KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Normally at the start of each year I take a week off work with the intention of doing little else but watching and writing about movies. This year, I have a different break coming up, so the usual week off wasn't in the cards.
This Week:
Zootopia 2 (2025, d. - in theatre)
Caught Stealing (2025, d. Darren Aronofsky - crave)
The Great Land of Small ("Tales for all #5" - 1987, d. Vojtěch Jasný - crave)
Skinamarink (2023, d. Kyle Edward Ball - Tubi)
---
But I haven't gone back to Zootopia since watching Zootopia 8+ years ago, at least not until now. And I was just as enamoured with the world and all its nuggets of details in this tour as I was back then. My interest in this story...about the same.
Picking up shortly after Hopps and Wilde's success in busting a mayoral conspiracy, they're looking for validation from their fellow detectives, trying to break the next big case, which they do, but in disastrous fashion. They're pushed into group therapy with other mis-matched detective pairings rather than getting assigned another case, but Hopps can't let go of certain clues she found and certain signs of something bigger coming up. She ropes Wilde into infiltrating a high society dinner, and her hunches were right, and they descale another conspiracy involving the reptiles who have been banished from Zootopia for decades, but are also framed by the evil, rich, powerful architects of Zootopia, the Lynxley family, as co-conspirators in the disruption of the nights events by a snake named Gary (Ke Huy Kwan).
Can Hopps and Wilde find Gary before the Lynxleys do? Can they uncover the evidence they need to reveal the conspiracy that doesn't just get them out of trouble, but allow the reptiles to have a home in Zootopia once again? And can a hyperactive altruistic rabbit and an easy-sleazy, lemon-squeezy sarcastic loner fox really be good partners?
Yes. Yes. and Yes. Spoiler alert for a children's film.
The key points the film is trying to drive home are:
1) society is better when it's diverse. They're right, but it's hardly the film's thesis. It's kind of the conclusion to the whole affair, the tidy bow at the end. The porkchop sandwiches of the piece.
2) doing something about a problem is better than doing nothing, even if it seem insurmountable, and the odds are stacked against you. It's a message I fully believe in but also one I have a very hard time living up to.
3) just because you are doing something about a problem, it doesn't mean it all rests on your shoulders. Which is an important thing to remember, that there's still life to live on top of dealing with problems.
and
4) Sometimes you just need to tell someone how you feel about them (whether romantically or platonically) instead of, you know, pushing them away. Aww, yeah.
Anyway. It's a charming picture with a weird Shakira/Ed Sheerhan co-production as interlude that just wasn't for me. But Patrick Warburton doing a thing that's so very Patrick Warburton...that's so for me.
---
We meet Hank (Austin Butler) working behind a bar, closing time at 4 AM. We see he's very personable with the barflies, and handles the drunks well, as well as manages to de-escalate any conflict threatening to arise. These are not skills that will serve him well in the story to come. We see him drop the night's take into the slot of a steel door in the basement before meeting up with his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). As they arrive hot and heavy at Hank's place, Hank's punk neighbour Russ (Matt Smith) is frantic. His father had a stroke and he needs to go to London. Hank needs to watch the cat, Bud.
The next morning, after Yvonne has gone to work and Bud has moved in, two Russian skinheads (whether they're just bald or actual skinheads is besides the point) are beating down Russ' door. Hank intercepts and for his troubles has the living shit kicked out of him. As he's laying on the ground he pisses himself, and blood starts running with the pee. "That's not good," he utters before passing out.
It's at this point that I realize the movie the trailer was selling is not the movie Aronofsky has made. The trailer presents it as a Coen Brothers-esque crime romp, where the protagonist is in over his head dealing with all manner of unusual wacky characters as he gets sucked further into a plot he desires nothing less than to escape. But Aronofsky isn't the Coen Brothers, and his tendencies are either to stay utterly grounded, or go operatic. Lightness of tone and satire isn't really his strong suit. Where the bad guys of a Coen Brothers film would usually be inept in their own right, here they are quite intense and really threatening.
Hank's hospitalized, losing two days and a kidney, returning home he narrowly avoids the return of the Russians as they bust into Russ' place. The cops arrive and Hank is treated with suspicion as an accomplice to Russ' suspected drug running by Detective Roman (Regina King). She eventually leaves him with a warning about a particularly nasty duo, the Drucker Brothers (Liev Schrieber and Vincent D'Onofrio) whose Hasidic aesthetic betray their violent nature.
