Item: Concept Films Sometimes Good

One measure of an excellent narrative film is the complexity of its story world - how it outlines a community so the audience can grasp its traditions and modes of survival/rejuvenation, indeed, how it pauses the forward pull of the narrative in order for us to bask in that world's rich textures. A recent screening of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) confirmed it as just such a film. In fact, Ford thematizes the tension between vertical world making and horizontal narrative pull which grafts onto the western's fundamental civilization vs. wilderness dichotomy. Ethan Edwards' (John Wayne) bloodthirsty drive to find Debbie (Natalie Wood) would seem to brook no obstacles. And yet Ford's characteristic narrative trills try to impede his search. Edwards has no time for such civilizing traditions as funerals even for his recently slaughtered brother and his family. "Put an amen on it!" he barks to the preacher, itching to start his search.

Another measure of an excellent narrative film is the novelty and brilliance of its conceptual thrust. These films subjugate texture and world making to the concept, an idée fixe that structures the entire experience, often a mystery that the viewer must decode in order to make sense of various narrative lacunae or inconsistencies. One of the benefits of a concept-heavy film is that it ignores the rote methods of creating a lived-in story world - the formation of the heterosexual couple, another heterosexual couple to shadow and uphold the primary one (often providing comedic relief), the formation of the nuclear family on the heels of the formation of the primary heterosexual couple, etc. 

M. Night Shyamalan is the current master of the concept film. So it's no surprise to learn that he produced Caddo Lake and like most of his films, the concept so dominates the narrative that a critic must ruin the twists in order to discuss it at all. So in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I'll just note that Caddo Lake involves time jumping with two stories separated by decades running concurrently. It results in a materialist narrative à la Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) with characters looking in on events that they have already experienced and the concept is handled with pop-art (not Pop Art) deft and grace.

Tuesday is even better. A terminally ill 15 year old, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), encounters Death in the form of a shape-shifting macaw. Tuesday's mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is understandably alarmed by the bird's presence and takes some drastic measures to prevent it from taking away Tuesday with some world-historic consequences. The concept perspires glucose and the reduced narrative/cast of characters has a drawback in its failure to lend any complexity to Tuesday's Black nurse (Leah Harvey). But the simplicity and force and sheer weirdness of the Grim Parrot steamrolls over most of the saccharine moments and helps us organize our own inchoate thoughts about death.

Best of all is The Substance, a repulsive body-horror film I was certain I would loathe. Demi Moore stars in a career performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a 50-year-old actress fired from her aerobics show for the crime of aging. She encounters a serum called The Substance which will allow her to appear as a younger version of herself. Problem is tight-bodied, twenty-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges from her back all Manitou-like and leaves a ripped-apart Elisabeth writhing on the bathroom floor. As per the concept, the two must switch back and forth every seven days for injections of stabilizer fluid. But as Sue starts to self-actualize (and take over Elisabeth's aerobics show to great fame), she ignores these instructions with grotesque results for both of them.

Any professor working on next semester's Feminist Film Theory 101 syllabus couldn't find a starker, more course-ready text. It explains Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One for the slasher-film set and the purity of the concept makes few concessions to a complexly textured story world. Feminist rage powers the film forward with a punky anger-energy augmented by Raffertie's howling techno score. It's about misogyny rather than being misogynistic although that's very much open for debate (as with The Searchers' racism*). And it's getting under audiences' skins, the rare non-franchise film to clean up at the box office. Howl along today!

Caddo Lake (Celine Held and Logan George, 2024) - A-minus

Tuesday (Daina O. Pusic, 2024) - A-minus

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) - A-minus

The Searchers - A+ (just in case you needed to be told) 

*Lehman, Peter. “Looking at Look’s Missing Reverse Shot: Psychoanalysis and Style in John Ford’s The Searchers.” In The Western Reader. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998, 259-268. [taken from Wide Angle 4.4, pp. 65-70, 1981].

Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

There's a moment in Trap, M. Night Shyamalan's latest folly (a word I employ with affection), that is as much a product of its time as Psycho was to 1960. Unable to tame the digital wilds of ebooks and screeners containing spoilers, Hitchcock could never hope to preserve the shock of the shower scene in 2024. But today, when mass communication and interpersonal communication are merging ever closer, Shyamalan bends our constant presence online (and the amped ubiquity of celebrity culture) to his suspenseful needs. In a pivotal scene, pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) jumps on TikTok Live to inform her millions of followers that there is a man being held captive. She knows only a few clues but once she provides those to her fans, they respond instantly and manage to locate and rescue the prisoner. Here Shyamalan uses the implausibility of the slasher genre to his advantage. You may feel it's unrealistic that a pop star could have immediate access to her fans. But that absolutely tracks with modern celebrity culture and the instant nature of digital life. It's equal parts preposterous and utterly believable, one of Shyamalan's many great attributes as a director. 

What's harder to swallow are the machinations of the serial killer Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett, a perfect role for his post-pretty boy victory lap). As with Jason, Michael, and Freddy, the man displays inhuman feats of strength and stealth. And when implausibility shades into confusion, I bristle. For instance, in the third act, how the hell does he manage to get out of the limo surrounded by Lady Raven's revenge-stoked fans? Because he put on a t-shirt he found on the passenger seat? Huh? 

Still, Trap is truly a folly because it's less a slasher film than a shameless vanity project for his daughter Saleka who stars as Lady Raven and gets to perform a full album's worth of her self-penned songs at a concert that comprises most of the first half of the film. There's even an accompanying album you can enjoy in all its meta glory. The songs are standard-issue bland pop, kind of like Ray of Light as an aesthetic strategy 30 years après la lettre. But the matter of the quality of the songs evaporates as Lady Raven takes an active role in the narrative and evinces a charity that would shame Mother Teresa let alone Lady Gaga. Where Cooper is Pure Evil, Lady Raven is Blinding Goodness as the film starts to take on Sextette proportions of delusions of grandeur. As an eternal lover of Sextette (the first half, at least), I must bow to both Shyamalans' shamelessness. And the fact that the people I saw it with had such passionately divergent reactions (the Mr. loved it, my two nieces and sister loathed it) makes me weak, hence the suitably preposterous grade below.

Grade: A-minus

M. Night Shyamalan makes first okay film in a decade!

Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023)

No 21st-century Hollywood director has hit more consistent highs than M. Night Shyamalan. Ever since his 1999 breakthrough The Sixth Sense, he has managed only one flat-out airdale, 2010's dreary The Last Airbender, and two middling vehicles, Signs (2002) and After Earth (2013). Every other damn title (and this includes his excellent Apple TV series Servant) has proven chef's-kiss-plus. Sadly, though, Knock at the Cabin is his first merely okay film in a decade. 

Based on Paul G. Tremblay's 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, Knock at the Cabin starts fresh with precious little exposition in that inimitable Shyamalan fashion. A group of four creepy weapon-wielding figures descends upon Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), a couple enjoying a bucolic vacation in a cabin in the Pennsylvania woods with their seven-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). Despite being led by the intimidating Leonard (Dave Bautista, muscling in on Dwayne Johnson's [and John Cena's?] territory), the group claims that they are actually there to save the world. All four have seen visions that predict a series of earth-ending catastrophes that can be avoided only if one family member kills another. Naturally, Eric and Andrew don't believe them even with some possibly prerecorded or falsified news reports about earthquakes and a deadly virus on the television. Most of the narrative tension derives from the question of whether Leonard and company are telling the truth or are subjugating the family to a sick game, a tension exacerbated by the suspicion that the group may be emissaries from a homophobic suicide cult. 

Shyamalan keeps the excitement levels on overdrive through the very last scene. And all the performances, especially Aldridge's rage-filled Andrew, are superlative. The problem is that, for once in Shyamalan's filmography, the twist is that there is no twist. Not that his films live or die with mere clever gotchas as more savvy audiences know. But the straightforwardness of the conceit here deprives Shyamalan of his trademark complex metanarratives. One might chalk up this relative drabness to the fact that he's adapting a story instead of an original screenplay. But that didn't prevent Old (2021), based on Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters' graphic novel Sandcastle, from joining the ranks of his toppermost outings. Knock at the Cabin makes you think about its particular story, its detours and plot holes and philosophical conundrums, rather than storytelling or filmmaking itself as Shyamalan's best films do. Once it's over, it's over - an economy-size, easily digested genre pic. And that places it at the level of typical Hollywood fodder, an echelon Shyamalan usually transcends.

