THE PAINTED BIRD (Czech Republic/Ukraine/Slovakia - 2020) Written and directed by Vaclav Marhoul. Cast: Petr Kotlar, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Julia Valentova Vidrnakova, Aleksey Kravchenko, Barry Pepper, Petr Vanek, Nina Shunevych, Alla Sokolova, Michaela Dolezalova, Zdenek Pecha, Lech Dyblik, Jitka Cvankarova, Milan Simacek, Petr Klimes, Andrej Polak, Filip Kankovsky. (Unrated, 170 mins) Based on the 1965 novel by Being There author Jerzy Kosinski, THE PAINTED BIRD is an unrelentingly grim, grueling, three-hour journey into the abyss, seen through the eyes of a young, nameless Jewish orphan (Petr Kotlar) left on his own in the rural hellscape of Eastern Europe during WWII. You know Czech writer/director Vaclav Marhoul isn't pulling any punches when it's barely three minutes in and the boy is attacked and beaten by other children, who then set his ferret on fire and watch it burn. His parents presumably perished in a concentration camp, he's been sent to live with his elderly Aunt Marta (Nina Shunevych), though he's left on his own once again when she dies and he's so startled by the discovery of her body that he drops a lantern, igniting a fire that quickly engulfs their small house. He makes his way to a gypsy camp where he's beaten by villagers who blame him for "bewitching the cows" and "summoning evil," and he's bought by a superstitious old crone (Alla Sokolova), who thinks he's a vampire. He escapes on a small raft and is found by the hired hand (Zdenek Pecha) of a bad-tempered miller (Udo Kier), who regularly beats his wife (Michaela Dolezalova) for making eye contact with the male help. The boy is off again after the miller, in a drunken rage, attacks the hired hand and gouges his eyes out with a spoon.
The horrific displays of cruelty, brutality and depravity never stop. He witnesses promiscuous temptress Ludmila (Jitka Cvankarova) being attacked by a group of mothers enraged over her corruption of their sons as they beat her to a pulp and violate her with a glass bottle. He encounters fields of dead Jews, some of their bodies charred and still smoldering, as their surviving brethren steal the clothes off of the unburned corpses. A German soldier shoots a crying Jewish baby point blank, the bullet also going through its mother, killing them both. The boy is captured by the residents of one village who turn him over to a German unit in a display of appeasement. The commander orders his execution, prompting one conscientious officer (Stellan Skarsgard) to volunteer for the task, waiting until they're far enough away from the camp to fire his rifle in the air and mercifully tell the boy to run away. He's captured by another German unit, but his life is spared when he's handed over to a Catholic priest (Harvey Keitel), who later sends the boy to live with distiller Garbos (Julian Sands), a devout parishioner who turns out to be a monstrous pedophile who rapes him nightly.
Shot in stark, monochromatic black-and-white, THE PAINTED BIRD is an undeniably tough sell even beyond its graphic content (it's unrated but well past the NC-17 threshold). It's just under three hours long, there's minimal dialogue, and it's spoken in the constructed Interslavic--an Esperanto-esque mix of various Slavic languages and dialects--with some incidental German and Russian, all with English subtitles. The most obvious influence here would be Elem Klimov's 1985 Soviet anti-war classic COME AND SEE, a film notorious for the ceaseless horrors faced by its young main character, played by a then-teenage Aleksey Kravchenko, who appears here as a Russian officer. Visually, THE PAINTED BIRD owes a lot to the works of Bela Tarr, particularly SATANTANGO and THE TURIN HORSE, and Aleksei German's mother-of-all-endurance-tests HARD TO BE A GOD. And with its numerous shocking wartime transgressions, one is reminded of Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO, Volker Schlondorff's THE TIN DRUM, Liliana Cavani's LA PELLE/THE SKIN, and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, with one shot of the boy lying on the tracks as a train speeds over him coming straight from that 1977 pro-communism epic.
One might also think of Lars von Trier, especially with the presence of Kier and Skarsgard. But where von Trier would revel in getting as explicit as possible just to poke the viewer with a stick, Marhoul generally handles such incidents with a certain degree of tact, though even the most jaded connoisseur of arthouse transgression might get the wind knocked out of them a little during the vignette where the boy shacks up with a widowed nymphomaniac (Julia Valentova Vidrnakova). She teaches him how to perform oral sex on her but then loses interest when, still being a little boy, he's unable to perform when they attempt intercourse (Kotlar has two credited adult body doubles). Her resulting cold-shoulder treatment ("You're useless!") eventually sends him into a jealous rage when he catches her having sex with a goat. Young Kotlar, a non-professional in his first film, says very little over the course of THE PAINTED BIRD, with Marhoul letting his star's eyes and face do most of the emoting. The film was shot in several phases with some breaks over the 16-month period from March 2017 to July 2018, and a fortuitous growth spurt allows you to see Kotlar, nine years old when shooting began, visibly change over the course of the time depicted. Not just in height and build, but also the increasingly dead look in his eyes as the boy has conditioned himself to feel nothing.
Despite the non-stop horrors on display, THE PAINTED BIRD is a staggeringly beautiful film, where every shot could serve as a perfectly-framed still image. Cinematographer Vladimir Smutny vividly captures the desolate, barren wasteland of war-ravaged Eastern Europe in ways that are breathtaking. The known names in the cast have little more than cameos, but all of them leave impressions in their limited screen time--particularly Keitel as the tragically oblivious priest, who finally realizes what's going on when he pays a visit to Garbos and can sense the tension and see the abuse in the boy's eyes--though it is admittedly distracting having Keitel, Kier, and Sands dubbed in Interslavic by voices that sound nothing like theirs, plus Barry Pepper speaking in dubbed Russian (Skarsgard has no dialogue), as is one action sequence appearing out of nowhere with one too-loudly-mixed Wilhelm Scream. THE PAINTED BIRD is bold, unflinching, and upsetting, and even with moments of light in its perpetual darkness (and a late glimmer of hope), it's the It's Not For Everybody/Feel-Bad Hit of the Summer, and regardless of how well-made it is--there were inevitable walkouts when it played the festival circuit last year--or how highly you regard it, you probably won't watch it a second time.
Director Vaclav Marhoul and star Petr Kotlar
on the set of THE PAINTED BIRD
I've stated several times in past reviews that, while the sentiment is appreciated, it's time for today's filmmakers to move on from the John Carpenter homages, but we have to give BACURAU a pass. The latest from Brazil's Kleber Mendonca Filho (NEIGHBORING SOUNDS), who co-wrote and co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, BACURAU is a hypnotic, wildly unpredictable, savagely violent, and brazenly original genre-bender whose release on the arthouse circuit was shut down by the pandemic, leading to US distributor Kino Lorber making it the inaugural entry in their online "virtual cinema" partnership with independent theaters across the country. Opening with a shot of Earth seen from a satellite hovering in space and set "a few years from now," giving it a vaguely-established sci-fi angle, BACURAU immediately shifts to the title location, a fictional, impoverished town in the western Pernambuco area of Brazil. Teresa (Barbara Colen) arrives for the funeral of her 94-year-old grandmother, a beloved figure who's considered the "matriarch" of Bacurau. She brings the residents some medical supplies and vaccines, which have been in short supply since Bacurau's water and essentials have been cut off by a dam project and a water rights dispute overseen by the loathed Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), the self-appointed mayor of the nearby Serra Verde. He also makes cosmetic attempts at olive-branching by donating expired canned goods and so-called "painkillers" that Bacurau's alcoholic doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga) warns is nothing more than a black market mood inhibitor in suppository form. The town is forced to rely on water being delivered in a tanker by affable truck driver Erivaldo (Rubens Santos), but when that week's supply is lost when his truck is riddled with bullets from unseen snipers on the way into town, the residents, under the leadership of Teresa and political insurgent Acacio (Thomas Aquino) sense something is...off. They start getting the feeling that they're under siege, especially when two nervous strangers on trail bikes (Antonio Saboia, Karine Teles) happen to pass through town, and one secretly plants a signal jammer under a table in the local bar.
