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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUBWAY (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Luc Besson

FEATURING: Isabelle Adjani, , , Michel Galabru, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jean Reno

PLOT: Fred, a free-spirited thief, absconds with valuable papers belonging to Héléna, the kept wife of a powerful criminal, and escapes into the underground world of the Paris Métro, where he enlists the help of an entire community living off the grid.

COMMENTS: Subway gets started with a truly satisfying kick. We meet Fred in media res, tuxedo-clad and barreling down a Parisian highway in a cheap car with a load of similarly attired muscle in hot pursuit. But he even knows that the chase doesn’t really begin until he’s got the proper music, and so he ignores the impending threat just long enough to give him the chance to slam in a cassette tape and queue up Eric Serra’s punchy synth-funk beat. Once that roars in, we’ve got ourselves a bona fide chase.

It’s a very Luc Besson kind of joke that, once Fred (Lambert, only a year after being introduced to English-speaking audiences as Tarzan) eludes his pursuers in the underground, we’ll never see him in the sun again, and we definitely won’t have another thrill ride. Instead, we’ll join Fred in discovering the very different way of life taking place in the tunnels of the Métro. It may seem familiar, with commerce and law enforcement and entertainment, but it’s a very different attitude down there. It’s a laid-back, “que sera, sera” kind of vibe, and Fred adapts to it quickly; in his first night, he meets friends who give him food, new clothes, and a place to sleep; he makes the acquaintance of an incredibly strong man who can pry open handcuffs with his bare hands; and he pops into an impromptu party where he immediately starts making friends. If Fred is a natural fit for subway life, Héléna, the gangster’s wife who Fred is both smitten with and cheekily blackmailing, is a more surprising addition to the community. Adjani is stunning in a series of terrifically 80s outfits, but she is possibly most striking in a scene where she returns to her above-ground life and realizes that she can’t stomach it. She gently ingratiates herself into the Métro culture, because that’s what the good guys do in Subway.  

Subway is one of the pivotal entries in the French movement known as “cinéma du look,” in which Besson and fellow directors like Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax cast aside distractions like narrative in favor of maximum style. Subway has style to burn. Indeed, logic is not anyone’s top priority. One thing may be important at one moment and forgotten the next. Sure, Fred is on the run from zealous policemen and vengeful gangsters, but that’s no reason he can’t take a quick time-out to rehearse the amazing new band he’s assembled out of the various buskers hanging out in the underground. There’s even time for him to team up with the well-connected flower salesman for a quick payroll robbery. Things just happen in Subway because it would be nice if they did. If you’re spending time wondering where Fred finds the explosives to blast open an office safe, or where the band comes up with their matching safari outfits, your head’s in the wrong place.

What’s most fascinating about Subway is how little it cares for the basics of story construction. There are a host of characters, all interesting but defined by the fewest possible characteristics, from the hard-bitten police detective who despises his junior officers, to the friendly purse thief whose primary trait is wearing roller skates, to the bemused drummer played by Jean Reno who hardly utters three sentences but still seems cooler and more relaxed than in any other role in his career. There’s a romance, but it’s conducted almost entirely smoldering looks and chill dialogue. There’s even a climactic collision of passion and violence that is tempered by a happy song to such a degree that even a corpse can’t help but nod along. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not supposed to. Subway is made of pleasant little moments, and like the people they depict, we just take them as they come.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s nothing that’s ever boring in this one, but it is definitely paced differently than many may be used to.  It is less about the Plot directly and more about the ambiance of the area…  Getting the balance between ‘weird, slice of life Story’ and Plot-driven Film is tricky.  Thankfully, this one balances it quite well… The Ending is a bit odd, but, you know, French.” Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizzaro

(This movie was nominated for review by Gary Simanton. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

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CAPSULE: DOGMAN (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jojo T. Gibbs, Lincoln Powell

PLOT: A boy, imprisoned for years in a dog cage by his sadistic father, grows up understandably misanthropic, preferring the company of canines.

Still from Dogman (2023)

COMMENTS: Luc Besson began his career in greatness with a string of three cult hits—La Femme Nikkita (1990), The Professional (1994), and The Fifth Element (1997)—before settling into mediocrity in his later years with the overblown sci-fi spectacles Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). After taking five years off from serious filmmaking to fight a rape charge—of which he was cleared in 2023—Besson fans might hope for a return to form with DogMan. This is not that, but it is a remarkably eccentric effort.

DogMan has one big asset that carries it over its rough patches: star Caleb Landry Jones, who throws himself into the role of dog Doug. Under interrogation, the unflappable Jones is unfailingly polite, calm, confident, weary, and only slightly menacing. The script requires him to repress his sadness when wooing a Broadway star, wield a sawed-off shotgun while wearing and evening dress and leg braces, and lip-sync Edith Piaf, all of which he does without a trace of irony. His relationship with his dozens of canine co-stars is remarkably matter-of-fact: he doesn’t dote on them like a pet owner, but treats them as comrades—while remaining the alpha and refusing to let them steal his scenes. Plus, he looks great in drag.

