At the movies: Venom: The Last Dance.

 

To see Venom³ is to know that either writer/director Kelly Marcel or co-writer/star Tom Hardy at some point saw Lucio Fulci’s immortal psychotronic freakout The Beyond and thought, “That giant jug of corrosive acid on the top shelf there… that seems a little coy and reserved.” And what V3nom gives us is something so ludicrous, with such a playground flourish, that you kind of have to enjoy the madcap daffiness of it all. That’s not even getting into a giant fight at the special effects factory/xenobiology lab/Area 51 that feels like the opening twnety minutes of Out 1 but with everyone wearing a colorcoded symbiote.

For three films now, we’ve waded through intricate superhero nonsense (which I say as a fan of comic book cinema) in order to get at the secret heart of the relationship between journalist/gadabout Eddie Brock (Hardy) and his metamorphic friend/brother/boyfriend Venom (also Hardy), an alien goo that’s as creative, useful, and kinky as the story requires at any given point. And now, they’re on the run due to a quick multiverse hop and the aftermath of Venom 2, where Woody Harrelson was an evil symbiote named Carnage who got his head eaten in the CG cacophony that kept intruding on the domestic drama of Eddie and Venom’s life, which felt like the most daring off-Broadway drama of 1967 with a little touch of a Ken Loach kitchen sink drama.

But more than that, they’re also on the run from Knull (Andy Serkis), the ruler of The Void, the primogenitor of all of the symbiotes, and a Big Bad who is imprisoned far away from the earthbound action we see. But having cosmic power means you can send heaps and heaps of hunter-beasts that shred their prey and expel their assorted fluids like a Water Wiggle, so that’s the engine of The Last Dance.

This movie is weird, but not in a way that’s particularly marketable. There’s digital thrills, and worldbuilding a-plenty, and this definitely feels like Sony’s Marvel outlet throwing a bunch of potentialities and characters out into the ether so they can pick up whichever way the wind blows in a year or so after their perplexing-looking but beefcake-laden Kraven The Hunter film comes out. This is a film made for the fans of the Venom films and character, but it feels much more like it was made for fans of Tom Hardy getting weird with it. And his approach to Eddie and Venom has always felt like someone who has worked out whole chaptered story arcs on AO3, finding stunning character moments and unexpected facets of this bizarre combination of two messy dudes who somehow make each other better than they were before.

They go to Vegas, they hang out with a hippie-adjacent family of UFO enthusiasts, they battle a quartet of dogfighters (which, if you know Hardy’s real-life advocacy, lets you know these animal abusers are going to get their shit righteously rocked), and they cross paths with a differently-abled Doctor of Science (Juno Temple!) who is the kind of symbiote ally that more alien races could use. There’s a dance number, some metatextuality, and an astonishing river chase where Venom is leaping between assorted critters like he’s acting out the paths of evolution, and it’s all so deeply strange and yet direct in focus that it feels like instead of suits in a boardroom that the team calling the shots were the table in the cafeteria who got slipped the Mountain Dew.

Is this a good movie? I don’t know. I don’t know if any of the Venoms are conventionally good. But when they let Hardy do his thing, Regarding the second film, I said it was a shame that there was no possible Oscar for an actor for incarnating a dialectical situation. So is this a recommendation? Absolutely, in that Hardy in his palooka era is never not worth watching- this is a cake made out of all the things you like but in unconventional proportions.

At the movies: Smile 2.

 

There’s something inexorable about the way Smile 2 unfolds- a path that can’t be avoided or resisted. In the first Smile, everything seemed like a remake of a J-Horror film; a closed system that no one can escape from, with death the end result for all involved parties. It had a fatalism that feels at odds with the traditions of American horror, and it traffics in a very specific kind of cruelty- think Candyman ‘92 or In Dreams, where the protagonist’s very life is disassembled with nothing left. And Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), the pop princess at the center of the latest Smile, has so much built up and we’re gonna watch it all burn.

I’m not sure what writer/director Parker Finn’s endgame is, but I’ve got to respect someone who, when given heaps of money after a surprise hit, decides it’s time to tell a sensitive and relentless story about how pop stars are people too. There’s a surprising amount of Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux in here, some thoughts about the way that recovery works for different folks, a bit of Halloween III, and a dark, dark focus on how easily we construct our lives to be disassembled. (It goes without saying that this film sets the bar high for that upcoming riff on Faces of Death with Charli XCX.)

