated by both the speed with which he worked and the total lack of regard for creating marketable material that comes when you’re staring disaster in the face and thinking, “What have I even been doing with my life?”

There’s a world-destroying pandemic on, and two scientists (Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia) are summoned to a rural retreat to pursue their projects, which might save humanity. Instead, they find themselves the subjects of a pair of researchers (Hayley Squires and Reece Shearsmith) who have gone full Captain Kurtz in the woods. They think they have identified an alien intelligence here on Earth which is behind the pagan legends of demons who live in the English countryside, and they are using magic mushrooms, flashing lights, and sounds to try to communicate with it.

In the Earth combines folk horror elements with real-life anxiety, seasoned with a strong dash of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. The climax is the kind of intricate, psychedelic trip that can only come from being cooped up by yourself for months with only your editing bay to keep you company. I personally loved this minor miracle of a movie, but my recommendation comes with one big caveat. There’s a strobe light warning at the beginning of the film, and I said to my sensitive wife “Hey, how much can there be? A shot or two?” Well, there’s a lot more than a shot or two. If you’re epileptic, or just have a problem with strobe light effects and quick edits, you should sit this one out. Otherwise, when this one surfaces — as I’m sure it will — horror fans will be treated to one of the most innovative films of the past decade.

Ailey

Monday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In, two films not about the problems of rich White people. The first is Ailey, a documentary by Jamila Wignot about the life of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey, which just sold to a distributor hours ahead of its premiere.

Then at 9 p.m., Judas and Black Messiah, director Shaka King’s biopic of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party who was hounded, and perhaps ultimately killed, by the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation. The cast is stacked with first-rate talent, led by Black Panther’s Daniel Kaluuya and Sorry to Bother You’s Lakeith Stanfield.

Sundance in Memphis: The Potter-Lynch Generation

Tickets to Sundance films at the drive-in are available at the Indie Memphis website.