tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/departments/moving-picturesSPLICETODAY.com2024-03-29T11:32:12Ztag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333762024-03-29T06:30:00-04:002024-03-28T23:46:27-04:00Two Weeks in Another Studio<p>“…rolling on top of him when he was 14 and drunk on a movie set or whatever, I mean come on…” Bret Easton Ellis is talking about Anthony Rapp and Kevin Spacey. “There was no sexual battery or assault… Kevin Spacey said, ‘Why don’t you stay…?’ Then Anthony Rapp ran out of the room… Oh, I don’t know why Anthony Rapp thought he had to tell that story, but that moment was hysterical and completely insane… ‘Sexual battery’… I think Kevin Spacey has been unfairly—and now! He’s been found <i>not guilty </i>in all of these cases. What do you make of that, Hollywood?”</p>
<p>He makes a compelling case. But I wasn’t supposed to be listening to anyone talk about anything on my break. Da Boss says henpecking is strictly reserved for after hours, but I can’t help myself from helping myself to some hash browns. Has-beens and hash browns: we meet in the commissary. But <i>there is no commissary at NARC FILM! </i>I’ll eat my browns elsewhere. But Da Boss didn’t ask me to turn Mr. Ellis off, he wanted to hear what the author had to say about the disgraced actor. “Cutting him out of that movie was disgusting, and immoral…” Da Boss listened without any expression. After Ellis trailed off, Da Boss looked at me and said, “Where is the projector?” I motioned towards the closet and he ran towards it, grabbing a huge box covered in dust. “Don’t call until Thursday,” he said. I reminded him I never call him on any day.</p>
<p>Da Boss will be beginning the final sound mix of <i>SATUR-19 </i>in early-April with his producing partner and recording engineer Jordan Romero. He’ll be recording narration, adding sound effects, and finishing off any dubbing left to do himself rather than calling in actresses to redo their lines. Why bother? He has varispeed tape machines, and besides, “this is really more of a feature length music video than a film… I should be showing this in art galleries with surround sound…” He trailed off into mumbles like always, leaving me to decipher whatever riddles he had left “carefully planted” around my person. Right, the sound mix was in a couple weeks, so I was to have a near-complete assembly cut ready to go without any gaps. Problem is, Da Boss has left almost all of the compositing work to the end, and he hasn’t even finished the final “breakdown” section, which he promises will be “mostly pictures and title cards.”</p>
<p>He rushed back into the room, still dusty. I asked him what the projector was for. “I’m filming the breakdown sequence. Katherine’s in the next room, she’s about to read for me. I think I might need some help setting up the microphones. Can you dolly grip? Actually can you roll sound or boom op? I really appreciate it. Thank you!” And then he ran out of the room. What’s wrong with him? I don’t want to be a movie director—editing is fine. Directing seems so stressful: up and down, always the world on your shoulders. Meanwhile I’m the one that actually <i>puts the movie together</i>, and I’m in the opening credits and on the poster, and I don’t have to talk to anyone but Da Boss. And that’s important because I really don’t like most people. But I do like Da Boss.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/monicaquibbits">@MonicaQuibbits</a></i></p>
Monica Quibbitstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333772024-03-29T06:28:00-04:002024-03-29T07:32:12-04:00She's Got a Great Ass<p>The upcoming release of <i>Booty Or Bust 9: Booty Forever</i> is a moment to look back at the <i>Booty </i>phenomenon, surely among the major cultural events of our time. Who could’ve guessed, from its humble initial release in only three small cinemas, the status that these films would attain over the last 10 years?</p>
<p>The characters are now familiar names: Sören Freen, Yvonne DeMorlac, Norman Geist, Catherine Fintag Post. We may love or hate them, we may even love to hate them<i>—</i>but above all, we accept them. They’ve become part of our family; they’ve become our mirrors. The hairstyles are copied, as are the clothes, speech patterns (including what every parent of a pre-teen knows, even the comical, stuttering response of “Fat” Pauly Torkin, “Wha-wha-what could you possibly mean you… I mean me…huh ?”), we buy what they buy, we love what they love.</p>
<p>An astonished public has watched the first eight entries in the <i>Booty Or Bust</i> series continue their unbroken ascent. There’s the rare yet occasional false note, like the notorious “Sexorcism dialogue” in <i>Booty Or Bust 7 : No Time Like Booty Time, </i>but the public will forgive and accept all things <i>Booty</i>. Like a wayward child, it can do no wrong, with each new release we welcome it back.</p>
<p>Something appealing in the series’ basic premise, as well as the record box-office receipts, guarantees that we can expect new <i>Booty</i> installments for an indefinite period of time. Producer Larry Fishbaum said in a recent <i>Variety</i> interview<i>, </i>“Why the hell not ? It seems nobody ever gets sick of <i>Booty</i>! If they keep coming back, I’ll keep putting them out.” But despite Fishbaum’s jocular insouciance, he’s a feeling man, and a regular donator to the Red Cross. These are films of the heart and mind; that risk all and succeed.</p>
<p>Like everyone who saw it, I too was captivated by the initial offering,<i> Booty Or Bust: Who’s Got Da’ Booty? </i>Its combination of virtuosic acting, intelligent and insinuating dialogue and cinematic linguistics came together to explode like a perfectly blended Molotov cocktail. So much so that no one noticed its four-hour running time or the dialogues in Sanskrit, unusual for a film in what’s usually considered a light genre.</p>
<p>One’s tempted to say that the strength of the series lays in the unforgettable set-pieces found in each film. The conversation on the burning bridge between Barbara Lomax and Brontus MacManeer stands as the major cinematic moment of the last few decades. Who’ll ever forget hearing Brontus’ cry, “Look down Barbara! Down! Those are shoes and I like the color red!” And then, the Sacrificial Archery scene in <i>Booty Or Bust 3: A Time For Booty </i>or Kitten Platt’s resurrection from the Golden Lake in <i>Booty Or Bust: Gimme That Booty</i>. Despite these stunning set-pieces, the <i>Booty Or Bust</i> films remain unified works of art where no single element prevails.</p>
<p>If in the first eight films we’ve been introduced to the Trufin and the Larnex, the Node-Related Tricept and the Shord, <i>Booty Or Bust 9</i> suggests a wholly new take in the <i>Booty</i> canon. The excitement has risen ever since the release of the first so-called “Chubby Balloon” teaser. Crazy? Unheard of? Absolutely: it’s <i>Booty Or Bust.</i></p>
<p>But what’s the secret of <i>Booty Or Bust</i>? From where does its ongoing fascination stem? Perhaps we received a hint in the unforgettable monologue from <i>Booty Or Bust 4: I’m Talkin’ Booty</i> when Frantisek Preen says to Amanda Thorndike, his heart on fire, “You know Amanda, peoples is always asking me what I’m about. Like if a man can be summed up in just a few words! But you can’t do that! You can’t just sum up a person, nobody can! Not even an idiot—even if they’re smart as hell! So you know what I sez to them? I look ‘em straight in the eyes and I tell ‘em: Booty, that’s what I’m about, just Booty, plain and simple.”</p>
<p>Booty, plain and simple. <i>Booty Or Bust 9 : Booty Forever</i> opens across the country on April 1.</p>
Dick Turnertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333692024-03-27T00:01:00-04:002024-03-27T22:59:51-04:00Isabella Rossellini on the Set of <I>Bye Bye Monkey</I><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HJVEgwXLzlM?si=zlbnKnTcGmnJ_uFv" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333602024-03-26T06:29:00-04:002024-03-25T03:29:22-04:00Free Flowing Revolution<p>The streaming landscape used to be different. Netflix was never the digital Library of Alexandria was for DVDs, although it was once more of a hub. Not even a decade ago individual studios had yet to Balkanize their properties to their own proprietary sites, Fandor was the only place to go for indie and festival affairs, and the Criterion Collection was hosted on Hulu. There wasn’t much form to it, just piles of catalogs loosely sewn together by threadbare algorithms that were still hemmed by human hands. Mubi was the notable standout back then, not just offering access, but limiting it. They used to launch a movie every day and only keep it up for 29 more. Thirty films, 30 days. They were the most interestingly curated, grabbing new alternative titles, practically undistributed international features, and pulling material up from the depths of cinematic memory. Their time crunch incentivized watching them too, instead of letting them just rot in a queue.</p>
