Browns Fan Circa 2012

Lawless

John Hillcoat’s previous two films both reached for quasi mystical dimension. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Lawless is an almost determinedly surface film. Aside from a few moments of eccentricity provided by Nick Cave’s script (a brief interlude at a Mennonite prayer meeting composed entirely in chant, lines like, “You have no more idea what is going on in the earth than the birds in the sky,”) Lawless is a movie that is entirely about attractive people doing tough things and looking cool with guns. It is one of the most unabashedly romanticized gangster films I’ve ever seen, making The Town look like Animal Kingdom.

How much fun you have with the movie depends entirely on how well you can accept that, and how well you can shelve your expectations for the film that Lawless could have been. Because as it is Lawless is nothing more than Peckinpah lite, with the finest Shia La Beouf beating this side of Constantine.

Continuing this summer’s tradition of crime film’s featuring vapid actors giving horrible voiceovers, LaBeouf himself tells the story of The Bonderaunt brothers, the roughest toughest group of moonshiners in Franklin County Virginia. All is well in Franklin county until they are set upon by a corrupt government agent played by Guy Pierce. Pierce having just won the interagency Klaus Nomi look alike contest, has been driven mad with power and seeks to put all the moonshining in Franklin county under his control, The Bonderaunt’s disagree. Hot tar, castration, throat cutting, and other acts of violent dismemberment ensue.

The brothers are led by Tom Hardy (and the film would probably have been a sight better if it had used him as the point of view character rather than LaBeouf, make no mistake no matter what the advertising tells you Hardy is firmly in the passenger seat) still carrying his Bane muscle, most of his dialogue monosyllabic. He’s in a hell of a cast, including Pierce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, and Gary Oldman. Unfortunately like the film, the cast has more in potential than realization. Oldman’s roll amounts to barely more than a cameo and he’s not the only one who all told just doesn’t have that much to do.

The film is surprisingly low stakes as a whole. After all the chaos and atrocity that ends up committed on screen, the event that ends up being the last straw is almost absurdly anti climatic (as the film rounds its final bend it grabs clichés with both hands), and the final apocalyptic shootout it inspires so low key that you can’t help but wonder why it didn’t happen a whole lot early. Like most of Lawless it’s just kind of there. All and all it’s tough to want to beat up on Lawless too much. It’s not a bad film by any means. Hillcoat gives the film a distinct and beautiful natural light look. There are tense sequences, memorable images, good lines and hard hitting moments. What it lacks is just about anything or anyone to get remotely invested in. With all the gear up to it’s release and drama and passion behind it’s making, the last thing I expected from Lawless was something significantly less compelling and complex than any given episode of Boardwalk Empire.      

Paranorman

I had expected something much more modest from Paranorman. The trailers promised a pat if surprisingly horror literate kids film good for a few chuckles. The friends who had seen it told me to expect a well animated, if a touch on the nose children’s fable. A true horror epic that goes to some genuinely dark places with a visual palate equal parts Tim Burton, Mario Bava and Michael Dougherty, brought to life with painstakingly beautiful animation, a score that pays tribute to John Carpenter, and an ending so visually ambitious that it draws from The Fountain of all things was decidedly not what I had expected.

Paranorman has the small town, preadolescent specificity, fast pace, and just short of crude humor that marked the best of the 80’s Amblin films. Although a few moments of potty humor aside (excepting one truly inspired gag involving a dead man’s tongue) it feels much closer to a genuine all ages film than most of the non Joe Danted Amblin films ever did and needless to say much moreso than the grand majority of what American Animation offers. Like last years Rango (though in a slightly less aggressive way) Paranorman genuinely feels like if the target audience for it happens to be kids that is incidental. The story goes to some dark places, the imagery isn’t watered down and for all the jokes, gags and requisite family friendly message, there’s a real intensity to the film. Frankly I’m genuinely surprised that the movie managed to get a PG.  

Like Rango, the animation and chacter design is much more aggressive and strange than the gentle rounded figures that American audiences are used to. The characters with their distended stomachs, rolls of flesh and mottled faces are pushed past the point of caricature and into the realm of grotesquery. The dead scarcely moreso than the living. (Though the animators have cooked up a fairly wide array of things to do with characters whose body parts and faces are not strictly speaking attached to them in any meaningful way.) 

