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Capsules

CAPSULE: SLINGSHOT (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Mikael Håfström

FEATURING: Casey Affleck, Emily Beecham, , Tomer Capone

Still from Slingshot (2024)

PLOT: Nearing Jupiter’s orbit, John develops growing concerns about the structural integrity of his craft and the mental well-being of its crew.

COMMENTS: Laurence Fishburne is obviously enjoying himself. Tomer Capone looks on the verge of a mental breakdown. Emily Beecham is either too wily—or not wily enough. And Casey Affleck, well, it’s kind of hard to say. Some critics have described his performance in unenthusiastic terms, with phrases like “phoned-in” bandied about. However, Affleck’s turn as John the astronaut, a man on a deep space mission kicked in and out of induced hibernation, rang true to me. John’s reactions, and perceptions, are muted, to be sure; but I can’t imagine a better frame of mind for his isolated ordeal.

Early on in the film, we are provided a good enough reason for this trip to Europa, a planet-sized moon orbiting Jupiter whose gravitational pull is to be utilized as a “slingshot” to send the exploration craft (dubbed “Odyssey”—’cause why not?—and frankly, the kind of name I can see a big-tech consortium thinking as both classy and clever) to the methane-rich moon in question. However, there’s a strange malfunction early on. Is it an impact? …Sabotage? John’s captain, Franks (Fishburne, delightful), is adamant that they crew should trust the vessel’s sensors when they say there’s nothing to worry about. The onboard astrophysics expert, Nash (Capone, frazzled), is immediately certain the team is heading toward their death. And John kind of just floats between the two views, while occasionally seeing and hearing hallucinations about the girl he left behind.

Slingshot is firmly along the indie lines of Moon, but with three closely knit characters growing more and more anxious. The vessel design takes inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and writing that just now, I notice it also drew the shuttle’s moniker from that film), so everything looks like whizzy, astro-chic IKEA. The sharp delineation of the craft makes for a nice contrast to the fuzziness of the narrative. Director Mikael Håfström begins the story mid-voyage, catching the audience up with extensive use of flashbacks. (I had mixed feelings about this, as the film might have played better with scanter backstory; that said, plenty of viewers are less forgiving of ambiguity.) Tensions rise, orders are disobeyed, and—trapped on some glorified tin some hundreds of millions of miles from home—we mysteriously find a firearm’s been thrown in the mix.

So we have here a chamber drama with an unreliable narrator and the pleasure of three very different actors having the screws turned on them. It’s a small movie with simple pleasures, and a triple-shot of plot twists wrapping up the low key adventure. Disagreeing with other reviews, I think Casey Affleck should be commended for his subdued performance. To reference another Kubrick film, he’s much like Barry Lyndon in this way: he will take the good and bad developments with equal magnanimity, never batting an eye because: he’s there. And this is happening. We should all aspire to be so calm when our habitat is mysteriously smashed and those in charge menace our survival with deadly weapons.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best, the film manages to capture the forlornness and desperation John experiences on his long, strange trip, and Affleck does a good job conveying that tone as he keeps waking up and going to sleep, over and over.”–Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FEAR X (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

FEATURING: John Turturro, James Remar, Deborah Kay Unger

PLOT: A mall security guard travels cross-country in an effort to find the man who killed his pregnant wife.

Still from fear x (2003)

COMMENTS: Mall cops get no respect. And if you’re judging them by the standards of heroic crimefighters, well, they don’t deserve any. As officers without portfolio, the most they can hope to do is serve as glorified hall monitors. But that actually highlights their most essential skill. They are watchers, ever on the lookout for wrongdoing. It’s a talent that is both passive and invasive.

From what we can see, Harry Caine (Turturro) is good at his job. He readily spots small-time crooks on the prowl, he’s got a billfold crammed full of mugshots to help him pick out known miscreants, and a bottomless well of patience. So it’s his peculiar curse that his wife’s murder took place at the very place he works, giving him access to grainy video footage of the crime to obsess over. And it’s an equally striking coincidence that an inspection of the house across the street produces a critical clue that might just lead Harry to the killer. For someone with the ability to look closely, finding the answer is surely just a matter of time.

The first half of Fear X (a meaningless title that might as well be gibberish) is a portrait of obsession at a low-but-steady simmer, and it’s intriguing to watch Turturro play quiet and insular. The milieu is familiar; in a sparse apartment, he pores over a wall of photographs that is only missing red yarn to connect them. But there’s a gutting hollowness to his pain. He’s not interested in revenge, he insists. He just wants to know why.

Act II shifts the action from suburban Wisconsin to rural Montana (the film was shot in and around Winnipeg), but in truth, the location is an entirely different movie. Once he arrives in the small town in the Big Country (with its five-story motel), he enters a world filled with intricate mysteries out of a John Le Carré novel, long red hallways that would be at home in “Twin Peaks”, and images of roiling seas of blood crashing outside an elevator that are positively Kubrickian. It’s as stark a transition as Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, and while Turturro tries to maintain his internal devastation, he’s ultimately forced to confront the progression of strange occurrences, culminating in a circular argument with the likely assailant. That proves to be Fear X’s undoing, because while there’s nothing wrong with a film that leaves its mysteries unexplained, there’s something very unsatisfying about a story that suggests it’s foolish to look for answers in the first place. Turturro gets the exact opposite of what he wants—revenge without understanding—and as he tosses his meticulously accumulated pile of clues into the wind, there’s more than a whiff of condescension about his belief that he could ever hope to figure it all out.