While Jones is steady, the script is another matter. A man who has a telepathic connection to super-intelligent dogs, I can buy. That’s magical realism. But when the police detain this man after an illegal warrantless vehicle search reveals nothing incriminating, just so a non-court-appointed psychiatrist can elicit a bunch of flashbacks? That’s lazy writing. The script is full of unanswered questions and depends on every character doing not what makes sense for their own interests, but whatever will advance the predetermined plot. In some ways, the story feels like it could have come out of a 19th century novel: man raised by dogs, seeking revenge, cursed with a romantic affliction (he can walk, but if he walks too much he might die). But it’s also all over the place: by turns, it’s a serious child abuse drama, a dimly-lit action thriller, a romance, a bizzaro heist movie, and even a sort of antihero-superhero flick, like 101 Dalmatians meets Joker. The lack of narrative rigor reinforces the idea that DogMan is really a gussied-up b-movie with art-house pretensions: a dramatic medium for delivering scenes like a mastiff munching on a gangster’s crotch. But, sloppy script and wavering tone aside, DogMan has just enough crazy energy and gonzo passion to save itself from being a disaster. Any movie with Jones as a wheelchair-bound, Shakespeare-quoting, asexual drag queen who communicates telepathically with dogs is likely to have at least a little oddball appeal.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.”–Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

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DIRECTED BY: Luc Besson

FEATURING: , Cara Delevingne, , Rihanna

PLOT: A pair of hotshot space cops flirt with each other as they stumble upon a conspiracy surrounding a lost race that threatens the survival of the massive spaceport that serves as the hub of galactic peace and commerce.

Still from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Valerian is an optical feast, presenting settings and creatures that push the edge of the imagination. However, that same imagination has hung these visual treats upon a story that is strictly by-the-numbers, with characters who are stock at their best and unfathomably shallow at their worst, rendering the film all frosting, no cake.

COMMENTS: The audience was quiet. Respectful. No laughing. No chitchat. Definitely no cheering. A candidate for blockbuster of the summer unspooled before us, and we could have easily been transplanted to a golf tournament without causing a disturbance. We sat in silence, staring at the screen like we were on a field trip to the art museum.

Actually, Valerian wouldn’t be out of place in a museum; it’s a lovely piece of pop art. Luc Besson has crafted a green-screen wonderland, ranging from the impressionist beauty of an alien beach world to a mind-bending cross-dimensional duty-free bazaar. Sometimes he is unable to restrain himself and piles the settings on top of each other; one chase scene barrels through a half-dozen environments in the space of a couple minutes. From start to finish, the film is a visual stunner.

Which is why the audience’s silence, while not necessarily reflecting quality, is so devastating. Valerian is a lot to look at, but is ultimately an uninvolving experience. The action set-pieces have no kick, the story feels boilerplate, and the leads are dangerously lacking in chemistry. People like spectacular visuals, but they’re not inclined to cheer for them alone.

At times, it feels like Besson has extracted the spine of the story from his earlier sci-fi venture, The Fifth Element, and grafted new visuals on top of it. Dane DeHaan’s hero’s journey from callow to committed is clearly intended to mirror that of . The overstuffed metropoli, aliens both corpulent and sinewy, the overwhelming power of *love*…they’re all straight out of Element’s playbook. Valerian even stops, like its older cousin, for a musical number. This one features Rihanna dancing (but not singing) and acting (but not, um, acting). What he hasn’t carried over includes any sort of stakes, much of a sense of humor, or charismatic characters. We’re supposed to take all those on faith.

Not that he only borrows from himself. The trio of duck-billed creatures who fence information feel like escapees from Labyrinth. A benevolent blue-hued race seems to have stepped directly out of Avatar (and brought some of their environmental and cultural issues with them). And overall, the film is surprisingly reminiscent of The Adventures of Tintin, another adaptation of a beloved French comic book that sacrificed character and story in favor of wondrous CGI visuals and a breakneck pace. Of course, Tintin is entirely animated, so perhaps our expectations for rich character development there are diminished. But Valerian has real actors, and this is where the trouble truly begins.

