It’s looking like a rainy weekend in Memphis. Lucky for you, there’s some new movies out.
Deadpool & Wolverine
The Merc with the Mouth teams up with Canada’s favorite mutant to repair a rift in the multiverse. Ryan Reynolds returns as Deadpool, the only Marvel comic book character who knows he’s in a comic book — or in this case, a movie. Hugh Jackman comes out of superhero retirement to reprise his role as Wolverine. This time he’s wearing that fetching yellow outfit Logan wore in the comics, but was deemed too cheesy for the screen. This is the first R-rated Marvel movie, so expect some cussin’.
The Fabulous Four
Bette Midler’s getting married in Key West, and her college besties Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph are on coming to the party. This outrageous road trip will rekindle friendships and open old wounds.
Longlegs
The art horror sleeper hit directed by Osgood Perkins is the creepy slow burn you’re looking for. Maika Monroe stars as an FBI agent, who may or may not be psychic, assigned to a case that has stumped the agency for decades. Nicolas Cage delivers a tour de force performance as a satanic serial killer with a glam rock fetish. This film is even weirder than it sounds, and I mean that in a good way. Read my full review.
PlayTime
The eyes of the world are on Paris this week, as the City of Light hosts the Summer Olympics. So it’s an appropriate time for Crosstown Arts’ film series to feature one of the great masterpieces of French film. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime is something rare: an epic comedy. Shooting over the course of three years in the 1960s on gigantic sets built to mimic (and mock) the glass and steel architecture that was taking over Paris at the time, it was the most expensive French film ever made. It’s nearly wordless, nearly plotless, and hilariously slapstick.
Longlegs isn’t bad. Really. It’s got Nicolas Cage, who plays a pretty convincing creepy serial killer.
The Silence of the Lambs is frequently credited as the film that made horror respectable. Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Best Picture winner was not the first horror film recognized by the Academy — The Exorcist was the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture, and ultimately took home two Oscars in 1973. But when Silence won the Best Picture/Best Director/Best Actor/Best Actress/Best Adapted Screenplay combo, the genie was out of the bottle for good.
Silence’s influence has reverberated through the decades. “Serial killer stories” have become their own subgenre. Without Jodie Foster’s indelible turn as Clarice Starling, there would be no Dana Scully on TheX-Files, for example. Maika Monroe’s character Lee Harker in Longlegs also owes her existence to Foster’s genius. Her foil, a serial killer who calls himself Longlegs, has Hannibal Lecter’s eerily insane genius about him. But where Anthony Hopkins brought an eerie stillness to Lecter, Nicolas Cage brings … well, Nicolas Cage.
After an opening flashback to her childhood in the 1970s, we see Agent Harker on assignment for the FBI, going door to door searching for a killer in a normal-looking suburb circa 1995. She somehow knows exactly which house the suspect is hiding in, which turns out to have disastrous consequences. In the first of several striking psychedelic sequences director Osgood Perkins drops throughout the film, she is called to take a test to see if she has psychic powers. When she scores high on the test, she is assigned to assist Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) on the Longlegs case. It’s a baffling situation: a series of murder-suicides covering decades. But these seemingly unrelated cases are all united by presence of mysterious letters written in code and signed “Longlegs.” How is the killer persuading fathers to murder their whole families, then leaving without any physical trace? The answer will require cryptography, a little telepathy, and a deep dive into Harker’s past.
Perkins has a knack for deeply unsettling visual compositions. The first time we see Cage as Longlegs, his eyes are cropped out of the shot, emphasizing his creepy psychopath grin. Longlegs, with a modest budget of $10 million, lacks flashy CGI or gratuitous gore. Instead, Perkins relies on character work, impeccable staging, creative camera moves, and, when he is finally revealed as the villain, an all-out sensory assault by Cage. Everybody needs to stop pretending Nic isn’t a genius. He’s one of the greatest actors of our time. Everything about Longlegs, from his unnatural paleness to his obsession with glam rock mystic band T. Rex, screams “dangerously insane.”
Monroe is compelling, if a little one-note, as the deeply damaged investigator whose life intrudes on her investigation. She has great chemistry with Alicia Witt, who plays her mother, a homebody hoarder and religious fanatic who is both the traumatizer and the traumatized. Blair Underwood’s dark humor as Harker’s boss provides a welcome counterpoint to Monroe’s twitchy neuroses, until Perkins turns the relationship on its head.
I’ll admit to having pretty low expectations for Longlegs, and I was a little surprised when my Friday night screening was sold out. Not everything Perkins tries works (and while his experimental streak appeals to me, it might put some folks off), but most of what he’s throwing against the wall sticks. It’s once again proof that when you hire Nicolas Cage, you always get your money’s worth.