The animation itself is simply gorgeous though. I have a soft spot for Stop Motion only partly because it gives the obsessive compulsive in me the screaming mee-mees, but the expressiveness and smoothness (not to mention the creativity) of the animation in Paranorman is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. By the time it reaches its jaw droppingly ambitious abstract and beautiful finale I would argue that the film has surpassed even the master Harry Selick’s Coraline. Simply put this is the gold standard.

The film is as much a pleasure for the dedicated horror fan as the animation fan, whether it’s a surprisingly exact recreation of a shot in Halloween or Black Sunday or simply the beautiful autumn palate that the film has. In the careful clever use of its iconography and tone, Paranorman is simply the biggest hit to the sweet spot for horror fans since Trick 'R Treat.

I may see better movies this year, but I doubt I will see one that catches me so completely, blissfully off guard.  

Postscript: I cannot help but be tickled that Patton Oswalt’s dream of a truly idiotic Gay character has come true.

Killer Joe

“Sometimes you had to just laugh.”

                                                Jim Thompson, Population 1280

They'll be there when we're gone/


Bright tumors, rooted in the dark/


Crowding the dirt. Nothing makes them
grow/

 But nothing kills them either

                                                James W. Hall, White Trash

Killer Joe is possibly the most misanthropic, ugly, downright vile film I have ever seen. And I am only fairly sure that I mean this as a compliment.

Of course this is hardly surprising, human ugliness has always been William Friedkin’s beat as it were. From the junkies on Popeye Doyle’s beat, to the underworld of Cruising to the slow motion meltdown of personality in Bug. Friedkin has always had an uncanny ability to showcase people at their worst.

But there is something about Killer Joe that goes over the line even for him. In its series of lovingly depicted grotesqueries, Friedkin goes well and truly beyond the pale. Imagine a version of The Killer Inside Me directed by John Waters and you’re nearly there. It’s a film that provoked in me continued gouts of horrified laughter, not so much because I found what was happening funny, but as a futile attempt to purge myself. Here for once is a film that earns every inch of it’s NC-17 rating, and if you don’t go into the film expecting an ugly, ugly wallow it will take your face clean off.

Killer Joe centers around a family of dumb hicks who scheme to kill off their mother in order to collect her life insurance. Though the hicks are venal, evil people they are also cowards so they decide to hire the job out to a contractor. Not having the money to pay for said services they decide to pimp out one of their members, a dreamy moonchild who tip toes right up to the line of batshit insane. Roger Ebert noted that these are the stupidest characters he has come across outside of a comedy, and I can find no way to improve upon the point. Their scheme is so rudimentary and dumb that I almost have trouble classifying Killer Joe as a crime film. It’s just a situation that they’re kind of stumbling into rather than some thought out plan.

As such Killer Joe is not so much a film about the mechanics of said crime as it is a detailed portrait of the sort of people who would try to pull it off. The roots of the film as a theater piece are clearly visible (Tracy Letts, has a fantastic knack for dialogue, one stretch in which Hirsch has a cordial but frank discussion with a drug dealer, made me laugh by the sheer Texasness of it). Though Friedkin is too skilled of a stylist for it not to feel cinematic, and certain images, the Kentucky Fried BJ, the final look on McCounghey’s face are as powerful and primal images as any in Friedkin’s career.

 The acting is superb, particularly Thomas Hayden Church as an affable hick who has allowed his “Go with the flow” nature to carry him all the way to the gates of hell, and Gina Gershwin as a half bright piece of trailer trash with the heart of a coyote. Even Emile Hirsch, an actor I have little use for, does a fantastic job as the venal, crass little man who puts the whole catastrophuck into motion.

But of course Matthew McConaughey towers above them all. I balked when I heard his performance compared to Robert Mitchum, a claim I don’t take lightly. But damnit if the boot doesn’t fit. In his lazy sexuality, hooded eyed masculinity and air of barely restrained violence, he earns the comparison. He cuts through the film with a sleepy voiced confidence, the mask on his psychosis only slipping once or twice. But when it does... Really who the fuck woke this guy up? I want to send flowers. If you had told me a year ago that two of my favorite performances of the year would belong to McConaughey I would have laughed in your face. Now I can’t help but look at the wasteland the last ten years of his career have been and feel genuine anger. 

