Propulsive and unapologetic, Adam Wingard’s Americanized Death Note finds beauty and terror in teenagers gaining God-like status and still losing control. Light Turner’s use of the titular book (which allows him to kill anyone whose name is written into its pages) goes through phases, burning through personal vendettas before encouraged to enact bloody vengeance on larger-scale bad actors. Rather than follow the popular storytelling model of other Netflix originals, wafting along on retreaded plot beats, Wingard barrels forward, exploring its premise–and the sociopolitical response to same–through pure momentum, expecting audiences to keep up as its messy protagonists get drunk on power, then come crashing down.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
The movie that basically cemented the idea I’m never ever ever going to see eye to eye with the zeitgeist when it comes to movies. Guy Ritchie’s loving pisstake/British caper comedy version of modern fantasy epics takes the loose template of Zach Snyder’s DC movies (which, to be fair, means it’s overlong by at least 30 minutes), exploding it into a series of snappy, funny montages. The storytelling is timed to the blustery, bullshitting exchanges of friends and colleagues, pulling a fast one on a bunch of dimwitted fascists alongside a Hero’s Journey. Also: DEATH DEALER!
Headshot
Iko Uwais seems to be modeling his career on Jackie Chan’s. Rama in The Raid films and Ishmael in Headshot are both fundamentally decent men thrust into insane circumstances which demolish their bodies. Ishmael’s arc even broadly recalls the plotline of Chan’s Who Am I?, though writer/co-director Timo Tjahjanto constructs a more personal threat for the amnesiac ex-assassin. Fights progress on psychoanalytic terms, going from impersonal grunts to fellow enforcers and hitmen from the same syndicate, onto an extended, brutal confrontation with the crime boss who kidnapped and tortured them into brainwashed killers. Damaged past aside, Ishmael’s firmly rooted identity allows him to endure body-shredding violence to destroy the source of his trauma.
Raw
Jumbled metaphors and frustrated angst are all over Julia Ducournau’s cannibal film. Justine, a vegetarian, enrolls in veterinarian school to get into the family business, only to eat meat as part of a hazing. This has the unfortunate effect of triggering a craving within her, spiraling her life out of control. Where other films might make this progression obviously linear, Raw instead spreads into all aspects of the freshman’s lifestyle. Every interaction Justine has in the film, from casual chats with classmates to the gaudy humiliation parties to lusting after her gay roommate, is filtered through the act of consumption. Other students are equally carnivorous, enacting their wills onto others for their own pleasure. Justine’s expression is a literal expression of her own conformity. To that end: her older sister, Alexia, serves equally as guide and tormentor, driving Justine to pursue her urges, then humiliating her for it.
Blade of the Immortal
100 movies in, Takashi Miike is at once settled into a groove and still pushing himself. Blade of the Immortal is bookended by two bloody, apocalyptic battles, swordsman Manji (Takuya Kimura) cutting through waves of mooks. The latter fight juggles four conflicting groups, enemies becoming tentative allies and going at each other’s throats again as the fighting ebbs and flows. Miike makes it look effortless, with blocking and editing expressing clarity and momentum, condensing Hiroaki Samura’s epic manga into 141 minutes that breeze by.
Marketed first and foremost as austere docudrama, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit instead hews uncomfortably close to the grimy verisimilitude of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Generations of social movements giving backdrop to the ever-tightening focus of the Algiers Motel murders, pushing through to zero in on one man’s escape from trauma into community. Consequently, as the stakes get more personal and human, the threat becomes more abstract. While Detroit‘s obvious villains are the trio of white, racist cops, using the pretense of law & order to brutalize black men (and a pair of white women, for being around black men), the literal army which passively looks on with mild disgust, along with John Boyega’s self-preserving security guard, are harbingers of the social structures which will permit this and countless other atrocities.