Hank finds himself deeper and deeper in trouble, the severity of which gets greater and greater, and he is a beaten, hunted and haunted man. He's effectively fighting for his life and the safety of people in his life, but he has no clue what it is the people after him are really after (except the trailer pretty much spoiled the reveal). It's not until Russ' return at the end of the second act that this flips its tone into a near-buddy comedy and finds levity in Hank's engagement with the Drucker Brothers and their Bubbe (Carol Kane). It's an attempt at tone shift that feels too little too late, and the missed opportunity of being a much more fun production looms large.
Despite an exceptional cast, all delivering exactly what is requested of them, the film was not successful at the box office which is unfortunate given that these sort of mid-budget adult films are few and far between at the theatres these days, instead being relegated to streaming. The audience (myself included) aren't going to the theatre as much for the type of content we're used to watching at home. But Aronofsky is a big movie maker, there are shots and sequences in here that are ambitious and exciting that direct-to-streaming movies don't bother attempting. Aronofsky more than once uses depth of field and forced perspective to make New York feel like an alien place. Long ago Aronofsky was tapped to make a Batman film that obviously never materialized. This really tweaked my interest as to what the director's Gotham City would have looked like.
---
With The Dog Who Won The War, it cleverly uses the setting of snowball fights as it artillery and a snow fort as the prize. It was effective at melding the tropes of war with the perspective of children. Horror movies have long been made on the cheap anyway, but even still The Peanut Butter Solution was ambitious and upsettingly weird. Dramas like Bach and Broccoli don't need much budget to be effective for its drama about an orphan trying to connect with her distant guardian, while the Polish co-production of The Young Magician seemed to have budget for its superpowered tale but an unadventurous character arc and a lack of clear intention.
What all these movies have is central characters who are children, children on a journey. Here David and Jenny have left "New York" with their mom (a trapeze artist) to visit their grandparents in small town Quebec. David doesn't want to go, certainly not without his dog.
Meanwhile Fritz (Michael J Anderson of Twin Peaks fame) is visiting this realm from the Great Land of Small because...he wants to...test(?) whether... mankind(?)... is ready to... accept(?)... the gift of gold dust which... grants wishes(?). He is invisible except to those who believe in magic, but he runs afowl of hunters, and the local mob(?) boss, Flannagan, finds Fritz's bag of gold dust. He's obsessed that there's more gold dust in the forest and gets his gang of goons out searching, until the local police officer tells him to stop.
David and Jenny roam into the forest and find Fritz. They make friends despite Fritz being a bit of an annoying Pee-Wee Herman type. He misses his return trip home on a rainbow, so they bring him home and feed him peanut butter sandwiches and Pepsi in the horse stables which make him gassy. They look for help from the local crazy hermit, Mimmic, but they hunters catch up to them and they have to escape on the river in a canoe, which somehow transports them to The Great Land of Small.
The Great Land of Small is pretty much just the grounds of the Olympic Stadium in Montreal populated by a bunch of neon-coloured spandex-wearing Cirque de Soliel performers. It's direly unimpressive or fantastical. The production is so confined by their limitations that there's really only two areas of the grounds they use, and one of them is a horrid concrete interior where the kids meet a big hairy man and his even hairier dog man who is never not disturbing to look at. Oh yeah, and the queen of the Great Land of Small looks exactly like their mom, and the king is Fritz's brother. (This dual-role conceit may be a Wizard of Oz-like reference, but is more likely a sign of budget restrictions).
The kids are told they can never go home and they're to be adopted by the king and queen, but first they're going to be "Slimeo'd", dropped into a pit where a big orb-shaped troll-like creature will ingest them and spit them out as butterfly people. Fritz asks the big hairy man to use one of his wishes to return the kids home (meanwhile, the kids have been missing for some time, and their mom and grandparents are distraught and the town has set up a massive search party for them). They are found by Flannagan's daughter, who learns that her dad has been doing bad stuff for the first time? (He has henchmen, honey, get a clue). She spies him power-tripping with the gold dust. And then the race is on to stop Flannagan from capturing the folk from The Great Land of Small before they can return home. Except Fritz can never go back. Except he can. What?
This is pure low-budget fantasy nonsense. There's no rules to the fantastical elements of this film and as such anything can happen at any time because the script needs it to. Rules are set up and then immediately broken at least three times. What the "gold dust" actually can do is never really clear, but certainly it has some power of some sort, the kind that drives men mad. Flannagan runs a bar with his daughter, but it's never clear what his side business is and why he has so many lackeys. The grandfather tells the kids a bedtime story about elves and faerie and whatnot and how you can only ever see them if you believe in magic, and it seems inferred that the grandfather believes in magic, but when they bring Fritz home, he doesn't see the guy at all.
