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Movie Curiosities: Eternals
November 17, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Yes, I know it’s been a little while, but I’ve been exhaustively busy opening up my own show. I’m happy to report that ticket sales are great, the reviews have been swell (Seriously, the Willamette Week review got posted a few hours ago as of this typing, and I’m over the fucking moon!), and I’m still accepting tax-deductible donations to help defray the costs of production. If you’re willing and able to chip in, I’d be more than grateful. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Last Night in Soho
November 2, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
“The price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted.”
–Neil Gaiman
Movie Curiosities: Antlers
October 31, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Antlers comes to us from director/co-writer Scott Cooper. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, this is the guy who made a huge Oscar-worthy splash with his directorial debut on Crazy Heart (in fact, that movie won two Oscars out of three nominations) and made basically nothing of note afterwards. The film is adapted from a short story by Nick Antosca, also a co-writer on this project, though he’s better known for his exec-producing work on “Brand New Cherry Flavor” on Netflix and the recent Chucky TV continuation.
Based solely on these creative voices, there’s not much here to recommend it. But no, this is a monster horror film exec-produced by Guillermo del Toro, so here we are. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Dune (2021)
October 24, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. It really shouldn’t be an issue, but Denis Villenueve has proven to be an arrogant blowhard who just couldn’t learn the lessons of Christopher Nolan before him. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: The Last Duel
October 18, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
We’re gonna need to have a serious talk before we dive into this one. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Halloween Kills
October 17, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
After umpteen COVID-related delays, here we finally are with Halloween Kills, the long-awaited sequel to Halloween (2018). That film came out to widespread acclaim from fans and critics alike. The sequel, on the other hand, came out to a pathetic 38 percent Tomatometer, panned by critics as a self-important slog.
Am I really going to be the one to stand up for this movie? Gotta say, it’s not often I like a movie that everyone else seems to hate, but here we are. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Lamb
October 10, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Here we are again with A24, fine purveyors of prestige horror. Their latest offering is Lamb from director Valdimar Johannsson, here making his directorial debut after an impressive run of VFX work (see: Prometheus, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Fast and Furious 8, Rogue One, and The Tomorrow War). Johannsson also co-wrote the script with Sjon, a prolific novelist/poet/playwright who’s also written numerous songs for Bjork. I might add that Sjon co-wrote the upcoming The Northman alongside Robert Eggers, he who practically invented “prestige horror” as we know it.
(Though I’d personally argue that The Babadook really kick-started the movement in 2014, a year before Eggers made his debut with The Witch. I digress.)
Anyway, The Lamb is set on a farm somewhere in rural Iceland. Maria and Ingvar (respectively played by Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) are the married couple who run the farm, which primarily means they tend to the sheep. And we get to see their entire daily routine on the farm, at great length, in agonizing detail. No joke, the first half hour of the movie felt like an eternity as I waited for something — ANYTHING — to happen.
I thought things might finally be going somewhere at the half-hour mark, when Maria and Ingvar deliver a new baby lamb. I might add that this is something like the second or third time they’ve midwifed a new lamb. But for whatever reason, the two of them make the choice to adopt this particular lamb (named Ada) and coddle her like she was a newborn baby human. Even more perplexing, Maria has to aggressively deal with the sheep that birthed this particular lamb, who seems adamantly and aggressively certain that her newborn lamb is in the house.
I kept waiting for 40 solid minutes — nearly half the movie! — for anything interesting to happen, or anything to be explained. Then comes the big reveal: Ada is a lamb/human hybrid. Somehow, this sheep birthed an infant with two human legs and a human left hand, but the head and right hoof of a lamb.
No, it’s never explained how this happened. No, we have no idea why this married couple decided to raise this abomination as their own child instead of killing it with fire or running for the hills. But at least it’s something interesting.
Things keep on picking up with the arrival of Petur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), Ingvar’s brother, who came to crash at the farm after running into some kind of money troubles with unsavory figures. The details are unclear. In any case, Petur finally gets a look at his new adoptive niece and finally asks the question we’ve all been wondering: “What the fuck is this?”
To paraphrase Ingvar’s reply, “It’s not hurting anyone and it makes us happy, so don’t question it.”