Nicolas Cage as Dracula in "Renfield." (Courtesy Universal PIctures)
It’s a big weekend at the movies in Memphis, so let’s jump right in.
Dracula’s faithful thrall R. M. Renfield has been with him since the beginning. But this relationship is starting to show its age, as Renfeld slowly realizes he doesn’t have to live like this. This horror comedy features the casting coup of the decade with the great Nicolas Cage as freakin’ Dracula. Read my review.
In The Pope’s Exorcist, Russell Crowe stars as Father Gabriele Amorth, the real life priest and founder of the International Association of Exorcists, who claimed to have vanquished infernal hordes during his 24-year-career as the Dioceses of Rome’s official demon fighter.
Speaking of Italians, one humble plumber turned video game hero just launched a blue shell at the box office. The Super Mario Bros. Movie raking in $204 million domestic in three days means we’re going to be seeing a lot more Nintendo characters in IMAX. Get in on the ground floor of the critical backlash today!
It’s official: More people play Mario Kart than D&D. And that’s OK, because Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is actually good! (Read my review here.) Chris Pine, the superior of the Chrises, brings movie star charisma to this inventive and fun fantasy heist romp.
The greatest concert film of all time, Stop Making Sense, just got a 4K remastering, courtesy of A24. Both Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads were at the height of their creative powers when the director shot three nights of the Talking Heads’ Speaking In Tongues tour on Hollywood Boulevard in December, 1983. On Sunday, April 16 at 7:00 p.m., Theaterworks in Overton Square will host a free screening of the film. The stage will be a dance floor for this fundraiser, so put on your big suits and sneakers and get ready to sweat. The original trailer looks just as radical now as it did in 1984.
Speaking of radical, on Tuesday, April 18 at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis presents the controversial thriller How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Director Daniel Goldhaber’s film loosely adapts Andreas Malm’s 2021 book with Runaways‘ Ariela Barer starring as a would-be radical who gathers a team to stop a West Texas oil pipline by any means necessary.
Nicholas Hoult in Renfield (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Hear me out: Nicolas Cage deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dracula in Renfield.
I know, I know. It’s Nic Cage, dude from Con Air and Kick Ass and a couple dozen direct-to-video cash-in schlockfests. And he’s playing Dracula in a cornball B picture directed by a former Robot Chicken animator named Chris McKay. But actors have gotten Oscar nominations for lazier performances in much crappier movies. And there’s nothing lazy about Cage’s Dracula — if anything, he put way too much effort into it! But as Penn Jillette said, “The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.”
It’s appropriate that, when Renfield finally got to be the star of his own story, Dracula steals the show. R. M. Renfield appears in Bram Stoker’s novel as a patient in an insane asylum who worships Dracula. He eats live bugs to gain their life force, like a vampire drinks the blood of living victims. (His doctor describes him as “zoophagous maniac,” proving they just don’t diagnose ’em like they used to.) Dracula gets Renfield to do his bidding by dangling the prospect of immortality, but never actually helping his thrall go full vamp.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Renfield, who we first meet in a group therapy session for people in codependent relationships. He recognizes the stories of abuse he hears from his own life with the big D. He and his bloodsucking boss have fallen into a pattern of dysfunction. They move to a new place, start to hunt in earnest, but Dracula gets too greedy, and the locals are tipped off. Then a vampire hunter, usually from the Catholic Church, arrives, and there’s a big fight in which Dracula is almost killed. Renfield has to pick up the pieces, move to a new town — this time, it’s New Orleans — and start collecting victims while Dracula convalesces.
Nicolas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
With the encouragement of therapist Mark, Renfield takes the bold steps of getting his own apartment and wearing clothes that are not black. He still has to search for victims to feed his personal monster, but he decides to prioritize the abusers who are making his new friends’ lives hell. This leads to a confrontation with gangsters inside a Mardi Gras float warehouse where Tedward (Ben Schwartz), the scion of the Lobos crime family, sees Renfield’s magical murder talents first hand. When a beat cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) investigates the bloody scene, she sees that the clues lead back to Renfield and Dracula, embroiling her in an escalating conflict between the drug cartel and the dark lord.
Hoult has plenty of choices for inspiration, from Klaus Kinski to Tom Waits. He has the haircut and bug eyes of Dwight Frye, who originated the character in 1931. But Hoult seems to be channeling Harvey Gullén’s Guillermo from What We Do In The Shadows. When he and Cage share the screen, sparks fly.