It's best to stop there with a plot synopsis, as things really start to get wild and the filmmakers go all-in on an "anything goes" approach with the intricately-detailed madness that unfolds. Flying saucer-shaped drones start appearing in the sky, Bacurau disappears from GPS and satellite imagery, phones and electricity go out, mind-altering substances are consumed, and things intensify with the deployment of some wonderful Brian De Palma split-diopter shots, and that's before legendary cult actor Udo Kier shows up as Michael, a mysterious German who's leading a group of racist, trigger-happy American mercenaries on some secret mission in the desert between Serra Verde and Bacurau. Mendonca Filho and Dornelles create a deliriously inspired mash-up of Carpenter and Alejandro Jodorowsky, with some bonus influence courtesy of Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and REPO MAN-era Alex Cox, augmented by some effective needle-drops, including Carpenter's "Night," an inspired synthgasm from his 2015 album Lost Themes, plus an improbable appearance by Spandau Ballet's "True." In an era of prefab cult movies and things like THE ROOM and BIRDEMIC, it's refreshing to see something like BACURAU come along in 2020. It's a real deal, instant cult classic for the midnight movie crowd, and seeing it for the first time is probably the closest we'll get in the present day to experiencing something like EL TOPO in the early '70s. It's the kind of movie where you truly have no idea what's going to happen next, and props to the filmmakers for giving veterans like Braga and Kier their best roles in years. Highly recommended. (Unrated, 131 mins) BODY CAM (US - 2020)
Paramount had BODY CAM set for theaters in May 2019 before bumping it seven months to December, and somewhere in the interim--likely due to last fall's tangentially similar body-cam-themed "bad cop" thriller BLACK AND BLUE--it disappeared from the release schedule altogether. They quietly dumped it on VOD in May 2020, a week before a Memorial Day weekend that ended with the horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. It certainly wasn't intended to exploit a tragedy, but perhaps Paramount should've read the room a little better in releasing this on Blu-ray/DVD now at a time when tensions are still running high, given its subject matter involving the ghost of an unarmed black teenager seeking revenge on the cops who murdered him. BODY CAM is topical, but it doesn't do anything substantive with the issue. Just off suspension after video of a physical altercation with a civilian went viral and led to a citywide uproar, cop Renee Lomito (Mary J. Blige, not really capitalizing on her MUDBOUND Oscar nomination) is still trying to get over the drowning death of her young son, and sees work as a necessary distraction. She's partnered with rookie Danny Holledge (Nat Wolff) and on their first night together, they find the horribly mutilated body of another cop who never reported back after a traffic stop. His dashcam video shows him stopping a woman in a van before he's lifted into the air by an unseen force and dropped on the hood of his cruiser. When her bosses look at the dashcam footage, there's nothing there. An improbable clue leads Lomito and Holledge to the dilapidated home of nurse Taneesha Branz (DREAMGIRLS' Anika Noni Rose), whose teenage son was found murdered months earlier while walking home after doing volunteer work for a church. Two more cops are killed in inexplicable supernatural encounters and again, surveillance video is mysteriously wiped after only Lomito sees it and before she can show anyone else. The fusion of dirty cops and Blumhouse jump scares is clunky and never really gels, though director Malik Vitthal does manage to pull off one really good scare set piece when Lomito and Holledge search Taneesha's house. Richmond Riedel's script was extensively reworked by THE PACT and THE PRODIGY director Nicholas McCarthy, probably brought in to punch up some of the horror elements, and it also has some uncredited contributions from 12 YEARS A SLAVE Oscar-winner John Ridley. There was certainly potential for some incendiary social commentary here, but after a generally effective first act, BODY CAM sort-of sputters out into rote, predictable genre cliches, giving its serious concept a rather shallow treatment. Not bad as these kinds of generic horror outings go, but it's easy to see why Paramount couldn't muster much enthusiasm over it. (R, 97 mins)
Based on the 2010 novel The Postcard Killers, a collaboration between America's James Patterson® and Sweden's Liza Marklund, THE POSTCARD KILLINGS manages to be both a post-SE7EN serial killer thriller and the kind of wintry Scandinavian mystery that came in the wake of Stieg Larsson's best-selling phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And for about 45 minutes, it's a terrific, expertly-crafted nailbiter that would've been a huge hit a decade and a half ago. But after an unexpected, gasp-inducing bait-and-switch that you won't see coming, the film loses the thread, stumbling and bumbling along with contrivances, confusion, and sloppy editing on its way to a dumb and unsatisfying conclusion, almost as if another team of filmmakers came in to take charge of the second half. NYC homicide detective Jacob Kanon (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is in London to claim the bodies of his murdered daughter and son-in-law, who were just married and on their honeymoon when they became the victims of a deranged killer who "posed" them in an embrace, with their eyes pinned open, an arm (not belonging to either of the them) stuffed in the son-in-law's mouth, and his daughter's left hand missing, among other disturbing details. A postcard was sent to a London journalist and Kanon learns from the unhelpful inspector in charge (Steven Mackintosh) that a similar M.O.--newlywed couple murdered and posed, dismembered body parts from another killing, a taunting postcard sent to a journalist--was recently found in an almost identical case in Madrid. Stonewalled over his repeated attempts to take an active role in the investigation, an irate Kanon heads to Berlin after another newlywed murder happens there and gets more collaborative cooperation from rumpled Inspector Bublitz (Joachim Krol). Then he ends up in Stockholm after American expat journalist Dessie Lombard (Cush Jumbo of THE GOOD WIFE and THE GOOD FIGHT) gets a postcard before police discover a nearly identical crime scene, at which Kanon's daughter's knit hat was placed in the hands of one of the victims.