Okay. So what we’ve got here is an allegory for raising an LGBTQ child. Or an adoptive child. Or a mixed-race child. Or any kind of child in a demographic that might be “othered” or even considered an outright abomination by small-minded fools. All while the supportive parents refuse to explain or justify their child’s idiosyncrasies on the grounds that no explanation or justification should be necessary. I dig it.
So now Ada’s a toddler and her adoptive parents have to deal with the stress of raising an unusual child, while Petur has to learn to accept his strange niece. So now we’ve got conflict and character development, a family drama with a supernatural allegorical twist. It’s sweet and it’s cute, but the film comes with an ominous score, restrictive static shots, and other prestige horror trappings to give the proceedings a surreal and unnatural feel. Yeah, that second act is wonderful.
Then comes the climax.
Of course I’m limited by spoilers, but I simply could not make heads or tails of that downer ending. Any way I tried to split it, the morality was either nonsensical at best or cruelly misguided at worst. I was so completely thrown off by the ending that I was forced to do the one thing I desperately try to avoid at all costs: I looked up an article that explained the ending. I don’t ever want the filmmakers to explain the film, I’d much rather the film speak for itself, but the film didn’t seem to speak very well for itself, so here we are.
It turns out that if the film is seen as an allegory for living as a parent and raising a surrogate child, or parenting a child who doesn’t fit the mainstream social paradigm, the movie does indeed make no lick of sense. But if the film is seen as a meditation on grief and acceptance, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I forgot to mention one brief moment in the film in which Maria goes to visit the grave of Ada, the dead young daughter and namesake of Maria’s current half-lamb daughter. This is maybe ten seconds smack in the middle of the film, and the previous Ada is never mentioned or referenced at any other point in the film.
So what we’ve got here are a pair of grieving parents, so desperately alone in their pain and loss, that they would steal a half-human child (who, remember, was born to a goddamn sheep) in a woefully misguided effort at replacing the girl they lost. Even knowing that there will be a reckoning someday for this theft, they’re willing and eager to enjoy what time they have with their second shot at parenting.
It’s a lovely sentiment. And there are so many reasons why it doesn’t work here.
I want to stress emphatically that the ONLY way this could possibly work is in the context of grief and loss. The first Ada should have been a much, MUCH more prominent offscreen presence because this whole angle falls apart without her. And it’s not like we didn’t have the space or the screen time for it, in between all the shots of Maria and Ingvar silently going about their day. Sure, they look bored and passionless, but how the hell was I supposed to know it was because of a dead kid?!
Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that we learn virtually nothing about the nature of Lamb Ada and her biological parentage. More to the point, Lamb Ada is entirely mute and a sheep is only capable of so much facial expression. She’s a helpless toddler with virtually no capacity for speech or emotion, so the centerpiece of our plot and themes has precious little in the way of agency or depth. Put it all together, and it’s little wonder why that ending makes virtually no sense on first watch.
In the final analysis, Lamb is a film that I respect much more than I like. It’s certainly a well-crafted movie on a technical level, all three of the lead actors turn in marvelous work, and the creature effects look fantastic throughout. The big problem here is that the film is too damn opaque for its own good. I can appreciate withholding information for the sake of suspense, and an ambiguous ending can make a good film into a great one under the right circumstances. But in this case, the filmmakers went too far and made a film that’s bursting with heart, yet frustratingly incoherent.
Seriously, it says a lot that in terms of pregnancy-based foreign horror flicks, I got more sense out of goddamn Titane. Though at least this movie didn’t make me want to throw up, so there’s that. I can recommend this one to the hardcore prestige horror fans, but nobody else should bother.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter. You can also make a tax-deductible donation to help my upcoming play and get your own hyperlink in the online program.
Movie Curiosities: No Time to Die
October 10, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
At last, it’s finally over. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities — Venom: Let There Be Carnage
October 7, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The very day after the Marvel/Disney merger was first made public, 20th Century Fox announced that they were putting a Fantastic Four reboot into development. No mention of the cast, director, or screenwriter, never mind a release date, Fox was moving forward with another Fantastic Four movie. Over six years later, Fantastic Four (2015) was finally released to a critical and commercial thrashing, losing the studio an estimated $80-$100 million.