It’s hard to get a feel for the moral space these films are taking place in- because this demonic presence is so absolute in its destruction, it seems rather egalitarian. But the circumstances by which Skye finds herself witnessing a grotesque suicide seem exactly like the stick some folks would beat on victims with, so it’s hard to say. Let’s just acknowledge the idea that people with past histories of substance abuse are just not allowed to feel pain beyond a certain threshold is grotesque, and it sounds like the kind of sicko power fantasies that a lot of people who really have no business in politics just love to indulge in.

The Smile Demon (not its official designation, and in a way it’s kind of impressive that we’ve gotten two of these films and no one is in any rush to explain or define its situation) has the meticulous attention to detail and utter contempt for humanity of Jigsaw from the Saw films, but also the reality-bending flourishes of a Freddy Krueger. And while this frees its malign tendencies up to just lay waste to every relationship and tie around the subject of its focus, it’s also got a sick, gaslighter edge for a last minute reveal that not everything that the cast (and audience) has suffered is in fact real.

It’s a specific kind of upsetting that horror seems to play very delicately with. Not so the Smile films- there’s nothing delicate here. Nothing ever escapes whatever is at play, and in a sense, it’s probably well-suited to the idea of horror as metaphor. Because just going on these films, this is how humanity dies, and that’s seriously hardcore for a film with this many quality pop songs (personal faves- “New Brain” and “Blood on White Satin”) and production numbers. There’s no hope at all to be found here, and it grinds you down a bit. I mean, even Art The Clown at least has a nemesis…

There is something cathartic about the world that Finn has created with these films. In a way, they’re heirs to the legacy of the Final Destination series, in that who you are as a person means absolutely nothing in the face of the death that comes for us all. You can be a well-meaning friend brought back into the orbit of someone you’d almost given up on but just couldn’t. You could be the source of support who has put everything into stasis and stability. You could be the old High School acquaintance who likes to party. And this unspeakable horror will take you down as well, either as collateral damage or by making you a witness to its destructive habits and then its next host. It’s bleak.

If you see a performer that you like has been cast in one of these films, it’s a weird feeling, because they’re going to die, and horribly. (Poor Lukas Gage, the Cat King himself, can’t even catch a break- gotta live freaky, gotta die freaky when you’re in a Smile.) Naomi Scott is pretty great as doomed pop icon Skye Riley, and she acts, sings, dances, screams, and cries up a storm. It’s an incredible performance that gives both the elegance and discipline of Black Swan and the stylized fatalism of Dancer in the Dark. And it’s in service of a film that takes its time to destroy you utterly.

The score, deeply effective and weird, paying homage to some of the tonalities in Annihilation, at times a collage of sampled screams and sighs, keeps you off balance. The frame, wont to invert its perspective as the viewer careens through this serrate vivisection. And there’s an ending that you can feel coalescing into being throughout Smile 2, something monstrous on a level that feels like what’s happening to us all, the way we’ve all become witnesses to something that overwhelms the meager defenses we have left after the past decade, and Finn has the guts to go with it, both in what we see and the overwhelming horror of What Happens Next. And I shudder at the thought.

At the movies: Red Rooms.

 

Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) is a Quebecois masterwork in deeply unsettling tension and unease, as well as some trenchant moral analysis about all the shit percolating in and around seemingly everything. The ad campaign goes for David Fincher, but this is like if Paul Schrader made 8mm, or a Robert Bresson riff on Emanuelle in America. Check it out...

At the movies: Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln.

 

Perhaps you’ve seen the key art for this film, with Abraham Lincoln sporting an Aladdin Sane lightning bolt. It’s a striking image that does a lot of work in getting across a concept, and the documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln makes a point of exploring that concept from a historical perspective, with an incredible assortment of scholars and thinkers (much respect to Dr. Jean Baker’s sweater/scarf combo- iconic) providing intelligent discourse about Lincoln and his affections.

Putting aside the fact that there’s a great deal of joy to be had in political films getting theatrical play in this country that aren’t knee-jerk hateration, evangelical propaganda, or empty hagiography, it feels truly subversive that Lover of Men is showing in regular theatres throughout the country. It’s like pulling teeth to get queer-themed cinema seen anywhere outside of arthouse outposts and focused film festivals, so there’s already a small victory won. And here’s the most important thing about this documentary- it’s a well-made film that has done its homework (knowing that bad faith voices would attempt to tear it down each step of the way) and has found a tone that works very well with the material. We have scholarly talking heads, primary sources where available, Ken Burns documentary fundamentals (there are moments when the score wants to make a leap from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass, and I was feeling that), and a rock-solid historical narrative.