Cage is not a madman. He is an extraordinarily talented screen actor in the tradition of James Cagney. His approach to Dracula is downright scholarly, mixing bits of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman with his own personae. His every gesture is perfectly calibrated for the moment. If you’re used to seeing a bored Cage vamp in roles that are frankly beneath him, watching him sink his teeth into Dracula will be a revelation.
Unfortunately, this movie is also beneath him. Awkwafina, bless her heart, is left completely at sea in a role that shouldn’t have existed. The whole crime family vs. corrupt cops subplot is stupid, disjointed, and unnecessary. It seemingly exists only to provide Marvel-esque moments of fight choreography — except the fights are the most boring part of the MCU movies! “Renfield tries to save his therapy group from an angry Dracula” is plenty of plot for a film where the real meat is a Nic v. Nicolas thespian cage match. Every second they’re not on screen is wasted.
Renfield is a must for Cage watchers, which are legion, and vampire obsessives who walk the night but could use a good chuckle to break up the gothic ennui. Others will find it a pleasant but ultimately bloodless diversion.
It’s really not that far from where we are now. For large chunks of, say, Avengers: Infinity War, everything the viewer sees was rendered by a computer. It’s only the need to have Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson appear as Captain America and Black Widow that keeps them from going totally CGI. This grounding in the real world is necessary in order for us to take seriously these stories of men in tights saving the world by punching each other.
The problem with “grounding” comic book stories in the real world is that you lose an essential element. Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and you’ll never look at a Spider-Man comic book the same way again. Comics are not just a storytelling medium — they’re vastly inferior to the written word in that regard. There’s also visual and design elements that are unique to comics, the most obvious being combining words and design elements to evoke sound. Pow! Thwack! Bamf!
Ultimate Spider-Man — Miles Morales is the teenage superstar of the new spider-movie.
Divorced from the vibrant page layout, superhero stories can seem goofy. When Spider-Man is just lines on a page, you know how seriously to take his battles with Mysterio, the guy with the glowing fishbowl for a head. But every live action superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman has had to add a line or two about how funny it is that a guy dresses up like a bat to fight crime, because it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend people act like this in real life.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses animation to embrace the conceits and eccentricities of comics. It takes its cues more from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. It also takes as its jumping off point a very comic premise, the “what if?” story. Sure, everybody knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker — a white, working class college student and cub news photographer raised by his aunt in Brooklyn. But what if Spider-Man was a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) raised by a Latinx nurse (Luna Lauren Velez) and a black police officer (Brian Tyree Henry). And also, there are five other spider-folk.
Now, we’re getting comic book-y! Publishers like Marvel beta testing new takes on their cash cow characters led to superhero comics being the first sci fi-adjacent genre to embrace multiverse theory, which solves some issues in quantum mechanics by positing that ours is one of an infinite expanse of parallel universes where everything that can happen, does happen. Super-mobster Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) hires super scientist Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn) to build a machine to access these parallel dimensions so he can retrieve fresh versions of his deceased wife and child.
Naturally, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) tries to stop him from running an unlicensed particle accelerator in Kings County. But when he fails, it’s up to Miles, who has been freshly bitten by a radioactive spider, to save reality. Since Miles can’t figure out how to stick (and more importantly, unstick) to walls yet, he needs help, which comes in the form of alternate spider-people. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), is a down-on-his-luck, freshly divorced, middle age spider-dude. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is from a dimension where the radioactive spider bit Peter Parker’s crush instead instead of him. Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) is a hardboiled, arachnid-themed crime fighter from a black-and-white universe. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) co-pilots a mecha with an intelligent radioactive spider. And Peter Porker (John Mulaney) was bitten by a radioactive pig.
Freed from the dubious need for plausibility, Into the Spider-Verse spins wild visuals. Each character is drawn in the style of their own comics. Peter Porker, who looks like a Looney Tunes character, drops anvils on people and assaults his enemies with a giant cartoon hammer. Peni has an anime-inspired, epilepsy-unfriendly transformation sequence. The animators sometimes divide the frame into panel-like spaces. “Thwip” and “Pow!” appear to punctuate the action. During the dizzying finale, in which a newly empowered Miles tries to stuff the interdimensional genie back in the bottle, gravity and reality fail, and abstract bits of Brooklyn float by.
Impossible shots coupled with a breezy screenplay make this the most fun superhero movie since Sam Raimi shot an upside down Toby Maguire kissing Kirsten Dunst. With Marvel building toward an illusory finale and DC dead in the water, this is the fresh approach the genre needs. Don’t just take inspiration from cartoons, be a cartoon.