Meanwhile, Fox kept trying to make the X-Men into a massive superfranchise on the scale of the MCU. Thus the screen times kept swelling and the budgets kept ballooning, to the point where Fox went bankrupt before Dark Phoenix was even released.
In both cases, I get what Fox was going for. They were trying to keep the rights from Marvel for as long as possible, trying to beat Marvel at their own game with their own properties. Even if they lost money in the process, at least Marvel wouldn’t have the film rights to make them look bad by succeeding where they failed. Trouble was, those six years Fox put into developing their Fantastic Four reboot were six years of spending money without getting anything for it. And the swelling budget of the X-Men films, plus market oversaturation and decreasing interest of the fandom, meant diminishing box office profits.
I get what Fox was trying to do, and I understand how things came to their inevitable conclusion. But I have no idea what the hell Sony thinks they’re doing with their Spider-Man holdings.
Sony came out with Amazing Spider-Man 2, their most ambitious and lowest-grossing Spider-Man movie to date. Their dreams of a Spider-Man Universe were clearly untenable, and Sony decided to cut their losses rather than drive themselves into bankruptcy trying to build a wretched superfranchise. (You know, like Fox did.) But Sony just couldn’t let go of their aging cash cow, so they “worked out” a rights-sharing situation with Marvel so arcane and convoluted that nobody seems to know who can use what in which situation. Thus when Sony makes a Spidey movie that doesn’t feature Tom Holland, everyone is perpetually confused as to whether or not that movie is canon with the MCU.
(Side note: The mainstream Marvel Comics universe is the iconic Earth-616, the defunct Ultimate Marvel line is on Earth-1610, the MCU is registered as Earth-199999, and even our own non-fictional real world has been designated Earth-1218. From the beginning, the Marvel Multiverse has been structured in such a way that every new line of comics, TV shows, and movies has its own numbered universe. So broadly and technically speaking, literally EVERYTHING is canon in Marvel.)
Case in point: The upcoming Morbius. Yes, that movie is still coming out. But you’d be forgiven for not knowing that, as Morbius is at best a D-tier character in the Spider-Man mythos and an obscure footnote in the Marvel stable. Then they cast the notoriously insane Jared Leto to headline the movie, then the reshoots happened in February 2021, and Sony dumped the film in January of next year. Also, we haven’t seen a trailer or any ads for the movie since freaking January of 2020. This is the very same trailer that ended with a brief glimpse of Michael Keaton to hint at a possible connection with Spider-Man of the MCU. I’m pretty sure that cameo from The Vulture is all that anyone still remembers from the trailer, despite or perhaps because of the fact that we still have no additional information on any MCU connection nearly two years later.
Then there’s the issue of Venom, in which Sony tried to make a film about an iconic Spider-Man villain — a character specifically made as a dark copy of Spider-Man, motivated by their hatred of Spider-Man — but without Spider-Man. It was not a good movie, but the film made a worldwide total of $856 million on an estimated $100 million budget, so here we are with Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
Our antagonist this time is Cletus Kasady, played by Woody Harrelson. As a young boy in a demented foster home, Cletus met Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris) and the two fell in everlasting twoo wuv. Trouble is, Frances — somehow, inexplicably — has a voice capable of powerful sonic blasts. The movie briefly implies that she’s a mutant (consistent with the character’s origins in the comics), but we’re not getting into that barrel of snakes because the film sure as hell doesn’t. Bottom line: Frances was carried off to spend her life in captivity at the Ravencroft Institute (Marvel’s answer to Arkham Asylum, basically) while Cletus went on to be a notorious serial killer.
Cut to just after the end of the first movie. Cletus is stuck behind bars, and for whatever unknown reason, he’ll only talk with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, once again). With a bit of help from Venom (who apparently has a photographic memory now), Brock is able to locate the missing bodies of Cletus’ other alleged victims. With this new evidence, Cletus’ body count goes through the roof and he’s cleared for execution. Thus Eddie Brock’s career is revived and the money starts coming in, but there’s still one last interview with Cletus before the serial killer dies.
Long story short, the interview goes sideways and Cletus gets a mouthful of Eddie’s symbiote-infused blood. The Venom particles proceed to mutate until Cletus gets his very own symbiote and thus we have Carnage.