In some respects, Fear X is an embarrassment of riches. In his first film on North American soil, Refn not only benefits from Turturro in the starring role, but he also enlists the services of Brian Eno to contribute to the score, Larry Smith (Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer for The Shining) behind the camera, and a co-scriptwriter in the form of novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. (of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream notoriety) turning in some of his last work. It’s a lot of talent thrown at a story that doesn’t really add up to much. It begins as a showcase for Turturro, then becomes a platform for Refn to show off his appreciation for the avant-garde masters. And if all you want to do is passively watch, it’s interesting. But we are not all mall cops. Sometimes, audience members are looking for a little more respect.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is one hell of an interesting film… Refn continually proves he’s got vision, willing each subsequent project to be weirder and wilder than the one it follows…” – C. H. Newell, Father Son Holy Gore

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

Fear X

Fear X
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BEAST (2023)

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La bête

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , George MacKay

PLOT: To get a job in a dystopian future, a woman undergoes a procedure designed to dampen her emotional responses by ridding herself of past-life traumas.

Still from The Beast (2023)

COMMENTS: Surely Henry James could never have imagined that, more than a hundred years after he wrote it, a Frenchman would loosely adapt his story “The Beast in the Jungle” as a centuries-spanning science fiction story incorporating a belief in past lives. James’ protagonist suffers a certain paralyzing presentiment of obliteration (the titular Beast), which is shared by (at least one of) Seydoux’s characters; but truthfully, Bertrand Bonello’s ambitious screenplay incorporates almost nothing from the original story—just the theme of loneliness and regret for missed opportunities, and a similar European setting for about 1/3 of the film. It also throws in a metric ton of other concerns, including artificial intelligence, incel culture, and reincarnation.

As suggested by the plot summary and hinted above, The Beast tells three different stories: one set at the turn of the twentieth century, one set approximately in contemporary times, and one set in 2044. This last date is the film’s base reality, despite not being the first story we’re thrown into. The Beast sets up the rather ridiculous premise that past life experiences are encoded in DNA and traumas that lead to automatic emotional responses can be overcome through a therapeutic regression that involves being submerged in a tub of black goo while a computer probes your ear—a concept that sounds like it came out of an esoteric Scientology text. While the procedure, and the theory underlying it, are insane, it doesn’t matter whether we accept them; it only matters that the movie believes in them, and creates a world that operates according to those rules. In Gabrielle’s case, the recurring trauma is her unconsummated passion for Louis, who is a gentleman in the 1900s, a stalker in the early 2000s, and an aspiring functionary like her in his current incarnation. The future’s rationale for the operation is legitimately unsettling, tapping into fears of cybertechnological dehumanization: with so much work automated and taken over by A.I., humans voluntarily try to rid themselves of passion and emotion in order to make more rational decisions that enable them to compete with the dominant machines.

So The Beast is, in a sense, three movies in one. There’s the science fiction fable; the Parisian period piece; and a contemporary stalker drama that quickly shades into (pretty effective) thriller territory.  As a standalone film, the full-length petticoat and starched collars of the Belle Epoque section would have made for a staid and respectable period drama, with a tremendous closing image. The modern day incel story can come off as a preachy, with on-the-nose commentary; MacKay’s portrayal of a 30-year old virgin who vlogs about how he’s “magnificent” and “deserves girls” but “can only have sex in my dreams” would seem like an eye-rolling caricature, if the character were not directly based on real-life incel mass-murderer Elliot Rodger (I believe some of MacKay’s monologues were taken verbatim from Rodger’s YouTube videos). But although each section is merely competent on its own—and arguably make for a bloated picture with a lot of unnecessary fat left in—tying them together in the reincarnation format makes for a whole greater than its parts. Certain conversations are repeated in full in different eras, and recurring themes like dolls/puppets resonate across time. Both previous Gabrielles consult psychics, in radically different contexts, who are able to see through the years and reference things that occurred in other lifetimes. Looking for common threads and shared symbols across the three stories engages the mind more than any of the issues the three tales address. And Bonello sprinkles significant weirdness throughout the project, much of it justified as artifacts of the disorientating effects of the procedure, but some of it freestanding. In the latter category is the opening with in a green screen studio, apparently rehearsing a scene for the upcoming film as she takes direction form an unseen voice (belonging to Bonello). Disorienting editing, uncanny dolls, dream interludes, unexpected clips from movies, a panicky laptop pop-up nightmare, and a nightclub with rotating mid-20th century themes all contribute to the strange flavor. The end result is a challenging art-house feature that doesn’t always hit its marks, but nevertheless remains intellectually stimulating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties, from AI stealing our jobs to climate disaster and the overall sense that the world is becoming unfeeling. It’s existential, yes, but it’s at its core a love story.”–Sara Clements, Pajiba (contemporaneous)

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]
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CAPSULE: PETROL (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Alena Lodkina

FEATURING: Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch

PLOT: Eva is unsure of her film thesis subject until she meets a cryptic young performance artist named Mia.

