Kent's Week In Film #2
The Bad Batch - 2016, d. Ana Lily Amirpour - Netflix
Alice, Sweet Alice - 1976, d. Alfred Sole - Xumo
Red Sonja - 1985, d. Richard Fleischer - DVD
The 39 Steps - 1939, d. Alfred Hitchcock - SilverScreenClassics
The unwanted of American society, the troublemakers, the mentally disturbed, the illegal, the criminal are scuttled into a no man's land outside the Texas border, a desolate space with no laws and nobody watching. Anything goes. We follow Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), an uneducated southern twentysomething, as she's tattooed and entered swiftly into the gates. She sets off with virtually nothing and is quickly found by the bodybuilding cannibals, aka the Bridge People. They take her arm and her leg, but after a time she manages an escape, to be accepted into Comfort, a civilization within the outcasts, where there's commerce, housing, comfort and calm, and a border to protect them. But all of this is thanks to The Dream (Keanu Reeves), who has managed to find luxury amidst the shit, in part thanks to his aptitude for making drugs, giving back to the people, and generally running a cult. He clearly has a pipeline into the outside world.
Jason Momoa is MiamiMan, one of the beefy cannibals who finds a stoned Arlen in the desert while looking for his missing kid, and knowing she might be in Comfort, charges Arlen with the task of helping recover her. There are sparks...very confusing sparks.
The film ambles, often quietly (there's not a lot of dialogue for the first half of the movie) allowing the viewer to take stock of the environment of this very open prison, to get a sense of the people within it, and not everyone is what they seem. The curious choice Amirpour makes is we never really get to know Arlen We don't know what she did, we don't truly know what kind of person she is. Ultimately she's a survivor, and so is MiamiMan, which may explain the connection.
It's an unconventional film with an unconventional narrative, a real sense that anything could happen. In other hands it may have accelerated into something action-oriented, or even more horrific. The opening moments of the film are filled with utter dread, but when the worst basically happens to Arlen in the first five minutes, there's not really anywhere else to go, terror wise. It probably could have used a little more action, or horror, or something just to elevate its blood pressure.
At one point, the film starts positioning itself as a revenge thriller, and then completely abandons it. Amirpour is savvy in knowing the cinematic language and using it against the audience. Sure, it subverts expectations but it needed to deliver then in other ways. In the end it's a curious outlier of a film, not really fitting into any specific genre, but weaving through many, yet never fully embracing them. It's also a surprisingly star-addled affair, thought you might never know it. Outside of Momoa, there's an unrecognizable Jim Carrey, an unmistakable Keanu nailing a no-pressure performance, and Giovanni Ribisi as a mentally trouble townsman, plus Diego Luna almost completely obscured as a DJ.
Amirpour knows her lenses, and while her song selection isn't as tight as A Girl Walks Home... she still adeptly uses those needledrops throughout, but the film struggles to find its narrative function. I love world building, and it's clear Amirpour does as well, but it also needs to be populated with interesting characters (which she has) and a story to drive it. The ending of The Bad Batch is virtually the same as that of A Girl Walks Home..., just the angle of approach to getting there is different.
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A recommendation from the Quentin Tarantino/Roger Avery "Video Archives" podcast as part of their look at "American Giallo". Once you get past the awkward timing of nearly every scene in Alice, Sweet Alice, (aka Communion) there's a rather gripping murder-mystery/suspense thriller. It starts with a child's murder for which another child is blamed. Kind of daring. I knew going in that Alice wasn't the murderer, but I think if you went in cold, it would only be the first act, at most, where you would suspect Alice of the crime. There wasn't a long-term plan here to deceive the audience.
The actual murderer is revealed at the end of the second act, which then spends time with them, givings us some insight into who and why they are. It's a little disjointed from act to act, as the focus shifts from one character to the next, and sadly Alice is pretty much gone from the film's second half, yet somehow it all hangs together quite well.
There are some surprising attacks and murders, and that great, soupy, bright red 70's blood is put to great effect. This revolves a lot around church, and I don't quite grok the message, but it's obviously not one that thinks highly of Catholicism.
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Red Sonja. The money is up there on screen, all 17 million dollars of it. The sets and costumes are quite amazing. It's just too bad the direction is so uninspired and the script is as tired as the most generic of Italian-shot sword-and-sandals fare from 20 years earlier, and far less charming. Even the master, Ennio Morricone, seems to be sleepwalking through his score
What is most surprising his how poorly acted it is. When Ernie Reyes Jr's hammy hyperactive obligatory 80's kid sidekick is the best you got going for you... hooboy. Besides Reyes, only Nielsen really seems to be giving it a real go, it's just she's not a good actress. She can sell the sword fights better than anyone in the movie, and she looks convincingly intimidating 50% of the time, but it's not nearly enough to really sell this character, nor the romance with Arnold (was that Arnold's first ever kissing scene at the end? Hallmark movies are more convincing). And that wig? Moof.
The film tries to be a semi lighthearted adventure, as was the style at the time, but it needed more seriousness, a bit of grit. This needed to be a hard R, with more blood and violence, you know barbarian shit. Nix the kid prince and his not-quite comic relief babysitter, and toughen Sonja up some more... we should never see her smile. And Arnold... just make him Conan...who are we trying to fool here?
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What Hitchcock does in The 39 Steps that I absolutely love is he keeps the actors busy, there's movement in every scene. When there's exposition to get out, the players have other things they need to be doing at the same time, be it making a meal or trying to file off a handcuff or check out the scene outside the window. It's a small thing, but it makes a huge, huge difference in how a scene plays from just static two heads talking. What is being spoken at times can be life or death, but the world does not stop for it. Every scene in the movie is immersive in this way.
Often in the action around the main characters is where Hitch's sense of humour comes out, such as the train sequence where our Canadian hero Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), on the run from the law after being accused of murder, is sharing a booth with two women's undergarments salesmen. Hannay's anxiety about being found out is just bristling with tension, but it's completely undercut by the men's prime focus, discussions of their trade interspersed with their utter disinterest in the murder they just read in the newspaper.
Hitch perfected the mistaken-identity layman-on-the-run with North by Northwest but The 39 Steps is a pretty damn good prototype. It's rare for a film from 1939 to have surprises (because if they're any good at all, the good stuff tends to get cribbed and rehashed over time) and yet the story here doesn't follow the traditional layman-on-the-run set up so there are a lot of unexpected deviations, as if Hitch is tired of the genre tropes before they've even really been established yet. There are a couple of moments bordering on deus ex machina, allowing Hannay an easier escape than likely, but they're not egregious enough to bring down the film's enjoyment.
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