Meanwhile, Eddie and Venom have apparently been bickering nonstop since the previous film. As with the first movie, Venom is a creature of pure id, desperate to eat brains and run around free with absolutely no regard for consequences. By contrast, Eddie isn’t comfortable with randomly killing strangers and he’s afraid of attracting the kind of attention that could get them locked up or worse. It makes for a fascinating comparison with Cletus, the homicidal maniac who’s perfectly happy with killing people, loves abusing the powers of a symbiote, and seems to get along perfectly well with his alien partner.
Still, there are problems here. Freaking big ones.
To start with, there’s the crappy internal logic. We’re told numerous times that Venom needs to eat brains to survive, but he seems to be perfectly healthy on a diet of chocolate and live chickens. For that matter, even when Venom or Carnage chomp somebody’s head off, it doesn’t seem to improve their health or strength in any appreciable way. Without that, we only have Venom whining and moping about how he never gets to eat anybody, and it gets annoying very quickly. Forgive me if I don’t find any sympathy for a protagonist who wants to kill people for effectively no reason at all.
Another huge problem is that at one point, Eddie and Venom part ways entirely. The two of them go through the entire second act apart from each other so that Eddie can have his quiet life as a journalist and Venom can live openly. Trouble is, Eddie doesn’t do much of anything except make some huge revelation that everybody would’ve figured out five minutes later anyway. As for Venom, he does literally nothing except fuck around all night. Yes, it’s a thematic point that the two are completely useless without each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that our protagonists are completely useless through the entire goddamn second act!
Moving on, there’s the matter of Carnage. First of all, it’s worth noting that the previous movie featured something like half a dozen symbiotes in addition to a superpowered mad scientist who wanted to launch a rocket to try and take over the world. Here, we just have the two symbiotes (namely Venom and Carnage) plus a randomly superpowered sub-villain, and the main villain is just out to kill people on his way to freeing and marrying his long-lost childhood love. Oh, and Carnage also wants to kill Venom for reasons that are never adequately explained.
The stakes are much, MUCH lower in the sequel, and I’m honestly okay with that. After all, Deadpool and its sequel kept the stakes relatively small, and that worked out great for those movies. As with Deadpool, Venom isn’t exactly the type of character to save the world on a regular basis. And from a business standpoint, it makes sense to keep the film small so there’s more room to take risks. The film can be unconventional and push boundaries and go over-the-top, without risk of any serious box office losses if these experiments don’t catch on with the audience.
The problem with that is that Deadpool and its sequel were both defiantly rated R. Venom and its sequel were both rated PG-13. As a reminder, the filmmakers on the first movie gave the symbiotes an addiction to human brains, then doomed that premise to a bloodless and lackluster execution with a PG-13 rating. And in the sequel, they gave a brain-hungry bioweapon to a goddamn bloodthirsty killer, and it doesn’t work because of the PG-13 rating. So are we trying to push boundaries and go over-the-top, or are we trying to water down a film to appeal to the widest possible audience? What are you doing, Sony?
Then there’s the matter of the world-building. To list one example, the trailer has a bit where Venom is deathly afraid of “the red one”, and this is never explained in the movie. There’s also the matter of Venom’s “light-years” of intergalactic knowledge that has never been mentioned up until now and never gets utilized except maybe in the mid-credits stinger. All of this implies some massive greater world that we don’t have time to develop because the film is only 90 minutes long. So are we trying to expand the world, or are we trying to keep the scale and the screen time (thus the budget) low? What are you doing, Sony?
Moving on to the female leads. It’s like the filmmakers want to keep Michelle Williams around as Anne Weying (they definitely wanted to rehash her most memorable story beat from the previous film), but they’re deathly afraid of putting her in any position where she’s remotely capable of overshadowing Tom Hardy. The filmmakers want her on the marquee, and they might as well make use of such a marvelous talent while she’s still under contract, but they have no idea how to use her. Likewise, Naomie Harris is utterly wasted on a character who changes motivations on a dime and has no appreciable agency in the plot.