<p>It was in this context I remember trying to write a paper for my 200 level film history class on Slow (or “Contemplative”) Cinema, trying to break myself again out of whatever cinematic comfort zone I’d wound up in. I wanted to push myself, find the extremities of the medium, especially from the contemporary and emerging digital world. I’d spent some time trying to track down the works of Lav Diaz, but beyond his latest (at the time) <i>Norte, the End of History</i> (2014) being on Netflix, his more aggressively experimental, slow, and outright long movies (<i>Norte</i> was short by his standards, clocking in at just over four hours) were pretty much impossible to find. It seemed like my last avenue was to try to reach out to my professor’s grad school roommate who wrote a dissertation on Slow Cinema, when out of the blue Mubi ran a retrospective on the recent master. All of a sudden, I could watch his previously impossible to see films, so long as I had a whole workday’s worth of hours free for one.</p>
<p>I immediately got to work on <i>Evolution of a Filipino Family</i> (2005), a transitional work in his oeuvre—both in material and form. Diaz spent nearly a decade making <i>Evolution</i>, first by shooting it on 16mm, then finishing the bulk of the 10-hour opus on digital, which revolutionized Diaz’s workflow and aesthetic possibilities. The transfer Mubi had back then showed plenty of evidence of this, with occasionally artifacting cutting in, whether black pixelated squares checkering the frame or the squeaky magnetic clicks of DV tape rupturing the soundtrack. It heightened the archeological quality of the film, from its period setting during the fascist Marcos regime to the quality of finding and watching a film that seemed like it was lost in the ether.</p>
<p>“... alam ko kung paano namatay si Jean Vigo.” (“I know how Jean Vigo died.”)—Taga Timog, filmmaker, reads the title card when the film cuts to black after over 600 minutes of relentless running. Taga Timog, the director character that acts as a stand-in for Diaz in the movie, translates from Filipino as “from the South” which—as Adam Katzman <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/lav-diazs-quiet-storm/">pointed out</a>—references both Diaz being born in Mindanao (the southernmost region of the Philippines) and his bottom-up approach to cinema. The Jean Vigo part is, at first, more illusive.</p>
<p>Vigo, that anarchist son of an anarchist, made one feature-length film before he died at 29 of tuberculosis. That film, <i>L’Atalante</i> (1934), along with his 47-minute <i>Zéro de conduite</i> (1933) are considered some of the finest films to emerge from interwar France, with some saying they’re a couple of the greatest films ever made. They’re the kinds of films everyone encounters when they first dive into cinema: we hear about “cool” movies like <i>Pulp Fiction</i> (1994) and Quentin Tarantino mentions French New Wave in an interview, and then you’re tracking down the film that inspired Truffaut to make <i>The 400 Blows</i> (1959).</p>
<p>I can’t say I appreciated the impact of Vigo’s films when I first saw them at 16 or 17, but images do come back to me time and time again—people dancing in Nice, framed as if they’re a part of the sky; feathers filling a dormitory after the school children have staged a revolution; a sailor running his hand over a record and music coming over the soundtrack. Vigo’s films, the few there are, were exuberant dreams of freedom, full of free-flowing form that feels far away from the hapless world Vigo was born into. In Vigo’s cinema is a liberation he fought and died for as the producers tried to cut his <i>L’Atalante</i>, and Vigo battled to preserve his vision while rotting away with consumption. It’s no different than his father dying in prison for anti-war beliefs, or the revolutionaries who’ve died in the jungle during the over half-century that the guerrillas have been trying to liberate the Philippines from a fascist and imperialist yoke.</p>
<p>Sometimes it seems like Jean Vigo’s cinema is the only cinema that mattered. For Diaz he seems to be a martyr of cinema—his ideals were the aesthetic promise of liberation, while also being destroyed by the material realities of the world. For me it was full circle: I’d spent so long trying to find the ends of cinema, its furthest reaches, and wound right back to where I started with canonical French works. I’d circumnavigated the globe of film, and found its revolution everywhere.</p>
Alex Leitag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333612024-03-26T06:26:00-04:002024-03-25T03:31:23-04:00<I>Irish Wish</I> Is the Fake Romance Everyone Wants<p>“It's one thing to edit a book,” James tells Maddy in the new Netflix film <i>Irish Wish</i>. “But,” he adds,” you really shouldn’t go on editing your own life.”</p>
<p>The moral here is that Maddy (Lindsey Lohan) needs to stop trying to be someone she’s not. The less obvious moral is that fans of the romance genre need to stop dreaming of distant, fictional romance and seize the romance in their own life. Director Janeen Damian and writer Kirsten Hansen have created a self-critique of their own fantastical genre—a self-critique which magically makes the fantasy more believable. As in Jane Austen’s <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, when the author tells you that she knows that romance isn’t real, it makes her promise of romance more, rather than less, credible.</p>
<p>Somewhat inevitably in such a self-referential film, Maddy’s an editor and would-be novelist. At the beginning of the movie, she has a crush on her star writer Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), whose book she heavily reworked, turning it into a huge hit. She’s too shy to tell Paul about her feelings, though, and he ends up engaged to her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan).</p>
<p>At the wedding at Paul’s stunning Irish estate, Maddy stumbles on Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who grants her heart’s wish—she wants to be the one marrying Paul Kennedy. And so, magically, it’s no longer Emma’s wedding eve, but her own.</p>
<p>Maddy should be happy! But instead she feels like someone who’s started reading that romance in the middle, and missed out on key scenes—like the wedding proposal, which she can’t remember. Worse, Maddy finds herself attracted to the wedding photographer, James (Ed Speleers). Paul and Emma, meanwhile, have feelings for each other even in this alternate reality. Be careful what you wish for, Maddy.</p>
<p>Telling romance fans to be careful what they wish for is on point and hypocritical. Romance is a wish or a fantasy; the audience for <i>Irish Wish</i> (including me) wants to spend a pleasant hour and a half imagining themselves out of their own humdrum lives and into a more exciting, more beautiful world—one with dramatic Irish cliffs, for example. They want to imagine themselves in love with some fabulous someone—a dreamy wealthy, dashing successful writer, for instance.</p>
<p>Romance can be seen as a kind of fantasy infidelity. <i>Irish Wish</i> is very aware of that possibility. Though Maddy, in the alternate timeline, shares a room and a bed with Paul, the script’s careful not to have them do anything too inappropriately sexual. Maddy covers her eyes when she realizes Paul’s in their shared bathroom naked. When he puts his arm over her at night, she freaks out and accidentally kicks him in the balls. We don’t even ever see the two of them kiss.</p>
<p>Maddy’s wish can’t come <i>too</i> true, or she’s unfaithful to her true self and true life. Romance readers don’t in general <i>really</i> want to marry a stranger, any more than James Bond fans want to really be an international spy with all the attendant dangers. The dream of love has to stay a dream for it to be enjoyable.</p>
<p>You don’t want the dream to abandon plausibility completely, though, or you can’t suspend disbelief, and where’s the wish fulfillment in that? <i>Irish Wish</i>, with the indulgence of its viewers, plays a shell game. It warns its viewers not to let themselves get sucked into a fantasy of who they <i>should</i> love and who they <i>should </i>be. And then, as an alternative, it offers a reality which is also a fantasy: James, the dashing photographer, who isn’t wealthy, but who believes in and wants to encourage Maddy’s own novel-writing.</p>