Killer Joe opens with a shot of a filth covered pitbull outside in the rain. The Pitbull is barking at the lead character who keeps yelling at it “To shut the fuck up,” as though the dog understands English. The dog doesn’t care, it just keeps barking, straining at the leash, trying to get at the kid so he can maul him. Dumb aggression and mean self interest is all it knows, and no one gives enough of a shit about it to take it out in the rain, So it just stays tethered to its chain, tied to a shitty trailer, trying to maul everything that walks into its field of vision.  

The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave

(This review is humbly dedicated to Sage Stallone, whose untimely passing last week robbed the world of a great programmer and film conservationist. If you enjoy the fact that you can watch The Beyond, you have Sage Stallone to thank. It was suggested in more than one of his obituaries that the best way to honor the man would be to watch the most squalid Italian Horror movie they could get their hands on. Well Sage here’s hoping this suffices.)

I’ve wanted to see The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, ever since Stephen King casually name dropped it as one of the most luridly titled horror films of which he knew. Though the film cannot quite live up to the promise of its title (and really how could it) it does stand as mad of an Italian tea party as has been filmed.

The film opens with a bug eyed man fleeing from a mental institute, which is as apt a way to start the film as any. This is Lord Albert Cunningham who escapes the asylum and returns to his crumbling ruin of a castle where he works through the grief of his wife Evelyn’s recent betrayal and death by kidnapping buxom redheads and killing them in his customized torture chamber. Well people handle grief in different ways... Just as we’re settling in for a good ole fashioned, “Crazed Aristocracy murders the plebians” picture the film abruptly switches gears (a phrase you’ll come by a lot in Italian Horror) and suddenly the film decides that Cunningham is a tragic hero. He marries a young blonde in an attempt to curb his murderous impulses (marking the one time in horror film history that being blonde has actually prolonged a woman’s life) and in doing so may or may not have raised the irate Evelyn from her, well you know it’s right there in the title.

Let’s see gloved killers, J&B whiskey, crushed velvet suits, incongruous hippie bands, a smattering of live burials, yep it’s a gialli all right. The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave neatly checks all the boxes of genre pleasures. But has enough of its own eccentricities to remain interesting. From the blasé manner in which everyone (and I do mean everyone) overlooks the Lord’s nasty habit of murdering women, the character of a dowager aunt who seems to be all of thirty two, and the fact that the film fits in so many nude fleshy red heads into the proceedings that one has to wonder if the filmmakers were trying to fufill a quota of some sort. Not that I’m exactly complaining.

Indeed The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, is one of the rare Italian horror films whose mind is truly more on sex than violence. Despite the lurid premise the film’s gore is actually relatively subdued, save one gleefully unhinged scene where a pack of foxes dispose of a body faster than you can say, "Chaos Reigns". Things climax in the best Italian Horror fashion with unhinged plot twist atop unhinged plot twist, creating a spectacle of the best anti logic sort. If you seek the absolute batshit from your Italian horror it won’t disappoint. 

Shilling

So this isn't the usual purview of TTDS but there are two worthy kickstarter campaigns that could use a good swift kick in the starter (went a bridge too far with that one).

First off there's Trailers From Hell. For those unfamiliar with this little slice of Awesomeness, Joe Dante and crew (with crew consisting of the likes of Guilmero Del Toro, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth) have banded together to bring you the best exploitation trailer collection not called 42nd Street Forever. Seriously the amount of fannish love that these guys bring to the average production is truly inspiring for all the years they've been putting out this stuff for free the idea of giving them a hand in order to help them cross that finish line is the least we fans can do.

It doesn't hurt that this has some of the coolest Schwag I've ever seen in a kickstarter campaign, rare autographed goods from the likes of Dante, Landis, Roger Corman. As well as gifts from the good folks at The Warner Archives and Synapese. I could only afford to pledge at the 25 Dollar mark and that still gets me an autographed DVD from Dante. So do yourself a favor and become a hellion.

Next we have Before The Mask the proposed sequel to Behind The Mask which after attempts at fundraising through Facebook and Gathr is finally pulling down one last ditch effort through Kickstarter. Behind The Mask, it truly had a unique voice, and Glosserman and crew deserve to continue their story. Behind The Mask was ahead of the curve in a lot of different ways and I'd love to see what they have to say about the last ten years of horror.