What’s worse, the inclusion of these two romantic leads complicates the film to the point of incoherence. See, the thematic cornerstone of the film is in the concept of friendship and teamwork. This is most clear in the aforementioned contrast between the horrifically smooth integration of Cletus and Carnage, as opposed to the strained and grudgingly non-violent partnership of Eddie and Venom. We also get a somewhat effective comparison between Cletus and Eddie, as the film draws parallels between the two characters as an explanation for why Cletus would only speak with Eddie.
But then we have the conflict between Venom and Carnage, in which the two of them have to destroy each other for reasons never explained. We’ve got the dysfunctional Cletus/Frances/Carnage triangle that plays like several reels of film are missing. We’ve got the triangle of Eddie/Venom/Anne, which expands out to a quadrangle with the addition of Anne’s new fiance (Dr. Dan, played by Reid Scott). There are so many relationships going on in this movie, without sufficient screen time to explore each one or how they all affect each other. Thus the central theme of friendship is convoluted and watered-down, spread out into so many different directions. It’s all a mess.
As an example, Frances is a character capable of emitting sonic blasts. Cletus loves her, but Carnage hates her because of the symbiotes’ natural aversion to loud noises. Thus Carnage wants to keep her quiet, but Cletus wants her to use her gift, and Frances is just kinda caught in the middle. On a similar token, the filmmakers try for some half-baked same-sex marriage metaphor in which Venom wants for him and Eddie to be open and happy about who and what they are, but there’s friction because Eddie wants Venom to keep quiet. And there’s a kind of parallel in that Carnage wants Frances to stay quiet and keep her power stifled except that Cletus doesn’t want that… the whole thing is so half-assed and unfocused that nothing about it works.
Last but not least, there’s that mid-credits stinger. I know we’re not supposed to talk about it for fear of spoilers, but trust me, freaking EVERYONE will be talking about that stinger in a couple of weeks, if they aren’t already. Put simply, it’s yet another example of how Sony’s approach to this whole franchise is so confused and ass-backwards. Are they trying to create a franchise independent of Spider-Man or do they want to tap into the character’s popularity? Are they trying to make a franchise that competes with or at least coexists alongside the MCU, or do they want to ride Marvel Studios’ coattails? Because right now, it looks like they’re trying to have it both ways and it’s not fucking working.
(Side note: I notice that the filmmakers tucked away a picture of Stan Lee. That’s a sweet way to keep the tradition going, and I’d love to see more filmmakers follow suit.)
Venom: Let There Be Carnage has all the hallmarks of a movie made by people with no idea of what they want to make except money. It’s a film that reeks of desperation, scrambling in every contradictory direction in a slapdash attempt at appealing to the widest possible audience. Yet they tried to cram all this shit into an economical 90 minutes, making a film about brain-munching aliens and homicidal psychopaths with a PG-13 rating.
The filmmakers are going through the motions of making a hyperviolent and over-the-top comic book franchise with all the appeal of the Deadpool films or James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, but they won’t commit to anything R-rated, shocking, or the least bit creative. They’re pandering to the fans that made Venom an icon, but they don’t understand what made Venom iconic to begin with.
You want to know what we want, Sony? We want you to sell back the rights to the whole Spider-Man franchise, and give it up wholesale. We’re sick and tired of dealing with all this rights-sharing, continuity-juggling bullshit, and I honestly think that you are too. You leased the Spider-Man rights in perpetuity so you could play with Marvel’s toys and you didn’t have to give them back until they were so battered and broken that Marvel couldn’t play with them anymore either. Well, you did it, Sony. You made your billions, you had your fun, you broke Marvel’s toys, and now you have to give them back. Call it a day. YOU. ARE. DONE.
And while you’re at it, maybe get out of the film business altogether. Sell your studios and your few remaining profitable IPs to somebody who gives a shit. Focus on being an electronics company and keep making video games, that seems to be making you a lot more money for less of a headache.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter. You can also make a tax-deductible donation to help my upcoming play and get your own hyperlink in the online program.