John Wick: Chapter Two
John Wick 1 is about a man who, when robbed of healthy outlets for his grief, falls back into what’s clearly an addiction. Keanu Reeves’ (ex) retired hitman can’t stop feeding his anger and need for adrenaline rushes. He chose to leave so he could marry and settle down, but the craving was still there. John Wick 2 deals with the man back in the life he left, the toll it takes on his mind and body. Wick is put through a gauntlet after being strong-armed by an old acquaintance to pull off one more hit. The assault comes from all sides, in varying shapes, sizes, and motivations, battering and bloodying the anti-hero. The film does what sequels do, taking a singular idea and exploding in a million new directions. Its lead, however, strips down even further to something elemental, until he’s going through a blood-stained hall of mirrors, asked to contemplate his soul. The world Wick is in complicates itself, inventing rules and masking its inherent savagery in the language of upper-class sophisticates (guns are talked about like they are wine, for instance). He’s able to navigate it, but getting out has made him less tolerant. All he wants is to ventilate the craniums of everyone who won’t leave him and his dog be, even if doing so burns down what remains of his life.
Equal parts jokey inversion of horror tropes and utterly devastating, Get Out stresses all-consuming danger. Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris doesn’t have conversations so much as get subjected to them. His white girlfriend’s parents, brother, and various friends stage well-meaning liberalism while demeaning him through invasive words and touch, before using hypnotism to subvert his very identity. Jordan Peele’s directorial debut moves on micro-aggressions against Chris and dismissals of his lived experience, the Armitage household becoming a monument to an entire system designed to exploit the African-American body.
Also Liked: Dunkirk, Rough Night, Logan Lucky, Catfight, Free Fire, Baby Driver, The Void, Good Time, The Villainess, Colossal, Atomic Blonde
Despite marketing and the tagline “It’s Time We Knew,” Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit doesn’t even remotely aim for the austere, respectable docudrama expected of it. A prologue sequence animating Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series, spliced news footage, and a couple re-enactments of key moments in the early goings of the Motor City’s ’67 riots establish a backdrop of violence inflicted upon a people. Before long, the focus narrows on the Algiers Motel murders, where three black men were killed while motel guests were tortured and humiliated during a police raid (in search of an alleged sniper). It’s here where the film’s drama revolves, tracking the collision of the cops and National Guard with the victims and a security guard named Dismukes (John Boyega). It becomes the story of the riots in micro: black men venting their frustration at an unjust system, only to incur the disproportionate wrath of a society that already views them as subhuman.
Initially, the violence is played as usual bad cop tactics: rough up suspects, force confessions, extreme measures, the same old drill, Bigelow framing scenes with an eye for contrast (particularly black skin against brightly-lit backdrops). Will Poulter’s slithery lead officer Krauss delights in the control he exerts over the (black) men and (white) women, content to order abuses when not shooting fleeing suspects in the back. Men then start getting dragged into rooms for faked executions. The very real threat of death is imminent: one would-be corpse is shoved into the floor, a Smith & Wesson 10 pressed into the floor beside his skull (the lighting, paired with dark skin and brown decor in the background, almost makes the weapon look white). Though the cops treat this as a game, the film never wavers from the vantage point of the motel guests. Closeups are uncomfortably intimate: bloody, bruised, tear-stained faces, pressed against faded wallpaper, blown up to fill the screen. Their terror is all that matters. When a miscommunication causes the cops’ game to become real, the horror escalates as the cops amp up their brutality to cover their tracks. In that regard, Bigelow and Hurt Locker/Zero Dark Thirty collaborator Mark Boal have effectively used the docudrama trappings to recreate the raw verisimilitude of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The film’s real horror, though, is silent, monolithic. Time after time, Detroit presents us with indecisive onlookers. Guardsmen and state police verbalize their disgust at the proceedings, but refuse to intervene because it would be an inconvenience. A homicide detective “recommends” charges against Krauss for an earlier shooting, but lets the man back out on the streets. Dismukes cozies up to the white authority figures for survival. Stepping into the motel and witnessing the brutality, he watches, passive. In a token gesture at aid, he takes one man aside to instruct him to comply. Ultimately, he chooses self-preservation. The real-life investigation into the murders suggested the actual person may have taken part in the abuse itself; the character, and Boyega’s performance (a mostly silent figure, eyes darting for an out), is vastly more sympathetic, but his inaction is all the more damning.