There's a parallel storyline involving...well, let's not get into that. The victims are staged like art exhibits currently in museums in the city where each killing occurs, and they're done so in such horrifically macabre ways that bring to mind an episode of HANNIBAL if directed by a young Dario Argento. Morgan does a fine balancing act of being overcome with grief and seething with entitled American rage when one European cop after another won't let him have his way and allow him to take over the investigation. Of course, he ends up doing that anyway, and he and Jumbo establish a nice rapport and make a solid detective team. But they're let down by an abrupt shift in direction after that whopper of a mid-film reveal, and things just start to get silly, like a typical episode of a CBS police procedural or any one of these elaborate serial killer potboilers where the murderers have way too much time on their hands. Making his first English-language film since 2009's neglected and barely-released TRIAGE with Colin Farrell and Christopher Lee in a great late-career performance that almost nobody's seen, director Danis Tanovic (a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner for 2001's NO MAN'S LAND) just falls asleep on the job in the second half, introducing an incarcerated Wall Street asshole (Denis O'Hare) and having no idea what to do with Famke Janssen as Kanon's ex-wife, who seems to be off in a completely different movie most of the time. And the end lands with a complete thud, made even more frustrating by the door being left open for a sequel. It's enough to make you wonder if something went wrong in post-production or if it was just too many cooks in the kitchen, with Marklund one of five credited screenwriters and Morgan among the small army of 28 producers. (Unrated, 104 mins)
LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY (UK - 2020)
A ludicrous thriller being simultaneously dumped on VOD and Blu-ray after two years on the shelf, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY is admirably resourceful in the way it manages to pass Norfolk, VA off as NYC, Los Angeles, and Paris (!), but that kind of ingenuity doesn't extend to its asinine plot. Sam (blank void Zach Avery) has been living a solitary life in Paris (played by Norfolk's Freemason District) in the three years since the death of his girlfriend Georgia (READY OR NOT's Samara Weaving), who perished in a NYC gas leak explosion caused by a stray bullet when gunmen entered their apartment and started shooting. He managed to escape and flee overseas and now works at a cafe owned by Scottish expat Gilles (Brian Cox, who must've happened to be in Norfolk that day). Gilles doesn't know Sam's troubled past, but admonishes him to forget about whatever happened and move on. But Sam can't, especially after he goes to see a movie and one of its stars looks exactly like Georgia, only with blonde hair. He Googles the actress, Lauren Creek (also Weaving) and finds that she's a model, tabloid fixture and rising movie star in the States. Convinced Lauren is Georgia, Sam packs his bags and heads to L.A. He attempts to crash her latest movie premiere but is recognized by Kat (MR. ROBOT's Carly Chaikin), a gofer for Lauren's PR firm who happens to be the long-forgotten little sister of Sam's best friend in high school. They catch up, but Kat isn't buying his story, especially after she tries to arrange an introduction at the post-premiere party and Lauren doesn't recognize Sam. Undeterred, Sam persists in trying to prove Lauren is Georgia, even following her and her fiance Vince (Hal Ozsan) to a bar and selecting Willie Nelson's version of "Georgia On My Mind" on the jukebox to get her attention.
That's a bit too on the nose, but nothing about LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY, is subtle or smooth, especially the eventual involvement of some Eastern European gangsters led by cancer-stricken Ivan Denisovki (Udo Kier), and more background info that Sam keeps from Kat until it's convenient for the plot. With its rampant stupidity and a surprising amount of nudity from Weaving, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY often feels enough like a deliberate throwback to an early '90s DTV erotic thriller that you almost expect it to open with the Prism Entertainment logo. But the sibling writing/directing team of Colin and James Krisel can't stop tripping over their own feet, telegraphing twists way too early, and never explaining why someone on the run and hiding from a ruthless crime organization would decide that becoming a model and movie star, and being in the tabloids after altering nothing about their appearance beyond switching from brunette to blonde and removing two tiny tattoos would be the ideal way to lay low. Weaving is uncharacteristically dull, though at least Kier gets to shout "What do you know about death?" giving you brief hope that he'll resurrect his signature line from 1973's FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN. Otherwise, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY gets its biggest boost from Chaikin, who turns in a terrific performance in an otherwise lousy movie. She imbues her character with a sense of humor that's snarky without being affected, and does a great job of conveying the seen-it-all jadedness of L.A. without turning the character into a cartoon. She does a lot with just a look and works wonders with a throwaway line (when Sam asks why she's helping him, Kat replies "Because you rejected me and I'm just sick enough to be attracted to that"), and ends up becoming the film's most compelling character. The Krisels try to develop some intriguing parallels between Lauren and Kat, but not enough to do justice to Chaikin's efforts. It's also perfectly fitting that Chaikin gets the line that perfectly sums everything up, at one point screaming "This is so fucking dumb!" (R, 90 mins)
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE (US/Canada/UK - 2019) Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. Cast: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Don Johnson, Thomas Kretschmann, Michael Jai White, Jennifer Carpenter, Laurie Holden, Fred Melamed, Udo Kier, Tattiawna Jones, Justine Warrington, Jordyn Ashley Olson, Myles Truitt, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Noel G, Primo Allon, Matthew Maccaull, Richard Newman, Liannet Borrego. (R, 158 mins) "I'm a month away from my 60th. I'm still the same rank I was at 27. I don't politic and I don't change with the times and it turns out that shit's more important than good honest work." With his 2015 cannibal horror/western BONE TOMAHAWK and his 2017 grindhouse B-movie prison face-smasher BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99, musician and author-turned-filmmaker S. Craig Zahler established himself as a bold new voice in cult cinema (presumably as a goof, he also scripted 2018's PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH). Can one appropriately follow up a film where Vince Vaughn tears a car to pieces with his bare hands? Well, the gritty and amazingly-titled cop thriller DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE is Zahler's most ambitious provocation yet, weaving complex characterizations, multiple storylines, bursts of truly shocking violence and splatter and several startling plot turns into a compelling crime saga that runs a sprawling 158 minutes. Zahler's cache in genre circles hasn't come without controversy, with detractors hurling accusations of racism and branding his films as right-wing fodder for the Trump crowd. Cop, and by association, vigilante movies, have been labeled fascist fantasies for decades, going back decades to Clint Eastwood in DIRTY HARRY, Gene Hackman in THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and Charles Bronson in DEATH WISH. Zahler's characters do and say despicable things I don't see him defending or excusing their actions. Understanding the mindset of a political viewpoint doesn't necessarily mean tacit endorsement or justification. Perhaps it complicates things by showing that these characters have a human side and might be doing very wrong things for what they perceive to be right reasons, but Zahler isn't being overtly political here. It's more likely a sign of the times and the cultural environment where the younger generation of film critics have focused less on writing about the films and more about "hot takes," expressing themselves, airing their own grievances, looking for things to be offended by, and making a huge production out of how woke they are. That's really no way to watch movies, people.