Movie Curiosities: The Addams Family 2
October 4, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Longtime readers may recall a little game I play when I’m this far behind on my watch list. I’ve called it many names in the past, but the basic gist of “cinema roulette” is simple: I show up at the multiplex at whatever convenient time, then I buy a ticket for whatever happens to be showing next. And my luck of the draw wasn’t great this time. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Titane
October 3, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The year 2021 is winding down, and the pandemic-induced bottleneck is finally breaking. Almost two-thirds of the nation is vaccinated (here in the Portland metro area, the adult vaccination rate is nearly 80 percent), and we’re all learning how to get back to some semblance of normal, with ample assistance from mask and vaccine mandates.
For my part, this has naturally resulted in a massive influx of parties, concerts, and live events that had been postponed for the past 18 months. One of them is my own live theatrical production, a modern female-driven adaptation of “Jekyll and Hyde”. Rehearsals just started last week, we open in November, and I’d be more than grateful if you’d like to chip in a tax-deductible donation.
(Side note: The program will be online, and we’re offering hyperlinks to our crowdfunding backers. So if you’ve got a website, a business, or some other project you’d like to direct the audience toward, send in a tax-deductible donation and we can put your hyperlink directly at the fingertips of our patrons.)
More to the point, I’ve got at least half a dozen films on my watch list right now, and they’re cycling through multiplexes faster than I can get to them. But before I can get to any of the bigger titles, I simply had to drop by Hollywood Theatre (Portland’s friendly neighborhood non-profit theater!) for this oddity.
See, Titane is a French film written and directed by a woman, namely “body horror” filmmaker Julia Ducournau. And it’s about a woman who gets impregnated by a car.
Yes, you read that correctly. I hope your prescriptions are all up to date and you’ve brought your tinfoil hats, because we’re in for some weapons-grade crazy tonight, folks.
Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) got injured in a car accident as a young child. As a direct result, she has a titanium plate in her skull and a distinctive scar above her right ear. Maybe twenty years later, she’s now a grown woman living with her parents and working as a showgirl at motor shows. So basically, she’s a dancer who gets paid to wear the bare minimum and grind her hips on sweet-ass cars.
Long story short, things progress from there until Alexia gets naked in the backseat of an especially beautiful Cadillac. It’s not exactly clear how this results in Alexia getting pregnant, but um… how do I describe this? You know those cars that jump up and down on hydraulic lifts? Imagine that, but with a moaning naked Alexia in the backseat, gripping onto the seatbelts for dear life. That’s basically what we’ve got with this I-can’t-believe-it’s-a-sex scene.
In short order, Alexia comes down with the typical signs and symptoms of pregnancy. The main difference is that instead of blood and breast milk and the other viscous bodily fluids typically produced during pregnancy, Alexia is somehow excreting motor oil. Alexia then attempts to self-abort with the use of her hairpin (Yes, you fucking heard me; and yes, we see that onscreen in graphic detail.), but the crude attempt at a self-induced abortion fails and she has to carry the… whatever it is to term.
I imagine at this point, you have many hundreds of questions, most of which will go defiantly unanswered by the movie. But among those questions, you might be asking why Alexia doesn’t go to a proper abortion clinic or seek professional medical help. Well, first of all, what would she tell them? Second and more importantly, Alexia can’t get conventional help because she’s a serial killer. Yes, seriously.
Alexia’s hairpin is her weapon of choice, using it to stab people as she’s in the process of seducing them. No joke, this movie treats us to a scene of Alexia’s hair getting caught on her love interest’s nipple ring, just before we watch one of Alexia’s victims die a slow and horrible death at the point of her hairpin, and that’s all before the fifteen-minute mark!
Anyway, one of Alexia’s attempted murders goes sideways and now she’s on the run from the law. Her bright idea is to disguise herself as a boy who’s gone missing for the past ten years. To repeat, the pregnant woman is trying to pass herself off as a man. More than that, the woman with freaking motor oil pouring out of every orifice, whose sketch is on wanted posters all over the nation, is trying to avoid detection. But then, you haven’t met the missing boy’s father yet.
Vincent (played by Vincent Lindon) is a fire captain whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of his son’s disappearance. I might add that he regularly injects himself with steroids in an effort to keep himself strong and handsome and youthful. Put simply, Vincent is a delusional hypocrite. He’s willing to overlook everything and justify anything to keep on living in his own alternate reality. He doesn’t just want Alexia to be his missing son, Vincent pathologically NEEDS Alexia to be his missing son.