<p>James wants Maddy to believe in her real self. But that’s also a fantasy; Maddy isn’t a real person, and her “true” story is as much fiction as the alternate, “unreal” wish world. Maddy’s relationship with Paul is a dream within a dream, a fantasy within a fantasy. The false path isn’t really there to lead her to the true one, as Saint Brigid suggests. Rather, the movie identifies the false path as false so the <i>other</i> false path takes on greater verisimilitude. The fantasy’s more solid, believable, and entertaining when it’s self-aware enough to dispel itself before it ushers you into the <i>real</i> wish.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that a fantasy can’t have real life applications; “Don’t let your stupid boyfriend steal your ideas and put his name on them,” is solid advice. (The suggestion that real men don’t let women propose to them is maybe less so.) Nor is the point here that romance fans are dupes. On the contrary, the multi-level meta-fiction of Maddy’s multi-narrative suggests that romance fans are self-aware and they enjoy stories that play with the genre’s tropes of wish-fulfillment and with the semi-buried guilty thrill of imagined infidelity. <i>Irish Wish</i> provides the fantasy its viewers want by not giving them the fantasy they want. That’s how the romance genre, and much of fiction, works.</p>
Noah Berlatskytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333562024-03-25T06:28:00-04:002024-03-25T02:50:57-04:00The New Fun Nun Movie<p>Go to a movie theater now. Not a superhero in sight. Marvel will implode soon, a victim of its own success, over-saturation, people moving on—the most natural thing in the world. While MCU and DC(EU?) films continue to be produced, announced, and scheduled, their reign is over. Even barring catastrophic collapse in the United States, I doubt people will return to Spider-Man and the Avengers for comfort. The films of the future will be blunt, cruel, and obvious, satisfying the demands of an increasingly illiterate, impatient, and intemperate population. Maybe they won’t go the movies, but parents still take their kids to the movies, and if you’re young enough and inclined, it’ll remain a lifelong hobby, maybe a career. That’s what will sustain the form of the narrative feature film as we’ve known it for nearly a hundred years.</p>
<p>In 2027, when sound celebrates its centennial, will we still be in the throes of yet another cycle of exploitation-lite? Ever since the turn of the century, pop culture has refused to reiterate new decades, instead cycling through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It’s all very inbred, and the only “innovation” in the last 10 years has been the conversion of character into vessels for various political cause celebres. It’ll be remembered with scorn just as the cheesy orchestral synthesizer scores of the 1980s date the films they belong to so badly.</p>
<p>Among the many qualities that made the films of the 1970s so great worldwide was their music. Just last week, I reviewed Rose Glass’ <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, but neglected to mention the rollicking and adrenalized score by Clint Mansell, one worthy of Michael Small. That movie had a bit more going on than <i>Immaculate, </i>but this new nun movie starring Sydney Sweeney has no pretensions towards anything but grindhouse glee. It’s not <i>Schoolgirls with Chains</i>, but I’m glad Sweeney’s a movie star in a time when the tide is turning towards more challenging, original films across the American marketplace. We’re not in the 1990s, but what will these early years of the 2020s look like in 2027? What movies of our first quarter-century will be incorporated into the pre-show bumpers?</p>
<p>All I knew going into <i>Immaculate </i>was that Sweeney met director Michael Mohan and writer Andrew Lobel in 2014 when they were initially trying to put the movie together. She auditioned, but the financing fell through. She remembered them, and their script, and a couple of years ago called them up and now they’ve made it. <i>Immaculate </i>is a brisk 89 minutes, with about nine minutes of credits, with the songs and music cues all the way at the end. I stayed to make sure that they used Bruno Nicolai’s theme from <i>The Red Queen Kills Seven Times</i>, easily the most thrilling part of this quickie horror movie. Just two years ago something like this—starring Selena Gomez, perhaps—would’ve seemed absurd, offensive to some people. Now it’s another feather in Sweeney’s cap, and a boost to the careers of Mohan and Lobel.</p>
<p>Simona Tabasco, best known in the States for her the second season of <i>The White Lotus</i>, opens the movie, the very unlucky “first girl.” It was charming how Sweeney affected no accent nor broad caricatures of trauma—this is just a fun nun horror movie, with some great practical special effects and a wicked ending that <i>definitely </i>wouldn’t have been produced five years ago. A qualified taboo broken, a risk taken for a public Hollywood is finally convinced is ready for more brutality, more gore, more death in their theaters and at home. Well, that’s what movies were made for. Leave the superheroes to their comic books.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333552024-03-25T06:27:00-04:002024-03-25T02:47:50-04:00Satan Tango<p>The new film <i>Late Night With the Devil</i> is a triumph of production design and period detail, even if its underlying story is somewhat derivative. It assembles a beautiful package around a demonic possession plot we’ve seen many times before. Still, the film makes great use of the lead role of veteran character actor David Dastmalchian, and it serves as a fantastic achievement in production design. After a run at South by Southwest and more horror-focused film festivals last year<i>, Late Night With the Devil </i>is now in theaters from IFC.</p>
<p>Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian) hosts a late-night talk show called <i>Night Owls </i>in 1977. Despite intermittent popularity, he’s never beat Johnny Carson in the ratings. The film’s set on Halloween night, about a year after Jack’s wife’s death from cancer. The bulk of the film represents the “found footage” of that Halloween night broadcast, with Jack hosting a succession of “spooky” guests like a mentalist (Fayssal Bazzi), a skeptic (Ian Bliss), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and the one girl who survived a cult’s mass suicide (Ingrid Torelli.) It’s got everything but Ed and Lorraine Warren, although a reference is made to the charlatan couple whose “work” inspired the <i>Conjuring </i>movies.</p>
<p>Satanic elements eventually appear. Unfortunately, it can’t show us much new. I still haven’t seen many movies about exorcisms that did it appreciably differently from <i>The Exorcist,</i> including that franchise’s numerous sequels and remakes. Regarding the combination of period TV and sudden violence, the monkey attack sequence in Jordan Peele’s <i>Nope </i>is a better version of the same idea. But the film’s worth it for its style and lead performance. And the ending is legitimately shocking.</p>
<p>Directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes, <i>Late Night With the Devil </i>is intimately familiar with the fashion, haircuts, style, and cadences of 1970s television and pulls off the look flawlessly. They’re Australian brothers who are presumably way too young to remember 1970s television, but they nail it. The film’s other triumph is the casting of Dastmalchian, a familiar face from his work as a character actor in Christopher Nolan movies and superhero films of the Nolan <i>Batman</i>, MCU, and DCEU varieties. He played the small but pivotal part in Nolan’s <i>Oppenheimer</i> as William Borden, who openly accused J. Robert Oppenheimer of being a Communist spy. Here, he’s natural in the lead role, both outwardly believable as a public-facing talk show host and the more tormented private man. After this, I could see his career pivoting to more significant parts in indie movies.</p>
<p>There’s considerable controversy related to <i>Late Night With the Devil</i> when some critics noticed that it appeared AI had been used for some artwork in interstitial moments a handful of times in the film; the filmmakers later confirmed this was true. I don’t love this, but it’s a minor part of the film. More noticeable is that <i>Late Night With the Devil </i>includes possibly the most production company logos I’ve ever seen before in a film. However, I don’t begrudge an independent film scrounging funding from many different places.</p>
Stephen Silvertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333542024-03-25T00:01:00-04:002024-03-23T23:56:30-04:00Theresa Russell on <I>Whore</I> (1991)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333492024-03-22T06:29:00-04:002024-03-21T19:06:34-04:00Monica’s History in Film Editing<p>A thin strip of film. A shallow cone of light. A purple haze running through the room up to the projection booth. Our projectionist, Bennington, is lighting himself on fire one feather at a time. He’s trying to dye himself brown. Rooster runs into the booth and stops the projector, upsetting everyone, and then extinguishes Bennington, upsetting everyone. These were the days of our lives in the screening rooms of dailies and showrooms on the Hollywood backlots we used to work for in the 20th century.</p>