He's obviously aware of the criticisms of his work, and even before watching DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE, one has to marvel at how well Zahler has his trolling game down: how much sheer chutzpah and raw balls does it take to make a movie about corrupt, racist cops in 2019 and cast Mel Gibson in the leading role? Few things piss off woke pop culture publications more than Gibson finding gainful employment, and his presence here can be seen as a test of separating the art from the artist or at least exposing the film's pre-release detractors for doing exactly what they're doing: passive-aggressively rehashing and reviewing Gibson's past transgressions instead of reviewing the movie. Gibson has lost none of his power to command the screen, turning in his best work in years as Detective Brett Ridgeman, a veteran cop in Bulwark, a fictional, good-sized lower-to-middle class city that's seen better days. Partnered with the younger Anthony Lurasetti (Hollywood conservative Vaughn, in his second Zahler film), Ridgeman is hardened, cynical, embittered, and a ticking time bomb. He does his job and refuses to play nice, and while his and Lurasetti's arrest records are exemplary ("Two wings of the penitentiary are filled with our collars...maybe three"), they're suspended for six weeks without pay when someone records Ridgeman using excessive force during an arrest, dragging a suspect (Noel G) out of the window on a fire escape and forcefully pressing his boot down on his head. The cell phone footage makes the local news, and while Ridgeman blames it on a society gone soft (sounding like a Fox News host when he barks "We get suspended because it wasn't done politely...the entertainment industry, formerly known as the news, needs villains" like a talking point), his former partner and current boss Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson) uses the opportunity to remind him "There's a reason I'm behind this desk running things and you're still out there on the streets."
Neither Ridgeman nor Lurasetti are in positions to go six weeks without pay. Lurasetti is about to splurge on an engagement ring for his girlfriend Denise (Tattiawna Jones), and Ridgeman is feeling pressure from multiple directions. His wife Melanie (Laurie Holden) is a former cop who was forced into early retirement when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and with the reduced income, they had to move to a crummy neighborhood where their teenage daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) is regularly menaced by a group of black kids ("I was never a racist until we lived in this neighborhood," Melanie laments). Pissed that he's got over 30 years on the force with nothing to show for it and refusing to take a temporary security gig, Ridgeman calls in a favor from posh clothier and connected criminal Friedrich (Udo Kier), who tells him about a vaguely-defined job being orchestrated by associate Lorentz Vogelman (Thomas Kretschmann). With a reluctant Lurasetti onboard ("This is bad...like lasagna in a can"), the pair stake out Vogelman's apartment building for several days before piecing together some semblance of what he might be up to. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline, just-paroled ex-con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) arrives home to find his junkie mother (Vanessa Bell Calloway) working as a prostitute. Forced to grow up early after his closeted gay father abandoned the family ("Pops is a yesterday who ain't worth words") and wanting a better life for his mother and his wheelchair-bound little brother (Myles Truitt), Henry teams up with old buddy Biscuit (Michael Jai White), who gets wind of a job offer for a getaway driver.
Despite its gargantuan length, DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE is never dull and never crosses the line into self-indulgence. Like BONE TOMAHAWK and BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99, it unfolds like a novel, drawing you in and letting the story and the characters breathe and take form and find their voice at its own leisurely pace. It's a good 100 or more minutes before all the plot lines converge (Jennifer Carpenter also figures in with a small but pivotal role as a nervous first-time mom having severe separation anxiety on her first day back to work after having a baby three months earlier), and Zahler is in no rush to get anywhere. Its twists, turns, and detours recall JACKIE BROWN-era Quentin Tarantino, and while Zahler may lack QT's signature pop culture, "Royale with cheese" pizazz, the novelist in him has a way with words that is uniquely his own and fits perfectly with the bleak, abrasive, nihilistic vision of DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE's world. Zahler stops short of rooting for Ridgeman and Lurasetti, but he manages to humanize them in the antihero cop tradition of DIRTY HARRY's Harry Callahan and THE FRENCH CONNECTION's Popeye Doyle (speaking of Doyle, there's a character who would never fly in woke 2019). DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE is an equal opportunity offender, whether Ridgeman and Lurasetti are pretending they can't understand a hearing-impaired female perp speaking clear English (Lurasetti: "Sounds like a dolphin voice") or one of Vogelman's goons needing to cut open a corpse (it's a long story) and being reminded "Careful you don't open the liver...it's the worst smell in the world, especially with a black guy," or the numerous bits of overt homophobia. DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE takes place in an ugly and dangerous world filled with ugly and dangerous people. Though it has its share of humor (watch Gibson's seething slow burn on the stakeout as Ridgeman clocks Lurasetti--it's also a vintage Vaughn moment--at 98 minutes to finish an egg salad sandwich, finally snapping "A single red ant could've eaten it faster"), it's a furious, ferocious, and fearlessly uncompromising gut punch of a film that isn't pretty, doesn't play nice, and isn't easily shaken.
BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (US - 2017) Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Udo Kier, Marc Blucas, Mustafa Shakir, Thomas Guiry, Dion Mucciacito, Geno Segers, Willie C. Carpenter, Fred Melamed, Clark Johnson, Pooja Kumar, Victor Almanzar, Calvin Dutton, Michael Medeiros, Devon Windsor, Tobee Paik, Rob Morgan, Philip Ettinger. (Unrated, 132 mins) With 2015's horror-western hybrid BONE TOMAHAWK, novelist/musician/jack-of-all-trades S. Craig Zahler immediately established himself as a filmmaker worth watching. The best description being "THE SEARCHERS if remade by Ruggero Deodato," BONE TOMAHAWK was an instant cult classic that was deserving of the label. Influenced by everything from Hollywood classics to Italian splatter films to underground metal (his musical projects include singing and playing drums in a band called Realmbuilder, and playing drums in the black metal band Charnel Valley), Zahler tackles the prison genre with BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99, a hyperviolent and stunningly brutal revenge melodrama with the kind of wonderfully old-school title you'd expect to find on a mid '50s Allied Artists programmer. In a welcome departure from roles he's been coasting through for years and what the little-loved second season of TRUE DETECTIVE hinted at, Vince Vaughn is almost the spirit of Lee Marvin incarnate as Bradley--do not call him Brad--Thomas, a man with a dark past who's just trying to make an honest living and get by. Stoical and serious, and with a large cross tattooed on the back of his shaved head, Bradley and his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) are recovering alcoholics living in a small house in a crummy part of town. Bradley drives a wrecker for a local mechanic, but business is slow and he's let go. Arriving home, he finds Lauren about to take off for some afternoon delight with a man she's been seeing for the last three months. Bradley is not an abusive man but he reacts in the only way he can at that moment: by calmly and methodically tearing apart her car with his bare hands.
After resolving to work through their problems and preserve their marriage, Bradley decides to go back to an old job: "delivering packages" for local dealer Gil (Marc Blucas). 18 months go by, and Bradley and Lauren are in a spacious new home and she's six months pregnant. Against Bradley's gut instinct, Gil goes into business with powerful Mexican drug lord Eliazar (Dion Mucciacito), whose crew of irresponsible fuck-ups end up in a shootout with the cops, during which Bradley takes out Eliazar's guys to save the cops and keep the situation from escalating. That still does him no favors with the judge, and after he refuses to give up any names of his associates, Bradley is sentenced to seven years in a medium-security prison. Lauren promises to wait for him, assuring him that "that same mistake won't happen again." Determined to keep a low profile and hope he can be paroled after a few years for good behavior, Bradley's plans expectedly go to shit almost immediately: he's visited by the mysterious "Placid Man" (Udo Kier), posing as Lauren's doctor but actually a representative of Eliazar. The Placid Man's boss isn't happy about Bradley's actions during the shootout, which cost him two men and $3 million. Eliazar has taken Lauren hostage with an abortionist at the ready--one who claims to be able to "clip off" the legs of the fetus but let it live, maiming it in utero--if Bradley doesn't pay off his debt by getting himself transferred to Red Leaf, a maximum-security hellhole in upstate New York, where he's to take out a top Eliazar enemy who's being held in cell block 99. Bradley goes to extreme, limb-snapping measures to get himself transferred upstate, and once he's at Red Leaf, he's forced to work his way into cell block 99 while also dealing with conditions that make Gitmo look appealing, plus endlessly bullying guards and sadistic, cigarillo-sucking warden Tuggs (Don Johnson).