Grade: B+

Monthly Top Ten: March 2022

1. camp.o.rama instagram. (https://www.instagram.com/camp.o.rama/). Londoner Myles Lester describes his Instagram as a mixture of "high and low camp and everything in between." He pays homage to some typical gay icons to teach the children. But his Brit base means he has plenty to teach me. If you were already aware of Cilla Black's "All Night Long" from her 1983 Christmas special, featuring children attempting The Robot but achieving...something else, then you're one up on me.

2. The 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies virtual conference. We were crushed that we couldn't meet in Chicago. But the conference platform (where you could leave messages, start polls, upload files, etc.) was a model for how to pull off a virtual conference. Some vestige of it should remain when (when!) we return in person.

3. Hash browns. Their simple structural integrity is welcome on the east coast where canned potatoes in a sea (literally) of unpredictable vegetables (especially yucky-ass green peppers and oppressive onions) are apparently the norm with breakfast.

4. Tony's Chocolonely 32% milk chocolate caramel sea salt. Godawful name. But so transcendent that I long to try this Dutch confectionery's plain ole milk chocolate. Even sweeter, the company strives to make all chocolate 100% slave free. More here.

5. The Righteous Gemstones, Season Two (created by Danny McBride) (HBO Max). A bit too broad this time out. And Kelvin Gemstone's muscleman side cult subplot was a disaster. But Eric André as oily televangelist Lyle Lissons owns the best line of the series. To Joe Jonas playing himself at a groundbreaking ceremony: "Get your Christian ass up here!"

6. Servant, Season Three (created by Tony Basgallop) (Apple TV). The most streamlined season of this scary, wacky series. The creators are right to have Season Four be the last. Nevertheless, each episode still feels like it's about to jump the shark when a twist worthy of executive producer and occasional director M. Night Shyamalan recalibrates the entire edifice.

7. The Lost Leonardo (Andreas Koefoed, 2021). An infuriating documentary on the Salvator Mundi which brought out the Judge Judy in me. Imagine these questions in her vice-like voice: Where exactly did this painting come from? Did you or did you not deem it to be a Leonardo?

8. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. My very first James! And I much preferred the film adaptation The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). 

9. Jess Conrad: This Pullover (Jasmine, 2022). The idea that pre-Beatles early-1960s popular music was a vast wasteland has been debunked so thoroughly that it's refreshing to encounter an act that bears out the thesis. The title track from this recent compilation was voted the World's Worst Record on Kenny Everett's Capital Radio show in 1977 and it just might be: bottom-of-the barrel teen idol tissue paper with no camp escape valve discernible. Later, Conrad showed up in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980) presumably to take up his place in a time-honored tradition.

10. Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (4AD, 2022). As always with this band, it starts out a bit too contained, a bit too Apollonian. Then the title track pauses your treadmill of a day as chief Thief Adrianne Lenker accesses the provisional calm in Yoko Ono's "Mrs. Lennon" and your favorite non-"Sara" Steve Nicks track off Tusk. At which point the entire album opens up and honors an outfit Wiki describes as "an American indie rock band with folk roots based in Brooklyn, New York." Far more consistent than Tusk and the best album of the year so far.

Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021)

The severe betrayal of The Last Airbender and the more routine disappointment of After Earth were clearly glitches. Ever since 2015's The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has held on to his title as the best Hollywood director standing and the incredible Old proves that any contender will have to come up with a Showgirls to approach his level. I won't say much here because a talent as formidable as Shyamalan deserves more than a blog post and I want to avoid spoilers so as to preserve the many shocks coming your way. But Old continues his knack, most legible in my beloved Lady in the Water, for creating meta-narratives - stories in which the characters are trying to figure out the stories. Thus, the first act becomes blissfully foreshortened and lends the impression that Shyamalan is not adept at traditional storytelling. (As if that matters. A colleague once complained that Unbreakable had only two acts. Um, yeah, that's part of why it's so great!) In actuality, he's enormously economical, dropping brief bits of narrative information in the first ten, twenty minutes of the film that will become necessary to push the story forward later on. A tight, resourceful, consistently surprising mainstream horror film that doesn't exploit gore and trauma and refrains from wallowing in sexual puritanism? I believe in miracles. 