It’s hard to watch Don’t Breathe and not immediately draw comparisons to The People Under the Stairs. By the time a drooling rottweiler pursues burglar Rocky (Jane Levy) into the claustrophobic spaces between the walls of its owner’s home, it’s clear Wes Craven’s film was a major signpost for Fede Alvarez’s. Both are home invasion thrillers centered on the invaders’ economic desperation (and it’s three in both films); the invaded are psychopaths, their homes fortified deathtraps guarding a horrible secret in the basement, trapping anyone who comes looking. There’s a girl locked away, idol and fetish-object for the home owner.
The imagery is certainly there, but Alvarez approaches it more obliquely. People is a fairy tale, a black child taking on Reaganomics–in the form of two white, incestuous, cannibalistic slumlords–and winning. Craven’s own They Live. Don’t Breathe is nowhere near as neat. Rocky, like People‘s protagonist Fool, wants a quick windfall to get her and her loved ones out of impoverished living, but she’s so laser-focused on the goal she appears cutthroat and manipulative (also, for her, “loved ones” primarily means her younger sister, with their mother a drunken, abusive oaf who needs to be escaped from). She runs with her juggalo boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto) and bland, wannabe-paramour Alex (Dylan Minnette), burgling suburban Detroit homes serviced by Alex’s dad’s security company. When they catch word of a blind old hermit (Stephen Lang) sitting on over six figures, in an otherwise abandoned neighborhood, the opportunity is too good. What they don’t count on is the Blind Man being an Iraq war vet, driven mad by the death of his daughter. His depravity is unveiled in stages. During the break-in–where Alvarez guides us through the house with smooth tracking shots, foreshadowing the geography of the ensuing chaos down hallways, into rooms and even the spaces between walls–the Blind Man is shown sleeping while listening to a video of his daughter, aligning sympathy. His murder and terrorizing is first seen as an understandable response to the sudden intrusion of his sanctum.
Then the girl is discovered. And that she is the one who accidentally killed the Blind Man’s daughter. From there, context gradually shifts until he is shown as truly monstrous (Alvarez played a similar game in his Evil Dead remake, shifting audience allegiances to leave us guessing who to root for).
Lang’s frame complements this portrayal: rippling, puffy musculature, he prowls as he feels his way through the house, checking for markers. The Blind Man responded to his battlefield handicap with a strict regiment and discipline, mechanizing his existence. He handles the death of a loved one similarly, taking those deemed responsible by force and attempting to (artificially) replace the loss. Old Testament-style, post-9/11 bloodlust sexualized, allowed to operate unimpeded by a socially and economically declining America eager to sweep horrifying reality under the rug. Pitting this against Rocky’s desire for escape makes the evil at the heart of the story abstract yet all too real. It can’t be killed, because it’s everywhere. Don’t Breathe isn’t a fairy tale, but a nasty, hopeless exploitation flick.
One curious charge I’ve seen leveled at It Follows, even in some favorable reviews, is a reference to “style over substance.” There’s an implication in this phrase the film lacks thematic depth in favor of superficial camera tricks. Film critics who use it seem to imagine movies (or any artform, really) as this battle between the story being told and a checklist of tics the artist simply indulges in, with story having to win out or else the film is a failure. This is a simplistic and, in the case of a movie like It Follows, dangerous way of looking at films, as the story is precisely in the way David Robert Mitchell arranges his film. Consider the devices he uses, and the mood he elicits: scenes of quiet, suburban Detroit sprawl broken by someone running from something. A stationary shot of a group of teens gathered, parsing out their next move while a background figure moves towards them–is it the It which is following Jaime (Maika Monroe) or some bystander going about their business? The pulsing, industrial score from Disasterpeace when It appears. Water from pools and Lake Erie as an ominous motif. The way boys leer at girls (Jaime especially), curious, infatuation and lust in equal measure. How the camera swivels around in 360 degrees as It draws closer to its prey. Anxiety is the invisible force which drives It Follows.