We’ve also got silent reenactments of important moments from the life of Lincoln, and these may prove a stumbling block for some viewers. While strictly PG, the fact is that any depiction of male-male intimacy will cause some people to lose their minds and try to pass legislation against the rights of others. Similarly, there might be- among the stodgier side of academia- viewers who do accept Lincoln’s sexual and affectional habits but who find these reenactments corny. And truthfully, you can’t win every time with every audience. But real talk: if you’re swinging for the fences with a subject like this, then yes, every step of the way you make it clear that the simple act of handholding, or a sweaty embrace, is part of this story. Sometimes it may be a little shady, or silly- but queer audiences can find the shade and the silly in any text- it’s a survival mechanism. And for far too long compartmentalization has been a weapon wielded against the past, and this film never forgets the stakes of living what the modern world would call a queer life.

And yes, they get into that- at times it may feel a bit of a rondelay through many of the issues that have obscured LGBTQIA+ lives over the past hundred and sixty years- but you can’t talk about why so much of this aspect of one of the most important historical American lives has been suppressed without addressing each of these specific approaches to reshaping social perspectives. (Despite seeming a little diffuse in the back half, documentarian Shaun Peterson does return to his thesis and brings it all together on the same page before it ends.) Though it is staggering that Lincoln’s wrestling career (see above photo) is never brought up, even in an incidental or anecdotal way.

Things that occurred to me while I was watching this- not in the sense of an ideological or historical conflict, but rather in a sense of commonality: the Electric Six video “Gay Bar,” current toast of Broadway Cole Escola’s play Oh, Mary, and the 2006 American Dad! Episode Lincoln Lover (which now feels completely removed from contemporary political context due to its naivete and the calcifying shifts in party lines). But all of them understand the unique vibe of this lanky symbol of American history as a signifier for gay stuff, and maybe memeification is the way to get this idea to take root across the swath of the American perspective on Abraham Lincoln. This is fun, informative, inspirational, and well-worth a look.

At the movies: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

 

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

I was worried about this film.

The trailers looked and felt like the frantic and flailing treading of water that comes from trying to recapture something elusive. The vibe felt like a court-mandated truce between practical elements and digital tech that would never dream of talking shit about one another even as they never seemed to mesh in a visually cohesive manner. The haphazard projection of the press screening (in the wrong aspect ratio) leaves a few questions in place about how exactly this film is supposed to look- but real talk: I had enough of a good time that I’ll happily check it out again. Will it become the perennial family favorite that the first one did? Well, it’s too soon to say. But it’s not a Greatest Hits movie, and it does cave in under the weight of previous elements.

If anything, what Beetlejuice Beetlejuice most reminds me of is The Last Jedi. I didn’t love everything about that film, either, but it felt so distinctive compared to its predecessor, and so willing to make its own choices that it felt special. And time has burnished its controversial reputation, and validated most of its risks. And to call a legacy sequel with tie-in car insurance/sales ads (including one with a “Day-O” rewrite that was so awful it almost killed off any desire I had to see this film) risky is certainly a wild development. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t feel particularly safe or conventional.

It’s hard to recapture how the original film played back in ‘88. First at the Dayton Mall cinemas with my Dad, a second time at a long since gone drive-in in Gallatin (with Flowers In The Attic as the back half of the double feature!), there were elements that certainly clicked through (I was already on board the Tim Burton train because of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which is absolutely the best movie for an eleven year-old to have on repeat when recovering from having an emergency tonsillectomy). But the O.G. Beetlejuice is a mood, and absolutely a hangout film that derives power from multiple viewings. There is a strength in the ramshackle, and this lesson is the direct throughline from the 1988 original to this weird little bauble of a film.

Once again, Catherine O’Hara defines the film and gets the best lines and the outfits that stick in your mind forever. Nothing as epoch-defining as her opera gloves-as-headband in 1988, but thanks to the media footprint of Schitt’s Creek, the whole world knows that no one wears clothes like O’Hara. Given the way that Nightmare Before Christmas-themed accessories have become their own perennial industry, is it too much to ask for Delia Deetz merch from her Human Canvas installation (which we see just enough of to be completely captivated)?