The entire production feels so shoestring. It's clear the dialogue was all performed in English, and yet it's all been recreated in studio, as has all the sound. And often it seems like the voice work has been tweaked to add exposition that doesn't actually help to clarify anything. It also seems like so many scenes are just ad libbed, as if they weren't properly scripted and the actors being told what to do off camera. So much of the performances here are real awkward.
It's a direly boring film up until the emergence of Slimeo, which is so utterly bizarre that it can't help but liven things up, but it's a fleeting moment with the big ogre ball, and once we're "back" in Quebec, things get pretty dull once more.
I'm not sure what could save this film, as it has so little going for it (Michael J Anderson excepted, clearly a charismatic performer with a good sense of whimsy), but unlike most "Tales for all" here our central character is not a child. It is meant to be David, but it turns out it's Fritz, and yet it doesn't give anyone a character arc of any sort. It just shows how haphazardly executed this whole production is.
C'est mal.
---
Horror, Not Horror
Some movies aren't meant to be watched at home. In homes with big, attention seeking dogs. Or in homes with gaming teenagers shouting profanities at their friends loud enough to hear through the vents two floors away. Or in houses with neighbours who can't seem to go a week without screaming at each other. Or in houses in the winter where the sound of the furnace creates a distracting ambiance for a quiet film. Or in an old house that creeks after the furnace shuts off as the wood rafters start cooling again.
Some movies aren't meant to be watched in the daytime, in a house where the light creeps in from almost all sides, even with the blinds shut, even in a basement. Some movies aren't meant to be watched in a house where the dryer has been home-repaired a number of times and the rattle of ... something gets a little worse every time.
Some movies aren't meant to be watched when you are sick. Some movies aren't meant to be watched when you've not slept properly. Some movies aren't meant to be watched when you've taken medication. Some movies aren't meant to be watched when you're sick, haven't slept well and just taken medication.
Skinamarink is one of those "some movies". It is a low-budget independently produced (on a shoestring budget) Canadian (yay) film that is all about sinking into its atmosphere, settling into its vibe, partaking in little else audible but its sound design. Any distraction, including heavy, fluttering eyelids as one's eyeballs fight not to roll into the back of one's head, is working against the film's intended effect.
The final nail in Skinamarink's coffin... if the sleepy, sickly head, big happy dog, shouting through walls, ambient noises and unavoidable light sources weren't enough to seal its fate...is watching it on Tubi, where you are going to get ads, big, bright, noisy, annoying ads, anywhere from one to four of them at a time.
Skinamarink is not really about a story, it's an experience. It's experimental art-house horror, as much out of budgetary necessity as design. The at home experience presents in a very narrow widescreen format (I don't know my aspect ratios). It feels, generally like the top, or the bottom, of the screen is cut off. The point of view is often from a low, but sometimes high angle, evoking sometimes (if not always?) the perspective of a child. The film is dark. Digital grain has been added to make it very gritty and noisy (I found the digital grain a little distracting at first as I started focusing on whether I was sensing a repeating pattern or not...but that went away). The imagery is largely present of a darkened household, with only the odd ambient light source, whether from a distant room, or a television, or a flashlight, lighting the way.
At home are little Kevin and his slightly older sister Kaylee. At one point we see Kevin's dad, on the phone with someone, talking about Kevin's fall down the stairs. The kids don't interact much with each other, and mostly are on the receiving end of a forceful, hushed, but hoarse voice. "I want to play." "Pick up the knife." That sort of thing. It's it creepy? Depends...depends on your surroundings at home.
The windows and doors start disappearing on Kevin and Kaylee, so too their access to their parents. Attempts to call 911 fail, until they succeed, and Kevin says "I hurt" and "I feel sick".
Even with all my distractions, it's an evocative movie. There's clearly a malevolent spirit at play, but it could have very easily been a metaphorical film about an abusive parent if not for the supernatural interjections. The early moment with Kevin's father, and the conversation with the 911 operator nod towards this reading, if only so slightly.
I was quite taken with the film's aesthetic, minimalist though it is. The shot compositions, just keeping most relevant details out of frame, as if Kevin or Kaylee were too scared to look at things head on. At one point the spirit warps reality and suddenly are POV is moving across the ceiling, instead of the floor. The sound design as well keeps things so, so hushed and muted. Yes, there will be noise scares, real basic route 1 horror startles, but there's no score outside of the music of public domain cartoons playing on the TV.
I'm pretty much convinced Skinamarink can only work in theatres, and it's experimental, low-key nature will turn away as many viewers as it will enthuse. I think it could have shaved 20 minutes off it's 100 minute experience without really missing anything (there's not really a story or plot per se), but I think I'm keen to actually see it in a theatrical screening, just to see if there's anything *really* there...or if I'm just gon' get sleepy again.
BUT...is it horror? Undecided.
No comments:
Post a Comment