Primarily, this anxiety is sexual. The most obvious is STDs: after getting intimate during a date, Jaime is drugged and bound by the man she’s with, who proceeds to explain how he’s “passed it on” to her. “It” being a mysterious, shape-shifting entity which walks after the people carrying its curse until it catches and kills them. Once It’s passed on, however, It goes after the most recently cursed person, killing them before returning to their predecessor. Jaime is urged to have sex and buy herself some time. Unrequited suitor Paul is game, but she’s ambivalent about his advances; bad boy across the street Greg may not have as much emotional attachment–seen flirting with Jaime’s sister Kelly or checking out their friend Yara–but his prospects of passing It on seem more likely. Social pressure and sexuality shown as fluid, intense things.
Monroe plays Jaime as quiet, assured yet internal. Pre-curse, she lounges in the pool, content with being. Chats in her tight-knit group are comfortably chummy, most of the talking comes from the others. Once It pursues her, she becomes withdrawn, terrified of this thing which could take the form of anyone. She bars the door to her room. Her peers are skeptical–It is visible only to its prey–going along with her story more to keep her calm than because they believe. It’s only during a close call, what they see as Jaime’s hair yanked by an invisible hand, they grasp the situation. Mitchell toys with how the same phenomena is perceived differently, especially in how It will take different forms depending on who It pursues and who sees It. Reality becomes splintered. Relative.
The social fabric itself takes on this quality. Detroit is shown unstuck in time, teens reading e-readers while riding in 70s muscle cars. Homes don’t appear to have been redecorated since the 60s while modern architecture looms in the skyline. Phones are mainly of the corded variety and televisions still have antennas. Match cuts cycle neighborhoods between decay and pristine, death and rebirth, reality and dream (or rather, nightmare). Adults either ignore problems or shift blame. After Jaime’s dropped in front of her house, half-clothed, by her date, police are called; incredulous, the officer taking her statement asks “So it was consensual?” Greg’s mother watches this from the living room, casting judgment. Yara relates how her parents made her fearful of going south of 8 Mile Road. Jaime’s own mother doesn’t seem concerned with the whereabouts of her daughters, or their well-being; they return the indifference by keeping her in the dark about their situation. Mitchell never allows anything to feel right, because the teens never feel right. Their anxieties are shrugged off. No one wants to talk about It. The kids are left to figure this out on their own.
Much of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive feels insulated and self-absorbed. Adam, a vampire played by Tom Hiddleston, is depressed by American cultural stagnation (calling humans “zombies”) and the decay of once-great Detroit. He sits in his home, composing ambient music and waxing nostalgic over guitars. He has a gofer (Anton Yelchin) procuring rare items and gets blood from a doctor (Jeffrey Wright) taken to calling him “Faust.” Adam’s antique obsession, dour mood, pale skin and Robert Smith hairdo mark him as a hipster. Even when his more flamboyant, optimistic wife Eve, played by Tilda Swinton, arrives, it only briefly snaps Adam out of his funk: their night life consists of drive-by sightseeing of decrepit buildings. Jarmusch’s ground-view staging and Yorick Le Saux’ photography easily classifies the film as ruin porn. Even when Eve pontificates on the inevitability of Detroit’s revival (“There’s water here”), the emphasis remains on the Motor City’s dysfunction. They steer clear of the revitalized downtown or even the bohemian sections of the city, wallowing in Adam’s self-pity and the past, until Eve’s ravenous sister Ava arrives to throw their life in chaos (depleting their blood supply and killing Yelchin). Deprived of creature comforts, the lovers leave the country and revert to type; ironically, this makes them come alive, after witnessing a young woman singing in Tangier. Jarmusch, ultimately, posits urban decline and hipsters as the result of self-destructive consumerism, powered by nostalgia.