If you're familiar with BONE TOMAHAWK, the languid pacing and slow burn methodology of BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 won't come as a surprise. While BRAWL isn't quite on the level of BONE, Zahler again demonstrates a unique ability to build the world in which the film exists on his own terms and at his own pace. He brings a novelist's style and sensibility to the crafting of this story, letting it unfold like an long, engrossing book with vividly detailed characters. With his first two films, Zahler fuses pulpy grindhouse and serious arthouse more effectively than anyone since Quentin Tarantino in his prime. As with BONE TOMAHAWK, which ran over two hours and took 90 minutes to get to the crux of its horror plot, the 132-minute BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 is in no particularly hurry to get to the title event. Instead, for about 105 minutes, we watch a fundamentally decent man who's been dealt one shitty card after another, his ability to keep his head above water growing more tenuous by the day, doing what's necessary to provide, to do what's "right." Vaughn is a revelation here, his every moment on screen seething with a palpable, slow-boiling rage. He knows he's in a bad business, but he's not a bad guy and still tries to do what's "right." He refuses to flip on his employers. When he's told he'll be out in four years and the judge hits him with seven, he shuts up and takes it like a man because his wife and his unborn child are all that matter. And when they're threatened, he's willing to put himself through every punishment imaginable to ensure their well-being. It's a remarkable performance, given a boost in some of the many shockingly violent, often sickening scenes of Bradley snapping limbs, stomping heads, and scraping faces across concrete walls and floors. Like BONE TOMAHAWK, BRAWL isn't all grim and humorless. There's no shortage of quotable tough-guy, B-movie dialogue--when asked how he's doing after losing his job, Bradley shrugs "South of OK, north of cancer;" when a fellow convict wishes their prison was like a state-of-the-art facility in Norway, Bradley snaps "You should aim higher with your wishes;" and during a jaw-off with a Eliazar flunky, patriotic Bradley gets in his face and says "The last time I checked, the colors of the flag weren't red, white and burrito." Released unrated and almost certainly worthy of an NC-17 for its extreme violence, BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 isn't for everyone and may not even be as accessible as the decidedly offbeat BONE TOMAHAWK (however accessible a cannibal horror western can be), but it's an unusual and compelling character piece in the guise of a bonecrushing exploitation grinder.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE aka DR. JEKYLL AND HIS WOMEN (France/West Germany - 1981) Written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk. Cast: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee, Gerard Zalcberg, Howard Vernon, Clement Harari, Giselle Preville, Jean Mylonas, Eugene Braun Munk, Louis Michel Colla, Catherine Coste. (Unrated, 91 mins)
Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) was a Polish filmmaker who worked primarily in France after settling there in 1959. Though generally lumped in with mavericks like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, directors who constantly straddled the line between art and smut, Borowczyk was more of a renaissance man, an artist and filmmaker who dabbled in everything from lithograph art to short animated works to the avant garde as a young man, tallying up many film festival awards throughout the 1960s. He collaborated with famed LA JETEE director Chris Marker and, like Marker, was an influence on Terry Gilliam. Borowczyk moved into feature films in the 1970s, earning a Palme d'Or nomination at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival for THE STORY OF SIN, but for decades, he was best known for IMMORAL TALES (1974), with its famous Elizabeth Bathory segment, and THE BEAST (1975), films that mixed horror with softcore porn that became so popular in the wake of Just Jaeckin's EMMANUELLE (1974). Subsequent films like THE STREETWALKER (1976), with EMMANUELLE star Sylvia Kristel and the nunsploitation BEHIND CONVENT WALLS (1978) pretty much cemented his reputation as a purveyor of high-end Eurotrash. Like Rollin and Franco, Borowczyk was capable of making films of serious artistic value, but often let his love of naked women take precedence. Lured by producer Alain Siritzky to the ill-fated EMMANUELLE 5 in 1987, with American actress Monique Gabrielle stepping in for the absent Kristel, Borowczyk's cut was released in France, but he would see the film completely gutted for the US market when it was acquired years later by Roger Corman, who dumped a good chunk of Borowczyk's footage and had HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD II director and regular Concorde/New Horizons post-production supervisor Steve Barnett shoot new sex scenes and decidedly un-EMMANUELLE action sequences with Gabrielle. Barnett's Corman-mandated changes essentially turned Borowczyk's erotic European art film into an Andy Sidaris knockoff that went straight to VHS in 1992. True to form for these guys in the late '80s, Borowczyk contemporary Rollin ended up directing some of the equally doomed EMMANUELLE 6 in 1988 (also released by Corman in the US in 1992), with the franchise becoming so hopelessly lost that by the time Kristel returned in 1993, the next in the series was redundantly titled EMMANUELLE VI. Borowczyk finished his big screen career with 1987's LOVE RITES and from 1986 to 1991, helmed several episodes of the erotic French TV series SOFTLY FROM PARIS before retiring from directing.
Though he's best known for IMMORAL TALES and THE BEAST, one Borowczyk film that's gained significant traction over the years is his perversely transgressive 1981 masterpiece DR JEKYLL ET LES FEMMES, better known as DR. JEKYLL AND HIS WOMEN (and also BLOOD OF DR. JEKYLL and BLOODLUST). The FEMMES title was imposed on Borowczyk by the producers, but the film is just out on Blu-ray from Arrow under the director's preferred title THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE. Borowczyk's take on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most unusual horror films of the 1980s and certainly one of cinema's most misanthropic screeds, with an aggressive electronic score by Bernard Parmegiani that's genuinely unsettling. The set-up owes as much to Agatha Christie as it does to Stevenson, and after a slow and tense build, Borowczyk steers it into some incredibly dark places, offering sights that, once seen, can never be unseen. Set over the course of one doomed night, the film takes place at the mansion of Dr. Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) during his engagement party to Miss Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro). While guests--among them renowned Dr. Lanyard (Franco regular Howard Vernon), the Reverend Donald Regan Guest (Clement Harari), and the eccentric military legend General William Danvers Carew (the great Patrick Magee in his last film before his death in 1982)--pretentiously pontificate and bloviate on proper Victorian matters of high society and self-aggrandizement, they're picked off one by one by a ranting, sexually voracious madman calling himself Mr. Hyde (Gerard Zalcberg).