So Vincent conveniently overlooks Alexia’s odd androgynous appearance and her refusal to speak. Of course Adrien doesn’t look the way he did after ten years, and of course he’s traumatized after ten years of God knows what. And perhaps most importantly, of course Vincent won’t allow Adrien to escape his sight after so many years away.
Funny enough, this is the beating heart of the movie. Alexia is a nymphomaniac sociopath with a terrible childhood marked by trauma, and here she’s learning how to be part of a loving family. Trouble is, we clearly see that Alexia was living with her parents before she went on the run, and that whole situation seemed to be okay. They were more than willing to deal with all the medical issues and expenses after the car accident, after all, and while Alexia didn’t seem to be on the best of terms with her parents, they all seemed to be civil enough with each other. This is a serious mark against the movie — we really needed more antipathy in Alexia’s birth family to make a clearer contrast with her unwitting surrogate family.
The contrast is much more clear with regards to Alexia herself. As the film continues, Alexia’s hair gets shorter, her muscle mass decreases, her eyes get this hollowed-out look, she breaks her own nose (again, this is shown in graphic detail) to get it all swollen and crooked… by the end of it, there’s no trace of the sexed-up bombshell she was at the start of the film. Couple that with her bizarre and genuinely hazardous pregnancy, in addition to the social quirks she uses to keep isolated and withdrawn, and there are multiple times when Alexia barely seems human.
In all practical terms, Alexia is an alien living among mundane humans who are gradually teaching her how to be human. What’s more, she’s a woman in mortal need of help, and it’s nice to see her getting some degree of compassionate concern. Incidentally, if you’re feeling unsympathetic towards the unrepentant serial killer, I’ll remind you that she’s pregnant with an unknown cyborg hellspawn and thus beyond the help of nature, science, or maybe even God himself. Trust me, by the end of the film, she’ll have suffered more than enough for all of her sins.
It bears repeating, because I can’t possibly stress this enough, the film establishes early and often that this is hardcore body horror. This is body horror to such a hardcore degree that through many scenes, I couldn’t tell if I was sexually aroused or sick to my stomach. This is body horror so hardcore that I spent at least a third of it cringing in physical pain at the sights on the screen.
I’m so grateful we’ve got a dedicated body horror filmmaker who’s a woman, because no man could’ve written or directed this film. Pregnancy and childbirth is itself a work of body horror beyond any fiction, and it’s such a deep well for gut-churning material that could never be done justice by any male filmmaker. (see: False Positive) Moreover, I have to commend Julia Ducournau for approaching this subject with some measure of heart and humanity without compromising the fucked-up nature of the body horror. Indeed, body horror simply can’t be effective unless it’s outrageously over-the-top, and “impregnated by a car” is about as over-the-top as one can get.
I honestly don’t know if Titane is a good or a bad movie, because it’s one of those films that clearly wasn’t interested in being judged as “good” or “bad”. Hell, I’m not even 100 percent sure there was supposed to be any deeper artistic meaning, and maybe I’m reading too much into the Alexia/Vincent dynamic in some desperate attempt at making sense of all this. All I know for sure is that the film was clearly made as an attempt to parlay the nonfictional body horror of pregnancy into a work of fictional body horror. Beyond that, the film might be seen as a commentary on the use of female sexuality in advertising (for cars, in this specific case), it could be a statement about the mercurial social construct of family, it might even have something to say about what it means to be human.
It’s hard to tell, and I’m open to the possibility that some linguistic/cultural barrier is getting in the way. But more likely, the film is nothing more or less than straight-up goddamn sweet and sour Christ on a crash cart cruh-HAY-zee. The film is cringe-inducing in the best way, and it’s undeniably effective as a unique work of body horror. If that’s all you’re looking for, check it out.
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Movie Curiosities: The Card Counter
September 26, 2021 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The Card Counter comes to us from the team of writer/director Paul Schrader and exec producer Martin Scorsese. This is the same team-up that previously yielded Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Still, those were over 40 years ago and Grandmaster Scorsese was in the driver’s seat for both. How does Schrader do in the director’s chair with a movie in 2021?
Pretty damn well, as it turns out. Read the rest of this entry →