I can’t shake the feeling Brick Mansions got lost in translation. The film’s producer, Luc Besson, essentially remakes his script for French actioner District B13–even importing its star (and creator of the “parkour” freerunning style) David Belle into roughly the same role–moving from the immigrant neighborhoods of Paris to Detroit. With its walled-off ghetto ruled by an eccentric gang lord (RZA) and ominous hints of what Detroit’s mayor and some shady corporate types intend, there’s clear influences of Escape From New York and Robocop. Big shoes Besson’s script just can’t wear.
Even at 90 minutes (12 less than Robocop and 9 less than Escape), it saunters in its introduction of Paul Walker’s undercover cop and Belle’s anti-drugs vigilante. Plot threads only vaguely gesture at the city’s decline, misreading the current should-be-scandal of the bankruptcy (enacted under the dubious Emergency Manager Law by Michigan’s governor Rick Snyder). Aside from a sequence where Belle escapes gangsters in dashing fashion, action is also unclear. Director Camille Delamarre uses choppy edits punctuated with slow-mo, reducing parkour to a handful of QTE moves. This is unhelpful to Belle, whose stilted English and expressionless face means everything about him needs to be communicated through his running/fighting (and isn’t). Walker salvages the movie: his surfer-dude attitude and straightlaced cop philosophy sharpened since The Fast and the Furious into working class deadpan routine (a habitual “Thank you” after knocking out a sniper and stealing his rifle). He fights with blunt strikes (either his fists or any handy object) and similarly runs with a determination to just get the job done–if he can’t gracefully leap up and slip through a gap like Belle, he’ll simply plow through. If Besson chose a director who didn’t downplay Walker and Belle’s physical feats (or the toll they take), he could’ve had a stronger film.
As well-regarded as Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop is, it’s amazing people forget how perfect it is. Balancing science fiction, action so violent it could only be 80s, biting satire, and even religious allegory, nothing in the movie is wasted. The death and billion-dollar resurrection of Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) recalls the Jewish myth of the golem as much as it does pulp hero The Lone Ranger, life from death and animate from inanimate. Set amidst the backdrop of a cartoon version of 80s America (the faulty ED-209 robot and an insipid sitcom with the catchphrase “I’d buy that for a dollar!” are running gags), the roboticized Murphy becomes a blunt tool for the military-industrial complex (Dan O’Herlihy’s well-meaning Chairman, blind to cutthroat execs played by Ronny Cox and Miguel Ferrer). Murphy’s former life–a wife and son, his partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) and murder at the hands of villain Clarence Boddicker (the wonderful Kurtwood Smith)–is a haze seen in dreams which blend into his digital video vision. These and certain tics (Murphy’s driving habits and iconic gun twirl) signify his personality endures beyond physical form. It’s dormant beneath programming, but there (similarly, Detroit’s citizens seem conditioned to enjoy the sitcom). While Peter Weller is rightly remembered for various deadpan lines like “Your move, creep” and “Come quietly, or there will be…trouble,” it is his body language which makes his Robocop performance worth repeated viewings. Hidden behind a metal helmet for most the film (like Judge Dredd), Weller communicates Murphy’s awakening with subtle lip quirks and minor deviations from the tunnel vision stride he is programmed for, climaxing in an angry outburst when he goes to his family’s abandoned home. Like Detroit, he’s numbed and broken by self-serving interests, but the person is still there. And a person is beautiful.