<p>My whole life has been film. You see, I’ve eaten emulsion. I’m quoting Jerry Lewis, but it’s true. I ate a whole roll of film once thinking it was Bundt cake and had to go to the Laurel Canyon Emergency Room. Sal Mineo and Mickey Dolenz pumped my stomach while that faggot from Paul Revere and the Raiders watched. What a horrible “scene, <i>man</i>.” I was never too good at crafting stories for myself. Mostly I let my husband do the talking. Any sensible and semi-regular reader of mine will be able to infer whether I am telling the truth.</p>
<p>In fact, I got my first job as a film editor on the set of <i>Trackdown</i>, a previously obscure 1976 revenge film starring Christopher Mitchum that Quentin Tarantino wrote about on his movie theater’s website. Once people started seeing the credit “ASSISTANT TO THE ASSISTANT EDITOR MONICA QUIBBITS” the offers came rolling in and it stayed that way, forever. Not. I was a duty saleshen for 12 years before I made guild membership. Still, the A.C.E. does not recognize “non-human participants in the arts,” so my considerable contributions to the art of film editing in America remain uncredited.</p>
<p>That’s why I’m dedicated to finishing this project for Da Boss. He’s told me from the beginning he’ll give me full credit, and he’s made good on his word on his previous two movies. This one is different, though. This one is being made in the editing room, and people will notice. Not just film people—anyone that watches this bizarre fucking movie is going to know that the editor, <i>Monica Quibbits</i>, salvaged discontinuous, unfinished material into a coherent and perhaps powerful piece of work. Da Boss will get most of the credit, and he’ll be in public with it, but my name is on his films, and it’s for what I did, <i>editing. </i>I do love what I do. Did I tell you I ate emulsion? But that was in my salad days.</p>
<p>Now I’m in my steak days. What’s that? I never understood the expression “salad days.” What does it mean? I know it connotes “good times,” but when you’re having “good times,” are you really eating salad? Wouldn’t you rather be eating a big, juicy hamburger or a whole pepperoni and anchovy pizza? Wouldn’t you rather be eating <i>ice cream</i>, drinking Coca-Cola, and maybe having some fucking <i>chicken wings</i>? Wait, shit, never mind, fuck, wait, don’t publish this, oh fuck no wait stop recording wait I don’t want this transcribed wait wait don’t put that into the column come on Nicky what the hell Really Really Really why are you doing this to me? Come on you know I was only oh so now it’s some big thing. Okay cool well you can have another tantrum and I can type it up. You want me to end here? Okay put down the hammer and give me the TASCAM. I’ll send this one in.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/monicaquibbits">@MonicaQuibbits</a></i></p>
Monica Quibbitstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333472024-03-22T06:27:00-04:002024-03-21T17:55:50-04:00A Sea of Pigs<p>The pilot nicknamed “Porco Rosso”—Captain Marco Rossellini, to those who knew him before he became a pig—stands aboard a tugboat headed to Milan, reading a newspaper. The ship’s carrying the ruined remains of his seaplane, shot down during a dogfight. “‘Is Porco Rosso Alive or Dead?’” he reads aloud. “Good question.”</p>
<p>Loosely based on director Hayao Miyazaki’s serialized manga <em>The Age of the Flying Boat</em>, <em>Porco Rosso</em> began as an animated short for Japan Airlines and ended up a movie the director essentially made for himself. The film zeroes in on two of the director's lifelong obsessions—Italy and airplanes—and the result is an adult film about love, longing, pain, and regret starring a womanizing anthropomorphic pig with PTSD. And, perhaps unintentionally, it’s the story of an alcoholic.</p>
<p>In a 1997 interview with <em>Animerica Anime & Manga Monthly</em>, Miyazaki expressed his dissatisfaction with the finished film: “To my mind, animation is for children. <em>Porco Rosso</em> flies in the fact of that assumption. Moreover, as a producer I still think <em>Porco Rosso</em> is too idiosyncratic a film for a toddlers-to-old-folks general audience. That it turned out to be a hit was an unexpected stroke of luck. It's actually kind of disturbing.”</p>
<p><em>Porco Rosso</em>’s “idiosyncratic” opening moments make it clear that this isn’t a quiet-afternoon-with-the-kids Studio Ghibli feature. When we meet the hero, he’s passed out with a bottle of wine in front of him. He wakes up, annoyed to be disturbed, and takes a call about a job. Porco lives alone on a tiny, nameless island in the Adriatic Sea. Aside from a small tent, his trademark cherry red seaplane is his home.</p>
<p>The life of an alcoholic is lonely. They may have many friends or loved ones but drinkers inevitably get drunk alone, taking refuge in numbing silence. After Porco rescues a group of precocious hostages from a gang of sky pirates, he takes a solitary meal at the Hotel Adriano. Housed in the remains of an ancient estate, the Adriano is a jewel in the darkness of the Mediterranean night and a refuge for pilots.</p>
<p>Inside, Porco exchanges mumbled, half-hearted pleasantries with a few well-wishers (and some unhappy sky pirates) before he heads to a corner of the Adriano to dine alone. Behind him, framed, faded photos of better days hang on the crumbling wall.</p>
<p>Porco’s solitude is interrupted by Gina, the hotel’s glamorous proprietor and one of the few people who knew Porco when he wasn’t a pig. Gina’s nearly as isolated as Porco, and the two loners share a profound bond from childhood. She’s received news that the remains of her husband (the third in a series of pilots killed by war) were finally found. “My tears dried up long ago,” she tells him after a lifetime of loss. Porco, like a brother to Gina’s first husband, can’t find the courage to adequately comfort his lifelong friend in her grief. Instead, he coughs out a self-serving quip. “The good guys always die,” Porco says, raising his glass in a cynical toast.</p>
<p>This scene is important: Porco’s curse isn’t looking like a pig—he’s <em>become</em> a pig. We don’t know how long Marco has been the legendary aerial bounty hunter “Porco Rosso”—but it’s been long enough that no one’s ever surprised by his appearance.</p>
<p>Yet, the Porco we first meet is surly and miserable. He’s a sexist. He takes stupid risks, like when he travels to Milan for a new plane fully aware that the local fascist authorities have a warrant out for his arrest (Porco is implied to have deserted the military of his home country out of moral objection). When Porco’s questioned about his choices, he is quick to dismiss them with a reminder that he’s, “just a pig.”</p>
<p>Mostly, Porco hates himself. His friends and brothers-in-arms died while he lived and that survivor’s guilt has only festered with time. Once, as Marco Rossellini, he fought for his home. As Porco Rosso, he fights for money to fix his plane, enjoy nice meals and sip wine. He’s even blind to Gina’s obvious affection for him, a love that could blossom into something greater if he could only see it.</p>
<p>Unwilling to engage with his humanity, Marco became Porco and a man became an animal. In a rare moment of vulnerability, after telling the story of the near-death experience that left him no longer human, Porco wonders if he even survived when so many others died. “The good ones are the ones who died. Or maybe I'm dead. Life as a pig, it's the same thing as hell.”</p>
<p>Self-loathing is the handiest weapon in the arsenal of an alcoholic in denial. “Surely, if I hate myself more than the people I’ve hurt, let down or otherwise failed, things will be okay. For me, drinking became an almost unconscious ritual most nights, but it was driven by the simple fact that I didn’t like who I was. Look around any bar, at any time, and you’ll see a few of us nursing a whiskey or a beer. We know, on some level, this isn’t good for us and yet there we sit. A sea of pigs drinking on an endless chain of desert islands.”</p>
<p>Porco finds this worldview challenged when Fio, his airplane designer’s 17-year-old granddaughter, interrupts his life of emotional exile. Fio’s a genius airplane engineer and architect in her own right, a challenge to Porco’s personal philosophy of crude sexism. Using her designs, it’s an all-female workforce that builds Porco a new and improved seaplane.</p>
<p>Fio also doesn’t humor the aerial ace’s romanticized self-pity. She sees the best in him, the courage and heroism he claims he shed with his humanity so long ago. In her optimism and bravery, Fio sees him as a man and not the pig he claims to be. At one point, Porco’s dimly-lit face even appears human before her, if only for a moment.</p>