It is the character of Delia and her entrenchment in the art world that leads to the visual keystone of the whole film- that gorgeous, asymmetrical house; born of Maitland Hardware and the paranormal couture of Otho and Delia, a fusion of aesthetics that, in the intervening almost four decades, has become one of the defining movie homes of the ‘80s. That house, shrouded in mourning vestments, is both a conceptual marvel and emotional grounding (as well as a tip of the hat to Christo and Jean-Claude), and it helps the various and sundry pieces of the film cohere. Do I wish it had the glorious queer scalpel of the late, great Glenn Shadix’ voice? Absolutely. (You can tell that Delia has inherited all the would-have-been Otho lines, which is as it should be.) As for the Jeffrey Jones-shaped hole in the film, it’s a Schrödinger’s Cat approach to the character of Charles Deetz

The biggest gamble that the film takes, other than existing in the first place, is in Winona Ryder’s Lydia. In the original film, she is ground zero for multiple generations to find themselves in Byronic flourish and skill with a withering quip. Lydia is both mirror and aspiration for everyone mortified by the tyranny of family tradition, and she is perfect. Which makes depicting the passage of time and how it has changed this pure Gen X icon both incredibly gutsy and kind of shocking. Still blessed/cursed with the gift of seeing the dead, the passing years have found her monetizing her specialness, dabbling in a vague pill habit (a subplot that is left dangerously underexplained), and caught in the orbit of a manager/lover (Justin Theroux, who is pitched at 120% but somehow only able to output on a “mellow” setting) who exhibits different facets of the madcap control freak that still haunt her from her time as the reluctant would-be bride of Beetlejuice.

Burton understands that too much Beetlejuice tips the scales, and thankfully, Keaton pops up in exactly the right proportion to the runtime. His undead Tex Avery vibe works best as a gag machine that can be fit into the story whenever he’s called on, and it’s comparable to the first film’s similarly judicious use of the character.

As Lydia’s daughter Astrid, Jenna Ortega is in a very interesting narrative space. She has to incarnate several recent generations, including the skepticism that Millennials and Gen Z rightfully feel toward everything that has come before, as well as define the voice of petulant youth – these aspects give her a strong voice and a rock solid foundation, but they don’t let her be a whole lot of fun. Which, honestly, is a fair reflection of the world around us and what previous generations have done with it. Thankfully, Astrid gets her own storyline that lets her have some terror-filled adventures, including a first date and a multidimensional caper that allows for some reconciliations (both emotionally and cosmically), in addition to a possibly unintentional narrative point that susceptibility to supernatural subterfuge may be a genetically dominant trait.

There’s also Willem Dafoe as the ghost of an actor famous for playing a cop who, in the afterlife, has become a high-ranking detective (it’s easier to enjoy onscreen than it is to explain- he’s probably the closest equivalent we have to Sylvia Sidney’s Juno in that he sets the tone we have for the bureaucracy of The Other Side), and he has a mad joie de vivre that helps reinforce some of the more tangential aspects of the script. Real talk: it’s a very weird choice to have Monica Bellucci in your movie and give her absolutely nothing to do. She has an iconic look, and gets to dole out the gnarliest kills, and it still feels like she’s barely in the film. This is the Eva Green/Helena Bonham Carter/Lisa Marie part, and it will likewise fuel a thousand Halloween costumes. It’s also an unexpected weird little treat to find Torchwood/Pacific Rim’s Burn Gorman meshing into the proceedings as a Connecticut priest whose interaction with the realm of the undead feels like it could be setting up a wacky take on Nightbreed’s Father Ashbury in the future.

Easily Burton’s best film since Frankenweenie (and before that, Sleepy Hollow), this manages to finally fix the catastrophic legacy of Big Fish- here is Burton finding a path to reconciling generations without completely belt-sanding away the edges that made his work distinctive in the first place.

This film’s musical setpiece may be the Richard Harris “MacArthur Park,” but thankfully, we’re bookended with the sublime Donna Summer version. Aesthetically, we’re in good hands.

Talking to Alicia Witt.

 

I talked with Alicia Witt about the horror event that is Longlegs, as well as her fascinating and singular career. Have a read, why don't you?

The 6th Annual Orville Peck Rodeo.

 When Orville came to town with a bunch of his friends, I got to approach the experience from two different perspectives. The first being a prelude to the three-day event.

With the second being a review of the second day of the trio, a mini-festival downtown at the Ascend Amphitheatre.

It was awesome, and a lot of emotional and musical ground was covered.