Still from Petrol (2022)

COMMENTS: Petrol. Petrol. Petrol. (“Petrill?”) After twenty-four hours, I’m still chewing over this title, and how it relates to what I saw. It’s a slippery little movie, so perhaps that fuel’s slickness should come to mind. Alena Lodkina’s sophomore efforts defies easy description. It’s a character study, sure; it’s an exploration of filmmaking (our protagonist is a final-year film student); it’s got some inter-generational stuff going on. And it might just be one of those “coping with loss” kind of explorations.

But it’s hard to say. As Eva shyly navigates life—and the pursuit of a film degree—chance intervenes: first, when Eva accidentally comes across a performance arts troupe whilst traveling a cliffside with a small boom mic, capturing the ambient sounds; second, when she observes one of those performance artists dropping a locket in town. When Eva returns the locket, so begins her relationship with an enigmatic (and altogether Artsy) young woman named Mia, who by all accounts is “living her life” and, as evidenced by the narrative’s sometimes desperate indications, is a rather “deep” person.

Frankly, I didn’t find her all that deep; just young and a touch lachrymose—if perhaps occasionally whimsical. Kind of like this movie’s general energy. Magical realism rears its head at least six times. A finger snap brings a picnic spread into existence, pre-referencing a literary passage which appears later in the film; a couple of pertinent winks of the eye—one appearing from a coffee surface reflection—and strange “reflections” from behind make us question both Eva’s and our own perceptions. Who is Mia? What is art? What is film, in the context of art? Are we interconnected?

And so on. Petrol kept my interest, despite me neither knowing too well what was happening nor caring too deeply about it. Eva’s film professor is a highlight, his brief appearance a master class in diplomatic guidance as he civilly remarks that it’s important to have mastery of film rules and tropes before subverting them; and there’s her fellow student with his down-to-earth ambitions to make a movie about an abattoir cleaner contrasting nicely with Eva’s more ephemeral ambitions. But for the most part, Petrol feels like it’s running on fumes: it gets you to the destination, but not without the worry you’ll end up nowhere at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Alena Lodkina’s dreamlike film, about a pivotal friendship between two young Melbourne women, has a poetic and sometimes surreal narrative style that conveys a vividly emotional take on the world; it reveals profound truths about the characters, even if the precise detail of their story remains slightly – and deliciously – cryptic… tonally, it recalls the psychoanalytic turn in art cinema of the 1960s and 70s (think Bergman’s Persona).”–Jason Di Rosso, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News (contemporaneous)

Petrol [DVD]

Petrol [DVD]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Liebesman

FEATURING: Nick Cannon, Clea DuVall, Timothy Hutton, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Shea Whigham

PLOT: A group of civilians who think they are participating in a paid psychological test have actually been tricked into an off-the-books government experiment testing the limits of human endurance under extreme hardship and torture.

Still from the killing room (2009)

COMMENTS: MKUltra was a CIA program with the modest aims of determining how much the human mind could be manipulated to do the bidding of others. Their goals ranged from developing irresistible interrogation techniques to enlisting unwitting civilians as assassins. (It’s a favorite topic for podcasters; the CBC’s “Brainwashed” is a solid place to start.) In 1972, the director of the project retired, saying that the entire effort had been useless; the CIA responded by giving him its highest honor and then destroying most of their files on the program. It took multiple congressional investigations for any of this to get on the record, and there will undoubtedly be much that we will never know about the American government’s assault on its own citizens.

(By the way, I really have to hand it to the CIA for the masterful troll job they performed in sharing their role in MKUltra. It’s clear that the Freedom of Information Act required them to come clean about their activities, but they certainly weren’t going to make it easy on anyone, hence the brilliantly unreadable online post they created to share the depths of their depravity.)

A pre-title card in The Killing Room makes clear that while MKUltra was publicly disavowed, there’s no way to know for sure that the government isn’t still up to something shady. After all, wouldn’t it make sense that the War on Terror would dredge up some of the old plan’s nastier elements? Thus we have all the premise we need for a familiar tale of regular people discovering they’re in a trap and desperately seeking a way out, with some rumination on Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts about liberty and security for extra seasoning. Think of it as “Cube meets the Milgram Experiment with a dash of Saw” and you’re pretty much there.

As a thriller, The Killing Room is an effectively shrewd piece of low-budget, high-stakes filmmaking. Director Liebesman exploits the claustrophobic setting with a mix of jittery handhelds, obtrusive surveillance footage, and lingering closeups. He also finds a clever balance of techniques to manipulate his audience, from ticking-clock suspense to queasy uses for blood. Most impressive, he kicks off the experiment proper with a brilliantly executed piece of shocking violence, a terrific blend of sound, editing, and acting that goes off like a bomb. Whatever it is, it’s not boring.

This is the kind of juicy-monologue, emotionally heightened movie that actors love to be in, and some really get to strut their stuff here. Hutton, in particular, relishes the darkness and toughness of his Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009) →