<p>Porco’s curse is the core conflict of the film, but it’s more complex than a fairy tale animal transformation. Other characters don’t even seem to care that he’s a pig: we watch him go about his life in the way that a human being would, with only occasional mentions of his appearance. Women adore him, and he’s seen by the world as a legend; even his enemies begrudgingly respect him.</p>
<p>Most movies of this kind would have ended with Porco’s transformation back into a human. Cathartic magic transformations are central to many of Miyazaki’s other films: Chihiro’s parents in <em>Spirited Away</em> themselves revert from oinking pigs back into humans. Maybe there’d even be a wedding or a shot of a gray-haired Marco and Gina holding hands in the Hotel Adriano’s rooftop garden.</p>
<p><em>Porco Rosso</em> isn’t that kind of film. The end of <em>Porco Rosso</em> is Miyazaki’s most ambitious and ambiguous: after successfully defeating his American rival Curtis in an aerial duel-turned-bareknuckle boxing-match for Fio’s honor and winning the money needed to pay off the reconstruction of his plane, the two pilots decide to distract dozens of incoming military planes long enough to give their audience enough time to escape to the Hotel Adriano.</p>
<p>In a narrated flash-forward set many years later, Fio speaks fondly of Gina, Curtis, and even the sky pirates she befriended as a teenager. She also tells us that the fight was the last time she ever saw Porco Rosso.</p>
<p>Human beings—real, non-animated ones—don’t change instantly and the beauty of the film’s ending is how open to interpretation Porco’s fate is. His huge moment of self-realization at the end of the movie, that Gina loves him, believes in him and waits for him, is just seconds old when we see him for the last time. Self-realization is not self-actualization, however. How he acts on this information—whether he lives for moments or for decades—is left unknown. Like any of us, he could just as easily fall as soar.</p>
<p>Did his luck finally run out at the hands of Italian fascists? Or did he regain his humanity and give up a dangerous life in the sky for a life on the ground with Gina? Maybe he found another empty island and another bottle of vino to crawl back into.</p>
<p>Is he Porco Rosso or Marco Rossellini? Is he a pig or a man? Dead or alive?</p>
<p>—<em>An expanded version of this essay appears in </em>Drying Out at the Movies: Six Sober Essays by Max Robinson, <em>available early next year.</em></p>
Max Robinsontag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333442024-03-21T06:27:00-04:002024-03-24T06:55:24-04:00The Watchable But Unnecessary <I>Road House</I> Remake<p>Doug Liman’s new version of <i>Road House</i> is surprisingly watchable, even if it’s an unnecessary remake. The original <i>Road House</i> came out in 1989, and its intrinsic 80s gestalt was one of its best qualities. Patrick Swayze starred as Dalton, a nationally famous bar bouncer recruited to a club in rural Missouri called the Double Deuce, where he fights off local toughs and ultimately foils a scheme by a nefarious crime lord. It was one of Swayze’s most beloved roles, and he was credible as a fighter, just two years after he starred as a dancer in <i>Dirty Dancing.</i></p>
<p>The new version is set in the present day and moves the action to the Florida Keys, bringing it squarely into the South Florida Sleaze subgenre. The hero is still named “Dalton” and is now played by Jake Gyllenhaal, only instead of a renowned bouncer, he’s a former MMA fighter, disgraced in the sport for reasons that are slowly parceled out throughout the movie.</p>
<p>Jessica Williams, formerly of <i>The Daily Show</i>, plays the Sam Elliott role of the road house owner, and she agrees to pay him $20,000 a month, which is… a lot to pay a bouncer. Dalton is protecting the club from a rich, in-over-his-head crime lord (Billy Magnussen) who has his own plans for the real estate. Why these elaborate plans for revenge and violence are focused on the bouncer doesn’t make much sense, although that was also the case in the original. </p>
<p>The movie starts behind the eight ball for a few reasons. A remake wasn’t needed, and it’s missing the 1980s setting and the absurdity of the “famous bar bouncer” concept. Directed by Doug Liman, who did the first<i> Bourne Identity </i>movie, the action scenes are choppy and shaky-cam-dependent. Rather than the Double Deuce, the road house is called “The Road House,” and the boat he lives on is called “The Boat.” (The road house is a pretty cool set that the movie makes the most out of.)</p>
<p>Daniela Melchior plays the love interest. Joaquim a de Almeida, who played the best villain in the entirety of the <i>Fast and the Furious </i>series, plays a corrupt lawman. There are too many characters, and some of them could’ve been combined.</p>
<p>But the film won me over. Gyllenhaal is delightfully wisecracking as Dalton, while Magnussen is great at playing the smug jackass. Conor McGregor, the MMA fighter whose public persona I’ve never much enjoyed, shows up in his movie debut as an enforcer—appearing for the first time naked, as if he were The Terminator—and is charismatic, even if he’s not a natural actor.</p>
<p>Besides, <i>Road House</i> isn’t even the most shamelessly fan-service-dependent 1980s reboot of the week; that’d be <i>Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. </i></p>
Stephen Silvertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333212024-03-19T00:01:00-04:002024-03-16T01:37:20-04:00John Malkovich Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characterstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333252024-03-18T06:29:00-04:002024-03-16T21:34:46-04:00Kristen's Love Gun<p>Telltale sign of a healthy American cinema: two movies with suspiciously similar premises and plots are released within months, weeks, days of each other. You know <i>Antz </i>and <i>A Bug’s Life</i>, <i>Armageddon </i>and <i>Deep Impact</i>, <i>Red Eye </i>and <i>Flightplan</i>, and if you were around for the Oscars in 1985, maybe you remember three films about women and their failing farms: <i>Country, The River, </i>and <i>Places in the Heart</i>. And even if you don’t remember <i>any </i>of that, you’ve probably heard a misquoted snippet of Sally Field’s Oscar speech for that last movie: "I can't deny the fact that you like me—<i>right now, you</i> like me!”</p>
<p>But maybe that moment has passed, too. Maybe all you can remember is Emma Stone looking horrified when she won for <i>Poor Things</i>—and now that awards season is over, the only bit that’s looking to stick around is Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech for <i>The Zone of Interest</i>, wherein he mildly condemned the insane regime running Israel right now. That’s the only piece of the show still talked about, which means it’s by some distance the most “important” thing to happen at the Oscars since Michael Moore said we were living in “fictitious times” in 2003. Whatever you think of him now or then, he was right.</p>
<p>Last month, I reviewed Ethan Coen’s directorial debut <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>, co-written with his wife Tricia Cooke; it’s a much more impressive and exciting solo outing than his brother’s <i>The Tragedy of Macbeth</i>, one of only a handful of movies I’ve ever almost fallen asleep in, and it’s good to know that they’ll be back soon with another short nouveau grind house movie called <i>Honey Don’t</i> this time next year. For now, we have <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, the <i>other </i>lesbian crime movie that had the good/bad luck of coming out after <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>. Directed by Rose Glass and co-written with Weronika Tofilska, <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>can’t match even one Coen brother on the merits of its script, casting, or attitude.</p>
<p>This is a tall order: the Coen Brothers’ debut <i>Blood Simple </i>came out 40 years ago, while Glass is only 33—this is her second film; her first, <i>Saint Maud</i>, was released in the fog of the pandemic. <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>is a much better film than <i>Saint Maud</i>, one with far more moving parts and places to go. Kristen Stewart plays a gym manager in 1989 Albuquerque; her dad is Ed Harris, career criminal with all local police under his control; Jena Malone’s her sister, and Dave Franco her asshole brother-in-law. Stewart’s gay and hates her dad—not because he’s homophobic, but because she thinks he killed her mom. Katy O’Brian walks into Stewart’s gym one day after screwing a stranger (Franco) in the parking lot. Stewart introduces her to PED’s, and she becomes addicted, popping veins like The Hulk.</p>