And while I'm shilling, though while I was on hiatus from TTDS I still found time to hang out with my friends from The Actioncast (And Alex Too). Which just celebrated it's second year actionversary. So if you have for some unfathomable reason not subscribed to The Actioncast and the other Podcasts in the Joe Drilling Media Empire™go back and peruse the archives to see what I thought of such films as The Rad, or listen to me geek out about all four (well two and a half really) of the Alien films. A good time will be had by all.

8 Million Ways To Die

Believe it or not but Savages was not the first time that Oliver Stone had a hand in ruining a crime novel that I love.

In all fairness you can't lay it all on Stone this time out. 8 Million Ways To Die has to rank as one of the most inexplicable combinations between a director and source material ever devised. It’s a crime film made by Hal Ashby that we’re talking about here. Ashby was of course best know for his humanistic character driven dramidies and whimsical fables. Bruising slabs of mean streets cinema not so much.

Because it’s not just any crime film either, it’s a Lawerence Block adaptation. If there’s one thing Block isn’t it’s whimsical. He’s not particularly humanistic either. Block has written some of the most cynical, down right meanest crime novels ever and The Matthew Scudder series contains some of the darkest of those.  Following this rabbit hole even further we find that 8 Million Ways To Die is considered one of the darkest of that sub strata. This is a natural fit right? And yes, Oliver Stone (in the prime of his white powder days) wrote the screenplay, because let’s face it it’s not like it makes things any weirder.

Things get off on the wrong foot literally from the first shot, a sweeping seemingly never ending panoramic helicopter shot of a city. It would be a perfectly fine shot, except it’s of the wrong city. Matthew Scudder is the quintessential New York detective, his character is informed by and associated with the city to roughly the same extent that Phillip Marlowe is with Los Angeles and Patrick Kenzie is with Boston. It’s not simply nonsensical to move him to the opposite coast. It’s antithetical. All making the completely arbitrary decision (it’s not as if effects the plot in any way) to change the location does is make the viewer suspicious that those involved didn’t really give half a crap about making a decent adaptation, it is a suspicion that is confirmed many many times over the course of the film.

The movie follows Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic former LAPD detective, who quits the force after killing a person (though the fact that that person was changed from a little girl to a drug dealer beating Scudder’s friend with a baseball bat makes the downward spiral that follows it more or less nonsensical) and sets himself up as an Unlicensed PI.

8 Million Ways To Die really kicks off (for lack of a better term) when a Scudder is hired by a woman at one of his AA meetings, a prostitute leaving the life who hires Scudder as protection from her pimp. The woman is murdered, Scudder goes on a black out drunk and then a week later comes to and tries to figure out what happened.

As a plot gimmick goes a man having to backtrack and piece together what he uncovered during a missing week isn’t bad, but 8 Million Ways To Die soon drops the conceit. The best detective stories combine morality plays with puzzle box plots, the search for truth that the detective goes on is reflected by the peeling back of the various facades of the world around him. The solution to whatever mystery is present should neatly coincide with the revelation of the world the detective inhabits for what it really is.  8 Million Ways To Die on the other hand has all the finesse of a lurching drunk. The film was compromised, taken out of Ashby’s hands in the editing room, but the director’s personal problems were catching up on him and attempts to insert the director’s trademark whimsy (a hostage exchange negotiated over a snow cone, exposition delivered during a lurching walk down a city street that plays very close to physical comedy) and the beloved behavioralism of his seventies films just come off as sloppy.

There are a few bright spots, Jeff Bridges plays Scudder with a very undude like conviction, and with the right level of bruised morality that suggests that he could have been the right actor to bring the character to life had he been provided with a better script.  And a young Andy Garcia makes for an impressive charismatic villain, even if Stone seemingly wrote the character as a dry run for Tony Montana. But it’s not enough to save the movie. 8 Million Ways To Die is the worst kind of bad film, the kind that doesn’t make you mad so much as it just kind of depresses you. Everyone in the film has done better work, alas Hal Ashby would never be given the chance again, the film served as a muddled coda to a great career.

When the movie flopped it drove the character of Scudder right off the screen, for the next thirty years. Luckily it looks like he’ll be given a second chance, Scott Frank and Liam Neeson are bringing the character back for A Walk Among The Tombstones, perhaps the darkest and best book in the series.

Here’s hoping they have better luck.