Design, as noted, is impressive, and there’s enough logic to the plot to earn a pass (ignoring, of course, the scene where a computer explains that the massive space station has traveled 700 million miles from Earth over the decades, which would put it somewhere just shy of Saturn). However, character is the gaping void of the center of the film, and the two leads bring absolutely nothing to the table. DeHaan is a black hole, delivering lines that are intended to mark him as a hard-bitten mercenary, but doing so in a voice cribbed from and bearing a look that suggests “bored 8th grader.” Cara Delevingne is marginally better, having the advantages of (a) being very pretty and (b) having only one emotion to play: cold irritation. The two are laden with banter, written to demonstrate their wit and cool under pressure, as well as to place them in the pantheon of great wisecracking romantic couples of the cinema. But DeHaan and Delevingne are nowhere near pulling it off. Their dialogue feels utterly false in their mouths, and because Besson puts their will-they-won’t-they dynamic at the forefront from the moment we meet them, the thud of their relationship is more than the film can overcome.

Besson’s instincts bend toward the weird. (Why else would you cast jazz legend Herbie Hancock as a futuristic bureaucrat?) But while his vision is undeniably heterodox , here he seems utterly unable to apply it. Perhaps the best indication of his failure of imagination comes in the very opening sequence, a montage chronicling the origin and growth of the City of a Thousand Planets. To accompany the growing alliance of humans and a variety of unusual extraterrestrials, he summons the ultimate alien: . But what song from the catalog does Besson choose? “Space Oddity.” Gifted with the limitless power of creation, he settles for the cliché; the most obvious, expected choice. And no one cheers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Little splashes of a weirder, kinkier, much better movie kept popping up throughout Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and even though they tended to vanish as quickly as they appeared, I still found myself missing them. They’re like phantasms making quick cameos from the nether, a brief flicker of a more adventurous, less compromised movie that perhaps could have been…” – Will Leitch, Paste Magazine (contemporaneous)

 

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CAPSULE: LUCY (2014)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Amr Waked,

PLOT: An American student develops godlike powers when she is accidentally dosed with an experimental drug.

Still from Lucy (2014)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I’m unsure whether Luc Besson is just joshing around here or whether Lucy the worst premise for a seriously intended science fiction movie of the year, but even the sight of Scarlett Johansson morphing into a black tentacle biocomputer can’t compensate for the feeling that you’re using less and less of your cerebral capacity the longer you watch this movie.

COMMENTS: Lucy may be a looney lark, or it may be one of the dumbest sci-fi movies to come down the pike in quite some time. The premise, that human beings have areas of the brain they never use which might house great untapped powers, might have played in the 1970s at the height of the paranormal craze, but in the age of the Internet, everyone who can read an IMDB message board is aware that the old “humans only use 10% of our minds” canard is complete b.s. And of course, even if it were true that you could find ways to utilize more of your “cerebral capacity,” that wouldn’t allow you to flex your neurons on objects located outside your cranium, change your hair color, or commandeer cell phone signals. Lucy‘s plot device is just a trick to give its protagonist whatever magical powers she needs to breeze past her next obstacle. The science in this fiction is on the sophistication level of a Marvel superhero movie, except those omnipotent heroes are always given equally omnipotent villains to square off against. Here, there’s no one in the movie capable of even landing a blow on Lucy from the very first moment she develops her powers, which creates a very odd, tension-free dynamic. It’s somewhat to the film’s credit that this lack of inherent conflict doesn’t completely kill it, but the main way the movie soldiers on is by throwing another action or effects sequence at you every five minutes: Lucy telekinetically flinging gangsters around the room, Lucy commandeering a cop car and putting her 40% optimized cerebral capacity to work stunt driving down the streets of Paris. The movie’s emphasis on action set pieces is completely and ridiculously at odds with its supposed philosophical ruminations about human evolution and the nature of time. It ends with a totally irrelevant bloodbath shootout that makes no logical sense whatsoever.

To his credit, Besson does toss most of his kitchen appliances into the movie, leaving only the sink unthrown. The effects are spectacular and are clearly the only reason for the movie to exist. There’s Lucy’s spontaneous levitation, the curtain of multicolored beams she sees descending from the heavens which she can swipe and manipulate like a cell phone app, and the spectacular moment when her facial molecules inconveniently start to drift apart during an airline flight. Besson includes references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (ape men), The Tree of Life (dinosaurs), and the Sistine Chapel (by way of E.T.). Maybe the strangest touch of all is the revelation that the miracle drug in question is actually a pregnancy hormone (!) The most favorable way to see the movie would be as a Lucy’s dying hallucination as she lies poisoned by the ruptured bag of drugs in her intestine; it would justify a lot of the film’s illogic, and her dopey gnostic omniscience would then appear to be a sly satire on delusions of “consciousness expansion” and chemical enlightenment. Unfortunately, the only serious justification for that reading I can come up with is the fact that Lucy‘s speculations are too ridiculous to be taken seriously on their face.