<p><i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>made me wary at first, with anachronistic lines like “Your body, your choice,” but it’s consistently hard to predict and genuinely weird for such a big movie. There are leaps and bits of magical realism that were really refreshing, and while you could call the ending a cop-out, it’s just dumb and obvious enough to work. It’s also a surprisingly nasty movie, one with a firmer grip on its tone than many American counterparts. Glass doesn’t just go for gore, she challenges the audiences and goes for laughs that would scare most investors out of the room. Two moments that made me howl with laughter: Stewart punching her already battered sister’s face in, and choking out that girl Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) when she somehow wakes up from a gunshot to the head.</p>
<p>I was stunned by how much negative criticism <i>Drive-Away Dolls </i>received, and dismayed by how many writers are more eager to treat <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>with kid gloves. The former is a much better movie, but they’re both merely excellent programmers, silly and violent films that can hold up a weak month like February or March. The violence and nihilism of both, particularly <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, feel essentially 2020s, post-superhero. Forget Emerald Fennell, Rose Glass is the millennial British director to pay attention to.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333242024-03-18T06:27:00-04:002024-03-16T21:23:19-04:00Why <I>Edge of Tomorrow</I> is the Only Good Tom Cruise Movie<p>Tom Cruise’s career is irritatingly inevitable and inevitably irritating. Ever since he stretched his cheek muscles into that smug, staid grin in 1980s hits like <i>Risky Business</i> and <i>Top Gun</i> he’s been an unavoidable screen presence, playing the same can-do guy with no particular acting ability who we all have to love because he’s superstar Tom Cruise with the uncanny valley wind-up smirk. And then playing him again. And again. And again. The smirk won’t die. No matter even that the smirker behind it is the leader of an abusive cult.</p>
<p>This is the genius of the 2014 sort-of classic <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i>. It’s a film in which Cruise smirks over and over. And then you get to watch that smirk get wiped off his face as he’s repeatedly, brutally, and satisfyingly murdered.</p>
<p>The story to set up the repeated Cruise-icide barely makes sense—but that’s part of the charm. The world has been invaded by a tentacular alien species which has conquered Europe and is moving on to Britain. Cruise plays Major William Cage, an American military publicity flak who through his own cowardice and incompetence ends up on the leading edge of the last-ditch no-hope final assault on alien-occupied Europe. Unsurprisingly, Cage gets killed. Surprisingly, he discovers that because a special tentacled alien bled on him, he now gets reset to the day before the invasion every time he dies.</p>
<p>It’s fun because, for Cruise haters, it recapitulates Cruise’s hateful career. He enters the story as a slick, sniveling glad-handing salesman, trying to grin his way out of having to join the fighting. And then he’s turned into a hero through sheer, numbing force of repetition. The God of the great studio that’s the world just decides to give Cruise take after take to become our savior protagonist. Nonsensical as the film is, uninspiring as Cruise may be, there’s no escape. He rises up, teeth first, into super-heroism and leading-man money.</p>
<p>If the film reiterates the terror that is Cruise, it also gives viewers a chance for cathartic revenge on his relentlessly annoying screen image. Because Cage keeps getting killed. He gets torn apart by tentacled aliens. He gets run over by a truck. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets crushed by a falling plane. He gets hit by a truck. He gets torn apart by tentacled aliens. He gets shot.</p>
<p>And every time, <i>every time</i>, he pops up again, tightening those little muscles in his cheek, looking determined, sweaty, heroic. And then he gets killed again! He keeps thinking he’s the hero, like all those other movies, and instead, at last—at last!—he’s just another sad sack piece of canon fodder. Someone somewhere finally realized that this guy is a blight on cinema, and they’ve decided to eliminate him and make someone else the hero. Someone like, say, the talented Emily Blunt, who plays hardened sergeant Rita Vrataski, a woman who had the time-repeat power before Cage.</p>
<p>The Cruise defenestration is too good to last. Eventually the movie has to move forward. Cage turns into a standard action hero. Rita gets demoted to sidekick and (its implied) love interest. The last image is of Cruise standing there with the smug smile, assured that no matter how many times you kill him, he can never stay dead. Because, for some reason as unfathomable as the plot, audiences and Hollywood love him.</p>
<p>But that’s the way it goes. Not every movie can have a happy ending. But the joy of <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i> is that there are many endings, and in most of them Tom Cruise’s smirk vanishes from the screen forever to trouble us no more. It’s not real. But Hollywood lives on dreams.</p>
Noah Berlatskytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333192024-03-15T06:29:00-04:002024-03-14T20:15:14-04:00The Pillow Shot<p>Yesterday the boss told me he’s quitting. “I can’t do this anymore.” He fell into the couch with a book by Robert Wagner and hasn’t left since. Yet he hasn’t stopped asking me questions about <i>SATUR-19</i> and its progress, “how’s the edit?”, all that. This man needs a break. But maybe I should look for other work. Da Boss told me in 2021 I’d be editing all of his films from now on, but this latest phase has gone on a bit too long, it’s time to look for backup. Maybe an SFX or post-house in Los Angeles, but that’s an oversaturated market, and way too many fried chicken restaurants. We have those in Baltimore, too, but rarely do they sport such hideous and offensive caricatures of our breed.</p>
<p>The state of <i>SATUR-19 </i>should mollify the boss but he appears more interested in Mr. Wagner’s fond memories of beating his wife or whatever. “It’s actually about the actresses he knew, loved, and worked with, Monica. It spans 30 years. Reading this is more fun than anything else I can think of doing right now. Nothing serious. Not a biography, not even a memoir. I don’t even think this book is 100,000 words. So what? He’s probably lying in most of it. I don’t care. It goes down easy. I’m comfortable. All of these people mentioned in the book are dead. It’s fine, I can read about it. I have a space heater. This couch is REALLY comfortable.”</p>
<p>During all of that, I stitched together a few title cards, written from Da Boss’ instructions. A sampling: “SEDUCED AND ABANDONED,” “I STRODE THE MOUNTAIN,” “GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS,” “YESTERDAY’S WORK,” “DISEASE AS MORAL FAILURE,” “WHERE ARE YOU,” “LOSING IT,” “WHERE AM I GOING,” “2020,” “2024,” and “YOUR LOVE IS FADING.”</p>
<p>I realized I never asked Da Boss what this movie was about—and if you’re wondering how I can edit a film without knowing what it’s about, please talk to any professional editor in Hollywood and get back to me, keep in mind I’m right and if they contradict me they’re wrong or lying to subvert not my but <i>your </i>best laid plans so watch out—and it felt like the right time. “What the fuck is this thing?” Da Boss explained that <i>SATUR-19 </i>was an experimental anthology film with “some connection to” the following films: <i>Fantasia, The Image Book, </i>and <i>My Winnipeg</i>. I asked him where the scary brooms were, and what about Mickey. He laughed and went back to his murderer memoir.</p>
<p>A lot of the transition shots, or “pillow shots,” come from scenes we didn’t end up using, entire sequences that, according to Da Boss, “just didn’t work.” He was right: they sucked. But there was enough good material in here for a feature film, one even a few minutes longer than Da Boss’ previous two. “How are we doing on dubbing?” <i>Uh</i>, I drawled like Butthead, <i>isn’t that, like, your job, dude? Uh-heheheh. </i>Da Boss sighed, got up, and pulled his phone out, texting with one hand and trying to undo the top button of his shirt with the other. I told him to turn around, said I’d help, jumped up and spur-clawed that button right off of his collar. It was the claw of love, and once he realized the shirt I ripped was basically worthless, he thanked me and told me to get back to work. “I’ll go to the Gap and you finish the breakdown section.”</p>
<p><i>—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/monicaquibbits">@MonicaQuibbits</a></i></p>