Grade: hardcore-ass A!

The film maudit - my favorite film genre!

J. Hoberman has a (mostly) terrific new piece in Sight & Sound on the film maudit, my favorite film genre ever! Translated literally from the French as a "cursed film," a film maudit is one that is "widely panned even as it is staunchly defended by a devoted minority." My real-time example of the film maudit process is Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) which, as I never tire of proclaiming, I saw on opening night and deemed a masterpiece within ten minutes. But Hoberman dives into the long history of the genre including its origin in the Festival du Film Maudit, a counter-Cannes organized in 1949 by André Bazin and Jean Cocteau to showcase those films that in “their indifference to censorship and the demands of exploitation were cursed like the books of certain poets," as per Cocteau.

The gambit worked since many of the titles shown at the festival have long since passed on to masterpiece status: L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940), Les Dames du Bois de Bologne (Robert Bresson, 1945). But I know of no maudit energy surrounding The Flame of New Orleans (René Clair, 1941) beyond a brief, warm mention in Henri Agel's 1950 Hollywood Quarterly piece "What is a Cursed Film?" And I'm intrigued by the inclusion of Mourning Becomes Electra (Dudley Andrew, 1947), a three-hour adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play that always seemed like a slog to me but has suddenly risen near the top of my must-watch list, especially since Bazin considered it “the film maudit par excellence.”

But here's where the messiness of generic boundaries seeps in because Hoberman loses me in trying to define this genre. To my mind, there must be something of the preposterous to a film maudit. Thus, Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) and Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977), both masterful but sober, don't count, not even as rehabilitated films maudits just because they "suffer[ed] all manner of indignities before being hailed as national treasures." And then there's the matter of determining both the panning and the defending necessary for a film to become maudit. Hoberman claims Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) "remains unredeemed." But he should check out David Scott Diffrient's 2013 Cinema Journal article "'Hard to Handle': Camp Criticism, Trash-Film Reception, and the Transgressive Pleasures of Myra Breckinridge" which details the film's redemption. And I know a vocal minority who hail Cats (Tom Hopper, 2019) as a masterpiece and "not just a titanic flop," even one Hoberman calls "ridiculous" as if such a designation weren't central to the maudit process.

Weirdest of all, Hoberman claims the genre is no more, a situation he blames on social media. Wondering if Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) might be the last film maudit ever, he concludes that "the net has fostered a cinematic counterculture capable of embracing, defending and blessing nearly anything." But that's always been true even during the era which Hoberman perplexingly labels "the great age of cinephilia (1945-2000)" (huh?). From "Charlton Heston is an axiom" to the Gay Girls Riding Club to the Psychotronic encyclopedias, plenty of energy has been expended on blessing all manner of cinematic detritus and it will continue to happen. Cats is proof of that. Cameron Crowe's 2015 fiasco Aloha might be too although I've yet to see it. I imagine there's a candidate ripe for mauditation among the nominees and winners of the Golden Raspberry Awards (there was a Basic Instinct 2??). For sure, M. Night Shyamalan has enjoyed the most maudit career of any mainstream Hollywood director this century with at least two fabulous films maudits, my beloved Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening (2008), and one irredeemably awful movie, The Last Airbender (2010), to his name. His gripping new Apple TV series, Servant, is suffused with maudit energy, continually threatening to jump the shark but never yet doing so over the course of two seasons. As a panning and defending machine, the internet will keep all this maudit energy alive. 

Still, Hoberman's essay is a fantastic repository for the cursed and the adored that put my mind in overdrive. I should finally get to that Shelley Winters/Liberace entry South Sea Sinner (Bruce Humberstone, 1950). Was Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah, 1965) really maudit? I've never even heard of Kid Blue (James Frawley, 1973). And I should really watch my beloved Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968) again sometime soon.