Hyde usually violates his victims--both female and male--with his incredibly large organ ("The sex of the criminal was extremely long and pointed, wasn't it?" a guest asks after finding a victim penetrated so deeply that the abdomen was ripped apart), with Zalcberg's stunt cock given several close-ups by Borowczyk in a couple of scenes that dangerously flirt with crossing over into hardcore porn, and no one really pieces together that Hyde only appears after Jekyll excuses himself and goes into his laboratory. In the lab, he has a bath filled with a secret potion called Solicor, which allows him to shed his proper Victorian image and become the raging id that lurks beneath. Once transformed into Hyde, he obliterates the facade of Victorian societal decorum, dismantling it one horrifying assault at a time as he annihilates cherished institutions like the military, the clergy, medicine, and family. He ties up the tough-talking Carew (one of Magee's most insane performances in a career filled with them) and forces him to watch as he has his way with the General's rebellious, willing, and sexually adventurous daughter as she's bent over a table, fondling and stroking the world's most phallic sewing machine. He rapes one of the male guests after pursuing him through the darkened house. Eventually, he even rapes his own mother (Giselle Preville, the 1935 Miss France runner-up who inherited the crown when the winner gave it up after just two hours), shouting "I'm going to break you in two, decrepit hag!" Fanny finds out his secret, and rather than being terrified, she's intrigued and even turned on, jumping into the Solicor bath with him, transforming into her own Hyde as the two commandeer a coach and ride off in the night, their dead guests' bodies strewn about the mansion as Parmegiani's score drones and on and on and on.
The second-best profoundly unnerving 1981 French/West German horror film by a Polish emigre (after Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION), THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE was released in France and other parts of Europe in 1981 and had an unsuccessful one-week run in the UK in 1984. Critics had mixed reactions, and few moviegoers saw it, but those who did never forgot it. It never received a theatrical or video release in the US (it did appear in Canadian video stores under the BLOODLUST title), though it was a mainstay on the bootleg circuit and eventually, crummy (and usually edited) prints could easily be found on YouTube. Arrow's new Blu-ray/DVD combo set marks the first official, authorized release of the film on home video in the US, and it's a package that practically outdoes Criterion in terms of the superior digital restoration and the copious extras. After years of watching blurry, cropped versions of the film, fans will be surprised at what they see and hear on Arrow's set, which will undoubtedly stand as the definitive version of what's become Borowczyk's signature work. It's a film that encompasses all of the filmmaker's sexual, political, and social obsessions, and it's shot on ornate sets with an at-times BARRY LYNDON-like use of natural or very dim lighting that emphasizes the disorientation and terror of the proceedings. Borowczyk makes excellent use of shadows and mirrors, the latter being the perfect metaphor for the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, Fanny and her murderous alter ego, and the perfect Victorian exterior masking the ugly hypocrisy underneath.
Luis Bunuel was a major influence on Borowczyk when he turned to feature filmmaking, and it's been pointed out by others and bears mentioning here how much of a debt STRANGE CASE owes to the Bunuel classics THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), with its guests physically unable to leave a dinner party, and THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977), with the female lead alternately played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), sometimes in the same scene. Taking on the role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always been regarded as a tour-de-force for any actor who's essayed the role, like John Barrymore in 1920, Spencer Tracy in 1941, Christopher Lee as "Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake" in 1971's I, MONSTER, and even Anthony Perkins in 1989's tawdry EDGE OF SANITY, which worked in the Jack the Ripper mythos as a freebasing Jekyll became a serial-killing, compulsively-masturbating Mr. Hyde. Fredric March even won the Best Actor Oscar for MGM's 1932 take on the famous story. It wasn't often that you'd see guys like Barrymore, March and Tracy in a horror movie, and the whole point of a serious actor taking on the role was to show their range. Borowczyk goes in the opposite direction in an obvious nod to Bunuel, casting one actor to play Jekyll and another to play Hyde. This had been done before--out of necessity with Ralph Bates and Martine Beswicke in 1971's DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE--but in the context of Borowczyk's take on the story, the dual casting works perfectly, even if it deprives us of just how interesting Kier as Mr. Hyde might've been. With his shaved eyebrows and dead glare, Zalcberg, best known to Eurotrash fans as Helmut Berger's hulking, drill-killing henchman in Jess Franco's FACELESS, is terrifying as Hyde, even if he's saddled with some of Borowczyk's prose that's often more purple than Hyde's engorged penis. If Borowczyk makes one mistake with STRANGE CASE, it's overstating the message and not trusting the audience to put it together. Jekyll/Hyde's appalling offenses, his shredding of societal convention, his exposing of upper-class hypocrisy, and his unleashing the beast within are apparent enough without him haughtily sneering "Like a schoolboy shedding the tawdry rags of his dreary institution, I throw off pretense, and leap, wallowing in an ocean of freedom and pleasure!" in a dubbed voice that sounds like Bill Corbett's later version of Crow T. Robot on MST3K, undermining Hyde's horrific actions by making him sound like a verbose brat in desperate need of a time-out.
Going with the French audio probably gives the film a touch of class that's lacking in the rather clumsy English dub (which only has Magee voicing his own performance; Kier's actual voice isn't heard on either track), and like its themes, it only further illustrates the sense of duality that permeates THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE: it's an art film with one foot in the grindhouse, simultaneously serious and trashy, classy and graphic, legitimately erotic and then straight-up uncomfortable. Like Jekyll and Hyde, STRANGE CASE is constantly two things at once, with incredibly effective and often stunning visuals juxtaposed with vile sexual violence. It shares a kinship with the best of Jean Rollin and maybe, on his best day, Jess Franco, though Franco wouldn't have been able to resist the urge for constant crotch zooms and would've have paid attention to the particulars, like having the camera pointed in the right direction. It's a strange, bewildering, beautiful, and shocking piece of work with haunting images that stay with you long after it's over.
NYMPHOMANIAC (Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium - 2013; US release 2014) Written and directed by Lars von Trier.
VOL I: Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Connie Nielsen, Jens Albinus, Hugo Speer, Cyron Melville, Felicity Gilbert, Anders Hove, Jesper Christensen, Saskia Reeves, Ananya Berg, Nicolas Bro. (Unrated, 117 mins)
VOL II: Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, Michael Pas, Caroline Goodall, Kate Ashfield, Ananya Berg, Shanti Roney, Kookie Ryan, Papou. (Unrated, 124 mins)
Arthouse provocateur Lars von Trier prides himself on walking the fine line between visionary auteur and misanthropic asshole, a firm believer that any publicity is good publicity, whether he's putting his lead actresses through hell to get the performance he needs from them, or prompting John C. Reilly to walk off of 2005's MANDERLAY over filming the actual slaughter of a donkey, or getting kicked out of the Cannes Film Festival for saying he sympathizes with Hitler. Like a bratty kid, von Trier revels in attention but with rare exception, backs it up with great films. When he announced NYMPHOMANIAC would run over five hours and include professional actors in unsimulated, hardcore sex scenes, the buzz was on. While the director's complete five-and-a-half hour cut was released in Europe, the US release was split into two films running around two hours each, released a few weeks apart (the director's cut will likely surface on Blu-ray). Von Trier supervised the US cuts, and while much explicit material was removed, quite a bit remains, including some penetrative shots that involve body doubles and CGI trickery melding the below-the-belt region with the name actors' bodies from the waist up. In other words, Shia LaBeouf may have auditioned for the film by sending von Trier a homemade sex tape, and while he's doing frontal nudity, the erection and beyond are the work of his body double. The same goes for actress Stacy Martin fellating a man (Jens Albinus) on a train. It's a very real-looking prosthetic penis, and while we see semen drooling out of Martin's mouth, the director's cut apparently shows the spurting ejaculation, for those so inclined.