Monica Quibbitstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333172024-03-15T06:27:00-04:002024-03-14T20:08:12-04:00Funeral for a Fuck Buddy<p>A sexy lesbian love story, which soon evolves into a scuzzy crime plot—the idea behind<i> Love Lies Bleeding</i> hasn’t been done this well since the Wachowskis made <i>Bound</i> in 1996. If you’re looking for a movie with earnest, positive LGBTQ representation, look elsewhere. Go watch <i>Rustin </i>on Netflix. But <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, while uneven at times, is an audacious delight, a movie not afraid to show its protagonists as violent and disgusting.</p>
<p><i>Love Lies Bleeding, </i>directed by Rose Glass (<i>Saint Maud</i>), is set in a small New Mexico town in 1989, and thanks to a reference to George H.W. Bush’s famous speech about crack cocaine in Lafayette Park, we know the exact date of the events, in early-September of that year. The period detail is just right for a depressed small town in the late-1980s, including vintage gym equipment and some of the worst haircuts you’ve ever seen on both men and women. Ed Harris’ bald head/ponytail combination is almost worth the price of admission by itself.</p>
<p>Ethan Coen’s recent <i>Drive-Away Dolls </i>was also about a lesbian duo taking on criminals but gave it a certain lightheartedness. <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>has a darker and sleazier tone that recalls earlier Coen movies like <i>Blood Simple. </i>In <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager with a mysterious past. One day she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter and aspiring bodybuilder with whom she begins a steamy affair, one rendered graphically in a series of love scenes.</p>
<p>Both have shady pasts, with Lou’s tied to her estranged father, also named Lou (Ed Harris), who controls the town’s criminal rackets. Adding to the scumbag action is J.J. (Dave Franco), the abusive and sleazy husband of Lou’s sister (Jena Malone), a man who sports an even worse haircut than his father-in-law’s. On the margins is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov, Mikhail's daughter), who just about walks off with the film as a psychotic flirt.</p>
<p>Can Lou and Jackie’s love survive these circumstances and the difficulties of their pasts? Will Jackie ever make it to that bodybuilding competition in Vegas? And is <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i> the first significant film ever to paint the use of anabolic steroids positively? The performances are all outstanding, with Stewart successfully leveraging her public persona, and O’Brian breaking through with a one-of-a-kind role. Anna Baryshnikov, best known from the Apple show <i>Dickinson</i>, is terrifying as a character who uses a baby-girl voice to mask a surprising agenda.</p>
<p>The film keeps hinting at the possibility of supernatural elements, leading up to a final choice that’s bound to be divisive, and popular among certain niche fetish communities.</p>
<p>Stewart, an out lesbian for years, played the media like a fiddle in the leadup to the film, posing for a sexily androgynous cover for <i>Rolling Stone</i> and drawing the rage of certain right-wingers angry that “wokeness” had ruined the girl they thought was cute back when she made the <i>Twilight</i> movies. However, this isn’t a <i>Madame Web </i>situation where the star’s press tour was more memorable than the movie.<i> Love Lies Bleeding</i> is a thriller that isn’t afraid to get nasty.</p>
Stephen Silvertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333202024-03-15T00:01:00-04:002024-03-15T02:09:03-04:00Jonathan Glazer's Oscar Speechtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333052024-03-13T06:26:00-04:002024-03-13T00:14:01-04:00The Many Targets of <I>First Time Female Director</I> <p><i>First Time Female Director</i> is a movie that looked pretty good on paper. It’s the directorial debut of Chelsea Peretti, a graduate of the alt-comedy scene who starred for years on <i>Brooklyn Nine-Nine</i>, and she also wrote and stars in it. It has a promising premise and a cast filled with talented people. The film mostly doesn’t work. While there are scattered laughs here or there, it’s never as funny as the premise and the presence of all those hilarious people, and its satire has too many targets, most of which are a couple of years out of date. It should’ve been a bad sign that the film is debuting on the Roku Channel, almost a year after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year.</p>
<p>Peretti plays Sam, a playwright who’s written a Tennessee Williams-like Southern play set to be mounted at a mid-level theater in L.A. When the director’s fired on the eve of the first rehearsals for #MeToo-related reasons, Sam’s brought in to direct the play herself. The meta-joke is that Peretti is herself a first-time female director of the movie. The style of humor is <i>30 Rock</i>, set in the theater—the woman in charge, played by the person who also created it, is struggling with a group of showbiz prima donnas and money people. And <i>First Time Female Director</i>, like <i>30 Rock</i>, isn’t afraid to make the protagonist the butt of the joke.</p>
<p>The humor, though, just isn’t as bright and is unfocused. The cast features veterans of just about every popular sitcom of <i>30</i> <i>Rock</i>’s era—Peretti (<i>Brooklyn Nine-Nine</i>), Megan Mullally (<i>Will & Grace</i>), Max Greenfield <i>(New Girl</i>), Blake Anderson (<i>Workaholics</i>), Amy Poehler (<i>Parks and Recreation</i>), Adam Scott (<i>Parks and Rec</i> and <i>Party Down</i>), and Nick Kroll (<i>The League</i>)— but no one from <i>30 Rock </i>itself. The prominent cast members of the play include a narcissistic gay guy (Benito Skinner), straight woman (Kate Berlant), and a social media influencer (Megan Stalter), although none of them do much with these roles beyond stereotype.</p>
<p>There are also cameos from comedy stalwarts like Andy Richter, Tim Heidecker, Brad Hall, and Peretti’s husband, Jordan Peele, who’s gone so long since he was last on camera as an actor that I didn’t initially recognize him. Whatever the film’s faults, Peretti is good at getting her famous friends to work with her. She’s not as adept at scene transitions, presented in bizarre slo-mo.</p>
<p><i>First Time Female Director</i> starts as a satire of contemporary theater, but the third act has added a lot of targets, including many related to race and gender. And the ending—characters yell at Peretti with cultural grievances straight out of 2017-2019—is dire. If you missed the era of “white women are just the worst” serving as a self-evident comedic premise, it’s your lucky day.</p>
<p>Last year’s movie <i>Theater Camp </i>was a much sharper and focused satire of theater people. At the same time,<i> American Fiction</i> better explored a late twist involving her jealousy of a Black female playwright.</p>
Stephen Silvertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332672024-03-12T06:29:00-04:002024-03-11T21:57:58-04:00<I>Scream</I> Belongs to Wes Craven<p>It’s sad that the 2022 <i>Scream</i> reboot (or “requel,” as one of the characters would call it) ends with a dedication “For Wes Craven.” Not sad because horror lost one of its great filmmakers seven years before the film’s release, but because the movie is pretty actively bad. Spyglass Pictures and Paramount’s attempt to resuscitate the previously Weinstein-produced franchise after a fifth film from Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson never materialized seemed like it could be a slam dunk in a market driven by “elevated horror” (a term derisively employed in the film, despite one of the character’s purported fondness for <i>The Babadook</i>). After all, <i>Scream</i> had become the metatextual staple of the horror genre after the first film’s release in 1996 made waves with audiences and critics who’s grown tired of the bombardment of overly formulaic slasher sequels that had become easy cash cows for newly multi-national corporatized Hollywood system of the 1980s.</p>
<p>It might not have been the first slasher-about-slasher—John Waters’ <i>Serial Mom</i> came out only two years prior, and also featured Matthew Lillard talking tropes in a video store, which I’m sure wasn’t lost on Craven and Williamson—but <i>Scream</i> was the shattering of a tired formula. It wasn’t another introduction to a wannabe iconic movie monster systematically slashing through a group of disposable teens until we reached the final girl. Instead, it was a whodunit, where the “monster” could be anyone in a game where everyone knows the rules because they’ve all watched too many movies.</p>
<p>It was a fresh take that knowingly became a parody of itself when its sequel cold-opened with a murder at the movie adaptation of the events of the first movie. The post-<i>Scream</i> era of self-aware horror whodunits produced very few good movies outside of the main franchise, with the notable exception being the excellent Williamson-written <i>I Know What You Did Last Summer</i> (1997). In this sense, <i>Scream </i>was a subgenre mostly made up of itself. It creates a sort of untouchable work outside of the core team of Craven, Williamson, and their stars, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. Within this framework everything is a game, up for grabs. But it’s important to remember that while <i>Scream</i> has its fun riffing on one framework, it’s a framework itself, with its own tropes and trappings.</p>