Around here, we last noted Luc Besson working on The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, a homemade French fantasy with a wealth of imagination undermined by a dime store CGI pterodactyl. The bi-continental auteur, who splits time between Gallic and Hollywood movies, follows up a great fantasy script with laughable effects with a laughable script featuring terrific effects. It’s almost as if he’s deliberately trying to protect stereotypes—American movies are big, dumb, and spectacular, while continental movies are smart but underfunded. C’est la vie, I guess.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the sheer weirdness of Lucy’s imagery—a telekinesis-assisted car chase, a USB stick containing all the knowledge of the universe, people growing animal limbs—prevents it from registering as run-of-the-mill summertime ‘dumb fun.’ It comes across, instead, as a directorial flight of fancy, an imaginatively goofy take on an already goofy idea, exaggerated by Besson’s blunt style and an uncommonly fast pace.”–Ignatiy Vishnevetshy, A.V. Club (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC (2010)

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Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Louise Bourgoin, Nicolas Giraud, Jacky Nercessian, Gilles Lellouche, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre,

PLOT: In 1911, novelist and adventuress Adele Blanc-Sec seeks an ancient Egyptian cure to bring her twin sister out of a coma; her plans are interrupted when she must deal with a pterodactyl who is terrorizing Paris.

Still from The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s more Spielberg-on-the-Seine than a weird movie per se.

COMMENTS: Adèle Blanc-Sec will probably remind you of those fantasy/adventure hybrids from the mid-1980s, movies like Big Trouble in Little China and Young Sherlock Holmes that mixed swashbuckling with the supernatural in an attempt to cash in on the cachet of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you imagine Audrey Tautou’s Amelie Poulain cast in the role of Indiana Jones, you wouldn’t be too far off the style here. Assaying the title character from a popular series of French graphic novels, newcomer Louise Bourgoin (previously a weather girl) stars as a proto-feminist novelist/adventurer at the dawn of the 20th century, the era just before the myths and legends of the ancient past were scoured away by the mustard gas blast of World War I. Interestingly, although all of her foils are male, no one in the French patriarchy comments on Blanc-Sec’s gender. She’s so confident and forceful in her actions—always seizing the initiative and never giving anyone else the opportunity to object—that we really believe her sex is not an issue. Adele bumbles around like an absent-minded professor, blind to everything that is alien to her goal of resurrecting her sister from her coma, including the clumsy advances of a young scientist who’s smitten by her. Yet, she’s also incredibly composed under pressure, not even breaking a sweat when she’s captured by an oily nemesis in the middle of raiding a pharaoh’s tomb.

Bourgoin is excellent in the role, and what success the movie achieves is largely due to her performance. Visually, the movie is a mixed bag. The cinematography is great, the set design (from desert tombs to Adele’s apartment, cluttered with relics from her adventures) is fantastic, and director Luc Besson’s eye for composition is as imaginative as always. Unfortunately, when it comes to effects and makeup, Blanc-Sec is not up to contemporary standards, giving the movie a cheap, ersatz Hollywood sheen that detracts from the sense of wonder the movie is desperate to instill. The pterodactyl is fine in closeups, but when it’s animated in clumsy CGI, it looks about a decade or more behind current technology. The grotesque Halloween makeup is unnecessary; it’s purpose, it seems, is to transform the onscreen characters into the exact duplicates of the characters from the graphic novel. One character has ridiculous eyebrows, another has unnatural dark spots surrounding his eye sockets, and the nutty professor of parapsychology wears a liver-spotted latex mask that just looks wrong. The makeup all looks slightly uncanny rather than whimsically cartoonish, as intended. The comic plot tries very hard to entertain, with telepathic connections to dinosaurs, a Clouseau-esque investigator who accidentally talks into his shoe, and reanimated Egyptians who speak perfect French and are fond of pranks. In fact, if anything Adele Blanc Sec may try a little too hard to impress, coming off as desperate; but any movie that manages to fit both pterodactyls and mummies into its running time has something to recommend it.

France just doesn’t have the funds to compete with Hollywood when it comes to blockbuster international entertainment; even in its dubbed version, Adele Blanc-Sec barely played American theaters (although the film did well in the Far East, surprisingly, and managed to break even on its budget). The movie arrived unceremoniously on Region 1 DVD three years late, without fanfare, from specialty distributor Shout! Factory. In a small controversy, a brief and apparently inconsequential scene of Bourgoin bathing in the nude was not included in Shout!’s initial release (as it had been snipped from the U.S. theatrical print). Three weeks later, however, Shout! issued a “director’s cut” with the topless footage included, forcing early-bird cinephiles to double dip if they wanted to catch the double nips.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Matching lavish period sets to surreal visual effects, Besson has crafted a feast for the eyes – but while there is absurdity aplenty on display here, the film also requires a very high tolerance for the broadest of humour and the slightest of whimsy.”–Anton Bitel, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)