A lot of this is von Trier just being von Trier, but contrary to initial reports and the director's own incessant hype, NYMPHOMANIAC, at least in its US incarnation, isn't quite the wall-to-wall porno fuckfest that it's been made out to be. In many ways, it's a von Trier greatest hits package, with cues from and callbacks to his past films like DOGVILLE (2003), ANTICHRIST (2009) and especially BREAKING THE WAVES (1996). It's von Trier's third straight film with Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's become his muse in misery after the harrowing ANTICHRIST and MELANCHOLIA (2011), where she initially has a supporting role but becomes the focus as the film progresses. Von Trier has a history of pushing his actresses to their limit and getting incredible work from them: Emily Watson's Oscar-nominated performance in BREAKING THE WAVES remains one of the greatest in all of cinema, while Bjork surpassed all expectations in DANCER IN THE DARK (2000). DOGVILLE's Nicole Kidman and MANDERLAY's Bryce Dallas Howard also survived von Trier and lived to tell the tale. In Gainsbourg, von Trier has found a kindred spirit who's willing and eager to go to the dark places others won't. She's the Klaus Kinski to his Werner Herzog, minus the mutual death threats.
As the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC opens, bookish academic Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) happens upon the unconscious Joe (Gainsbourg) lying in an alley, beaten and bloodied. He helps her back to his apartment, lets her shower and makes her some tea. They begin talking, first about little things, and then she agrees to tell her story. Von Trier plays with the time element a bit, but in the first volume, much of the dramatic weight is carried by 22-year-old newcomer Martin as young Joe. As older Joe explains, "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old," and before her age is in double digits (Ananya Berg plays Joe at this age in some discreetly-shot sequences that imply more they show), Joe and her best friend B are exploring themselves in ways that are already threatening to go beyond sliding down the bannister and grinding themselves against the bathroom floor. At the age of 15 (and now played by Martin), Joe asks local stud mechanic Jerome (LaBeouf) to take her virginity, which he does in the most perfunctory fashion imaginable. Nevertheless, the beast has been unleashed as Joe and B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) have contests like sneaking on to a train and screwing as many men as possible during the trip. They even form a club at school devoted to the pursuit of sex without love, though B eventually comes to her own realization that "the secret ingredient to sex is love." Joe believes that love complicates things, and continues sleeping with as many men as possible, eventually reconnecting with Jerome when she applies for a secretarial job at a printing company owned by his uncle (Jesper Christensen), even though she has no secretarial skills. She resists Jerome's advances, spending her evenings maintaining a busy schedule of hourly appointments with men who drop in to have sex with her, often passing one another as one arrives and the other leaves. By her own estimate, she's sleeping with up to eight men on a typical evening, and even devises an elaborate system for deciding which men she'll call back among the many messages on her answering machine. At the end of Vol. 1, Joe decides to settle down for domesticity with the now-successful Jerome, when she finds she can no longer reach orgasm.
In a brilliant debut, Martin is the focal point of the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC, and like Watson in BREAKING THE WAVES, she's up to the challenge even though von Trier saves the worst for Joe for when Gainsbourg assumes the role. For the first half, Gainsbourg is limited to sitting in bed as Joe tells Seligman her story, and the kind-hearted intellectual listens intently, often going off on thematic tangents involving fly fishing, cake forks, Bach, Poe, and mathematical theories that sort-of tie into the psychology of what Joe is telling him. Von Trier also gives Christian Slater his best role in years as Joe's doctor father in flashbacks. Joe loves her father deeply, and the two bond over their shared love of trees and flowers, neither feeling a connection to Joe's "cold bitch" mother (Connie Nielsen). As good as Martin and Slater are, the show-stealer for the first half is Uma Thurman in a one-scene stunner as the enraged wife of Mr. H (Hugo Speer), one of Joe's regular hookups. When Mr. H leaves his wife and shocks Joe by showing up at her place with his suitcases in tow, he's followed closely by Mrs H, who's dragged their three young sons along with her. If that wasn't awkward enough, Joe's next guy (Cyron Melville) shows up and everyone watches Mrs. H maniacally melt down, introducing the boys to Joe so they can "put a face to the all the therapy they'll need down the road," and saying "Would it be alright if I show the children the whoring bed? They need to see it! Let's go see Daddy's favorite place!" Thurman is onscreen for less than ten minutes but she makes every second count, and it's an instant classic of laughing while cringing in pained discomfort, one of those rare instances where a cameo is actually Oscar-worthy.
Vol. 2 picks up with Joe and Jerome married and having a baby. A few years pass as Martin exits and Gainsbourg takes over. The child, Marcel, is now three and though they love each other, Joe and Jerome's sex life has stalled. Jerome encourages her to see other men if it will help her psychologically ("If you buy a tiger, you have to keep it fed," he says). This goes on for some time and eventually leads Joe to the mysterious K (Jamie Bell). K seems to be some sort of Craigslist-type sex therapist/sadist who lives in what appears to be an abandoned office building where women show up for appointments to be beaten. K does not offer sex, and he doesn't allow safe words. You do what he says, period. Joe's sessions with K involve him renaming her "Fido," tying her to a couch, bent over, while he whips her bare ass with a riding crop, then inserting his fingers into her vagina to gauge her arousal. Things just get worse for Joe as her sex addiction, self-loathing and degradation cause her to lose her family. She can barely hold down her office job, routinely fucking male co-workers in the restroom or a closet space. She's ordered into therapy, where she lashes out against a society that judges her and tries to shame her. Now in her mid-40s, she eventually loses any feeling of pleasure, as her vagina is so scarred and worn from the thousands of men over three decades of hook-ups that it spontaneously bleeds, and causes numerous bouts of unbearable, debilitating pain. Joe eventually gets a job as a debt collector/extortionist for the shady L (Willem Dafoe), which leads to her shot at redemption by becoming a mentor to troubled teen P (Mia Goth).
While the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC has its share of dark moments, it's also surprisingly amusing in spots, such as Joe comparing her vagina to the automatic doors at a supermarket ("only with a stronger sensor") or when Seligman echoes the audience's call of bullshit with every one of Jerome's improbably hackneyed returns to the narrative. There's also the standard von Trier button-pushing bits like Joe getting wet standing by her father's death bed, and later in Vol 2, unsubtle Christ metaphors and Joe admitting that she feels a sympathetic kinship with a pedophile (Jean-Marc Barr) because of their "outcast" status (drawing thematic parallels to past von Trier outcasts ike the tragic Bess in BREAKING THE WAVES, Selma in DANCER IN THE DARK, and Grace in DOGVILLE and MANDERLAY). But it's the second half where things take a grim turn, largely with the intensely disturbing sequences involving Bell's K (the much-ballyhooed "Silent Duck" moment when K fists Joe is mostly implied, at least in the US cut), and the effect Joe's behavior has on Jerome and Marcel. I'm still not convinced that his recent public implosion isn't some extended von Trier-coordinated publicity stunt, but credit where it's due--funny accent and all, LaBeouf is actually quite good, especially in the second half. Given the extreme length and the myriad of directions the story takes, von Trier generally keeps things on point even when it threatens to derail at any moment. It only starts to feel choppy as things wind down, especially in the debt collection tangent, which comes out of nowhere and doesn't really feel like it belongs. As shown in her scenes at her jobs, Joe really has no skills other than sexual, which wouldn't seem a prerequisite for tough-talking collecting for a loan shark (perhaps the manipulation aspect?). Also, Joe's relationship with P is never fleshed out, at least not to the point where some of P's actions near the end make complete sense. I see the way the tables get turned and Joe is looking at things from another perspective, but it just feels like something's missing or got lost in the editing.