<p>The first time <i>Scream</i> tried to chase that idea was also the first time Williamson didn’t write the screenplay. While <i>Scream 3</i> (2000) is maligned, Ehren Kruger’s screenplay paired with Craven’s operatic direction incisively cut through <i>Scream</i>’s logic-play by creating an impossible maze built out of hollow Hollywood sound stage versions of the original murders and amorphous mansions. It’s a ride that no longer allows the audience to be as clever with it, because the director of the horror film is always in total control: he makes the rules, he just lets you play along. It's a conclusion to a trilogy that was aggressive, hard-hitting, and, like so much of Craven’s work, sincere in the end. The franchise would continue under Craven’s direction over a decade later with an attempted generational shift in <i>Scream 4</i> (2011), with Emma Roberts taking on the apparent final girl baton from Neve Campbell, although not without its own twists. That sequel was meant to spawn two more from Craven and Williamson, although they never materialized before Craven’s death in 2015.</p>
<p>With another 11-year gap in the bag (not including the all-but-already-forgotten <i>Scream: The TV Series</i>), a new <i>Scream</i> was hitting theaters. This time the film was helmed by the indie-credentialed Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence, directing a screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, attempting to once again update <i>Scream </i>for a new generation. They try to start with as fresh a slate as they can by establishing a new core cast centered on a pair of sisters played by Melissa Berrara and Jenna Ortega. It is a full-hearted attempt to remix a metatextual work mired in 1990s culture for a Gen Z that’s grown up in a world more self-aware and self-conscious than ever, and Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s approach fundamentally doesn’t work: it’s not reshuffling a game built out of genre conventions, it’s totally trapped by it.</p>
<p><i>Scream</i> (2022) simultaneously tries to live up to the inventive, playful aspirations of Craven’s four films while at the same time being obliged to wink and nod towards what fans of the series would want to see. And the film is all too aware of the trap it’s beset in, and it’s angry about it. The killers are revealed to themselves be obsessive fans of real (in the film’s diegesis) murders that inspired the <i>Stab</i> movies, and the final girl’s anger is textually a “fuck the fans” moment. It doesn’t play like that to an audience, because that’s exactly what they wanted to see in the first place. Maybe the anger on the behalf of the filmmakers is justified to an extent then, although it does make the film an unsavory misanthropic exercise.</p>
<p>The most egregious part isn’t how the film tries to write itself out of the corner it was born to live in, but that the filmmaking lacks the heft and grandiosity of Craven’s camera. It’s fascinating that Craven’s roots, with down-and-dirty pictures like <i>The Last House on the Left</i> (1972) and <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i> (1977), aren’t representative of the filmmaker he’d ultimately become, which is that of a masterful showman. By the time Craven arrives at directing <i>Scream</i>, his style has become refined into a sly combination of classical thriller techniques and extraordinary explorations of the environments. Rooms have clear geometry, audiences understand how to traverse a space and how long it takes, they know where the characters are or where <i>they think</i> they are. It’s in the world of the film, the physical world of it, that Craven has so much fun in playing with the audience, and I’d imagine a reason those films are so beloved above so many others that try to be like it. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s mise-en-scene is, by comparison, extremely basic. So basic, in fact, that you don’t realize that the party in the climax of the film is taking place in the house from the end of the first <i>Scream</i> until it’s revealed as a twist. Perhaps the poor direction was just obfuscation then, working to keep the big “wow!” moment of the film under wraps as long as possible. Like the ouroboric problems of the screenplay, that just makes for a bad <i>Scream </i>movie.</p>
Alex Leitag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332652024-03-12T06:26:00-04:002024-03-11T21:41:57-04:00In <I>Damsel</I>, the Bloody Anti-Cinderella Genre Goes Mainstream<p>There’s a mini-genre boom in anti-Cinderella stories—narratives in which a woman’s wealthy ideal suitor turns out to be the opposite of a savior, and empowerment comes not through marriage, but through (bloody) divorce. Christopher Murphy’s 2019 <i>Ready Or Not</i> was a vicious, breakneck horror/comedy set in the present day; Le-Van Keit’s 2022 <i>The Princess</i> was a giddy medieval fantasy martial arts comedy. And now Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s dark fantasy Netflix film <i>Damsel</i>, with Millie Bobbie Brown as Princess Elodie going toe to claw with an extremely irritated dragon (voiced with incomparably husky menace by Shohreh Aghdashloo).</p>
<p>Details: Elodie’s kingdom is in the grip of famine when the kingdom of Aurea offers a lifeline—wealth and riches in return for her marriage to Aurea’s Prince Henry (Nick Robinson). Elodie’s reluctant, but decides the union is necessary to protect her people. Then she finds out there’s a catch; she’s not actually wanted as a bride, but as a sacrifice to propitiate that dragon. Tossed into the cave as dragon-bait she has to save herself—and inevitably her younger sister, Floria (Brooke Carter.)</p>
<p>The appeal of the anti-Cinderella sub-genre is obvious enough; the Cinderella story suggests that women can only self-actualize through marriage to some powerful patriarch. The hero of the story is the Prince; Cinderella’s role is just to dress pretty and wait around for the Prince to put the right shoe on her. The anti-Cinderella stories don’t just reject that; they portray it as a calculated trap. Men seductively offers comfort and wealth if women embrace their disempowerment. The anti-Cinderella reveals patriarchy as a duplicitous, life-destroying cage, and make them the protagonists of their own lives. With swords.</p>
<p><i>Damsel</i> lacks the fight choreography and brutal fun of <i>Princess</i>. Nor is it elevated by the wicked mean-spiritedness of <i>Ready or Not</i>. It’s also oddly unfocused in comparison to its predecessors. The film, bafflingly, makes its main villain not the prince, but his mother, Queen Isabella (Robin Wright).</p>
<p>Nor does its narrative go straight for the kill. Instead it meanders through the dragon’s cave, pausing and vacillating and doubling back on itself with various revelations, surprises, and false escapes. There are a few plot holes along the way too—it’s hard to believe that the powerful and ancient dragon is as easily fooled as the movie makes her out to be.</p>
<p>But the real problem is that part of the joy of these anti-Cinderella stories is the simplicity of brute revenge; the scythe swoops down, the scythe swoops back. You don’t want to put too many barriers in the way of the arc. Still, that anti-Cinderella story is pretty sturdy, and while <i>Damsel</i> isn’t a great example, it works well enough. Millie Bobbie Brown has great presence and charisma, and it’s hard not to cheer when she straps that sword to her back. The CGI dragon is designed with loving detail, and Fresnadillo is canny about concealing her early on in ways that build suspense.</p>
<p>I also enjoyed the way the film plays with the evil stepmother trope. Lady Bayford (Angela Bassett) initially seems shallow and status-seeking; per the Cinderella myth, you expect her to be the villain colluding in the plan to do away with Elodie. But she soon reveals more depths—as does the film’s other impressive surprise stepmother. Female solidarity under patriarchy is powerful and unexpected.</p>
<p>In a lot of ways, <i>Damsel</i> is the mainstream, bigger-budget, watered-down version of a narrative which has bubbled up from the margins of scuzzy B-movie genres like horror and martial arts. It’s not <i>that</i> watered-down, though, and while not as much fun as its blueprints, it manages to capture the bloody triumph of turning a clichéd and in many ways pernicious myth on its head, and then cutting that head off. If you liked <i>Princess</i> or <i>Ready Or Not</i>, you’ll probably find something to enjoy in <i>Damsel</i>. And if you liked <i>Damsel</i>, watch those other princes get theirs.</p>
Noah Berlatsky