Like Seligman, the viewer is likely to be skeptical of some of Joe's story. There are many times over the course of the four hours when both Joe and to a lesser extent, Seligman seem like the classic "unreliable narrator." In many ways, NYMPHOMANIAC is film loaded with sex and not really specifically about sex. One popular theory is that Joe is a stand-in for von Trier and that Seligman is every stuffy, erudite, out-of-touch film critic who's judged and vilified him, though this involves a revelation by Seligman that I won't spoil. But Seligman doesn't judge Joe (other than being incredulous over some too convenient developments), which makes him different from every other man she's ever known other than her beloved father. There's a lot to take in--no pun intended--with NYMPHOMANIAC, so much so that sometimes the filmmaking itself is easy to overlook. There are some stunning shots and a strong Andrei Tarkovsky vibe throughout--one shot of older Joe finding "her" tree is breathtaking, and clothed or otherwise, the camera simply adores Martin, who has the most hauntingly seductive gaze you've seen in ages. Even seeing it split into two films--if you see it in its American incarnation, it's best to set four hours aside and just binge it--it probably still needs to be seen again in von Trier's original director's cut. Judging from viewing it in this format, it's not von Trier's best film--it seems to start stumbling with the introduction of L, though that's no fault of Dafoe's-- but it may be his most personal one, and one that reveals more of itself on repeat viewings, however soul-crushing and exhausting that may be. But that's vintage Lars von Trier. Love him or hate him, his films get you talking.
I'd probably have to go back to 2010's LEGION to find a horror film that starts off so promisingly and implodes as catastrophically as RED LIGHTS. Written and directed by Rodrigo Cortes (the "Ryan Reynolds in a box" cult thriller BURIED), RED LIGHTS is an initially intriguing look at the world of academic skeptics debunking the supernatural. Psychologist Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and her physicist assistant Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) have never encountered a case of supposed paranormal activity or psychic phenomena they couldn't disprove. Meanwhile, long-retired 1970's blind celebrity psychic Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) has emerged from self-imposed exile and Buckley wants to go after him, despite warnings from Matheson that Silver--with whom she's dealt before--is dangerous and nothing like the typical scam artists they usually face. Cortes gets things rolling very effectively and there's a nice John Carpenter vibe to the film's first half, but it starts seriously skidding with the unexpected exit of one major character and the story just gets sillier by the scene, culminating in an infuriating twist ending that renders the preceding 105 minutes moot. There's a lot of good actors left stranded--Joely Richardson, Toby Jones, and Elizabeth Olsen have supporting roles--and Cortes wastes an excellent performance by Weaver but, sorry to say, De Niro is a major reason why RED LIGHTS doesn't work. He's horribly miscast, visibly bored, and just completely wrong for this film's personification of psychic evil. It's never believable for a moment that Silver's return would cause such a media frenzy, and at no point does De Niro convey the kind of charisma that a huge celebrity of this sort should. He's just a stone-faced, sleepwalking bore throughout, and for some reason, I kept picturing how perfect someone like Jeff Goldblum might've been as Silver--someone who can convincingly demonstrate both the eccentric charm and the sense of supernatural menace that's required. Hell, even a Nicolas Cage would've at least brought some energy to the role. I think De Niro was more engaged in FREELANCERS--either he's coasting for a quick paycheck and a free Spanish vacation or underplaying it to the point of catatonia. It's a shame, because RED LIGHTS starts off so well and is one of those rare horror films geared toward an adult audience, cast with living legends like De Niro and Weaver, and it just ends up a crushing disappointment. Almost worth seeing for the laughable Simon Silver flashback where a young actor with a stick-on mole does the worst De Niro impression this side of an open-mic night at your local Chuckle Hut. Barely released in US theaters, grossing $52,000 on just 18 screens. (R, 114 mins)
IRON SKY (Finland/Austria/Denmark/Germany/France/Australia - 2012)
Stylized, absurdist sci-fi comedy centered on the conspiracy theories that after WWII, the Nazis set up a secret base on the dark side of the moon. Here, in 2018, they're led by the current Fuhrer, Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier) and they're planning on attack on Earth with their space fleet let by the massive warship Gotterdammerung. They're accidentally discovered by two US astronauts. They kill one and take the other, African-American James Washington (Christopher Kirby) prisoner, bleaching his hair and skin white to give him the perfect Ayran look. Meanwhile, Washington is forced to accompany Kortzfleisch's ambitious second-in-command Adler (Gotz Otto) and his fiancee Renate (Julia Dietze) to Earth to obtain more of Washington's "computer phones" (cell phones) to aid in their takeover plot. They end up sticking around on Earth when they cross paths with fashionista Vivian Wagner (Peta Sergeant), the bitch-on-wheels image consultant to the dim-witted, slogan-spouting Sarah Palin-esque US President (Stephanie Paul), who incorporates Renate's Nazi platitudes into her speeches. Before long, Kortzfleisch arrives with the fleet and Adler puts the invasion in motion, with the Gotterdammerung forced to take on the space warship USS George W. Bush.
There's some sharp-edged satire throughout IRON SKY, particularly with the presentation of the American political scene (the US President is overjoyed that she gets to be a wartime President, citing that "They always get re-elected!"), and various plays on stereotypes (when Washington is a fugitive on the moon, the Nazis issue a news alert describing him as "unarmed and possibly angry"), and an inspired bit where Renate, a teacher, describes Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR to her class as "a famous ten-minute short film," unaware that Nazi officials have censored the rest of it (I also liked the scene where United Nations representatives laugh at North Korea's hapless attempt to claim responsibility for the invasion of Earth). There's some big laughs in IRON SKY, but it still seems like an SNL skit dragged out to feature length. Perhaps a bit more sophisticated, yes, but it has long sections where it just seems to putter along. Co-written and directed by Timo Vuorensola (who made two films in the STAR WRECK series of Finnish STAR TREK spoofs), IRON SKY got some attention in Europe as part of a new movement of communal, participatory filmmaking where online fans at an IRON SKY forum got to contribute ideas and pitched in with donations to help fund the film. That's not to imply that it's some homemade, DIY film, when in fact, it's a multi-country co-production with an international cast, shot in several countries, with most of the interiors done in Australia. IRON SKY isn't altogether successful and at times feels like a party guest who won't leave, but it does exhibit some occasionally daring bits of ballsy humor, and is definitely worth a look if you're in the right mood. (R, 93 mins)