2012 was not a good year. By all accounts, 2013 was not any better. All the usual politics hyped up to catastrophic levels for anyone who works/cannot work for a living (government shutdowns, furloughs, the push to cut more from assistance programs, that sort of thing), more war, more shootings (and more shootings of unarmed kids by supposed adults), Barack Obama pushing hard to finally meet his goal of being exactly like Ronald Reagan, basically the entire Republican party dropping even the most cursory pretense of concern for actual people from their platforms, Detroit being forced into bankruptcy by Michigan’s Governor Snyder and his corporate toady Kevyn Orr (to the obvious catcalls of Americans oblivious of the same misfortunes brewing in their own backyard)–an ongoing story which resembles less an attempt to fix the broken structure of one of America’s greatest cities and more like a bunch of mobsters trying to dump a body after putting a bullet in its head. People in other countries dying because of shoddy work conditions, which pundits who advertise themselves as right or left seem to agree is okay, because, hey, slightly-less-expensive jeans, yo. People dying in this country because of shoddy work conditions, which pundits just seem to be unaware is a thing, still. Comics and video game nerds competing over who can have the worst attitudes towards women/blacks/gays//etc, only to be beaten at the last minute by Duck Dynasty fans. Which is embarrassing, really. It’s a fakey-fake-fake reality show about some fakey-fake-fake millionaires pretending to be good ol’ boys (why, they worship Jesus and have tacky, matching camouflage outfits!), whose only goal is to sell their cheapo merchandise to white people who complain about how their rights are oppressed by gay people–with their “not wanting to be beaten to death in the street simply for being grown, consenting adults fucking other grown, consenting adults of the same gender” agenda–all while snuggling up to T-shirts made by people in countries who actually are being oppressed (Brand synergy, motherfuckers!).
I mean, seriously: Duck Dynasty? That’s what Americans will be moved to stand with?
Anyway, enough of that shit. Here’s the entertainment I consumed and felt best defined 2013:
Pain & Gain: Back when it came out, I tried writing an essay about Michael Bay’s black-hearted comedy (had the title “The Grossest, Most Beautiful People” in mind), but never got around to finishing it. This was an absolute surprise, a Coen Brothers movie on testosterone and aimed at cutthroat capitalism–represented by an intense Mark Wahlberg as Danny Lugo (the leader of the real-life Sun Gym Gang) and a caustic Tony Shaloub as a sandwich shop magnate Lugo kidnaps and extorts. The way Lugo and his buddies (Anthony Mackie and scene-stealer Dwayne Johnson, as a cokehead/ex-con/born-again Christian) are seduced and corrupted by the American Dream, the way they leave people dead and broken (Johnson, as the closest the group has to a conscience, has sympathy for the victims), the way they indulge in every gaudy, lurid fantasy Bay ever committed to celluloid, and the way their situation spirals out of control is perfectly nasty, hilariously disgusting, and smartly cutting. The ease with which Lugo gets around tepid regulations of bank practices (bribing his boss, a notary, into falsely approving a transfer of assets) turns the mid-90s crimes upon which the movie is based into a perfect metaphor for the housing market collapse (doing for that crisis what The Dark Knight did for the War on Terror). If Michael Bay’s career as a Bruckheimer hack was the plot of a film, this was the third act twist. The pulling back of the curtain to reveal Bay as a much smarter director than anyone (myself included) ever gave him credit for. Transformers 4 could be the worst piece of shit on the planet, Pain & Gain still justifies its existence.
Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us: Voice actor Troy Baker’s year was defined by one theme: emotionally scarred, cynical men escorting teen girls through a sci-fi nightmare (in both, the girls are, for the most part, only vulnerable to the psychological wounds the game inflicts). The Last of Us was standard zombie apocalypse fare, with Baker’s Joel escorting foul-mouthed Ellie (Ashley Johnson) across America. Gameplay was divided between genuinely tense stealth moments (where scrounging for supplies was dangerous, yet could pay off in a tight spot) and the same cover-shooting and Quick Time Event action setpieces which defined Naughty Dog’s one-dimensional Uncharted games, but also took the time to marvel at the elegant mix of beauty and horror in nature reclaiming civilization. Joel and Ellie bonding, becoming co-dependent (she a surrogate for the daughter he lost years ago), makes up for the script’s lame attempts at deconstruction (only once does Joel kill someone who is neither threat to him or Ellie, and only after the game goes out of its way in the third act to tell us he’s a crazy, murderous psychopath). Bioshock Infinite, however, was the more complete experience: its entire world, the floating city of Colombia, defined by violence and oppression. The bourgeois class, led by Comstock (Kiff VandenHeuvel), enjoys so much leisure they refer to their metropolis as “Heaven, or the closest you’ll get in this life,” but rest on the broken backs of slave labor (a cross-section of early 20th century black and immigrant communities) who routinely get mangled by unsafe work conditions, if not killed for sport. This inspires justified revolution (The Last of Us‘ Fireflies didn’t have real motivation…they were a plot device), except it goes so far as to murder children. Baker’s character, thug-for-hire Booker DeWitt, only adds to the chaos, with motivations for extracting teen psychic Elizabeth (Courtnee Draper) more personal than he realizes. Redemption and baptism figure prominently in the narrative, with Booker trying to “wipe away the debt” even as more and more blood gets on his hands. Pundits mistook this critique in a first person shooter as ludonarrative dissonance, forgetting that any story about the effects of violence has to have violence. Those sprinkled moments of quiet throughout the first half–Booker and Elizabeth wandering Colombia, or when they hide out in a bar for awhile, performing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”–are about these two finding some grace, but it always exists in a fragile bubble amidst carnage they leave in their wake. Ken Levine and his Irrational team chase these themes down a rabbit hole of alternate universes and time travel, until we get to one, single conclusion: the damage we do can’t be fixed by simply repenting.
The Long Journey: Boulet’s infinite canvas webcomic doesn’t just capture modern frustration. With a story which only builds, and never really ends, as his avatar goes beyond humdrum reality to backpack across surrealist landscapes, he finds beauty in expressing that frustration. Boulet wishes to escape the world, yet keeps coming back to incidents and images he sees everywhere (graffiti being the most prominent). What he finds is the need for connection, with himself, with people, with life. The nuances within the monotony of existence, which keep us going when all is dark and the end is never in sight. Boulet finds out he can go on a little more.
Horror movies: The genre had a minor comeback this year with three movies. First was the better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Evil Dead remake/sequel/thing, a vicious allegory about the plight of addicts. Fede Alvarez borrows superficially from Sam Raimi’s original movie (the isolated cabin, Book of the Dead, possession, girl being raped by tree) but fixates on the self-mutilation the Deadites force upon their hapless victims (two lose their hands, one as a morbidly funny bit of misdirection), calling to mind the amputation of Jared Leto’s arm in Requiem for a Dream. In a worse year, this would’ve easily been the best horror flick, but it was just warm-up: after this came Rob Zombie’s American giallo Lords of Salem, contemplative in the ways all his previous movies were (about violence, sexuality, drug use, music, and Americana) but witha much more assured hand. The big winner, though, is You’re Next, a movie as much a window into the fucked-up dynamics of an upper-class family (as seen through the eyes of Sharni Vinson, playing the fiance of A.J. Bowen’s meek middle brother) as it is the latest in the new wave of home invasion thrillers. Adam Wingard neatly divides the movie into halves, allowing the relationships between the siblings (especially Bowen’s antagonism towards his cocksure, passive-aggressive older brother) to be the core around which the movie revolves. In a way, their bourgeois affectations expose the rottenness of most Hollywood dramas and mumblecore (both about the troubles of pretty, rich, white people), while Vinson gets to portray the working-class, can-do attitude of a John Carpenter anti-hero. I cheered for this.
Arrested DevelopmentSeason 4: I’m really not sure what people were griping about. Instead of wasting the new opportunity provided by Netflix cruising on fan-service, Mitchell Hurwitz and crew took Arrested Development in a bolder, meaner direction. Splitting apart the Bluths, embroiling them in schemes which became increasingly sad and pathetic extensions of their own isolated misery (George’s loss of masculinity and Maeby still going to high school), and even more explicitly attacking the American political system (Terry Crews is better at being Herman Cain than Cain is), this was exactly what the show needed to be.
Star Trek Into Darkness: Just kidding, this sucked.
XCOM: Enemy Within: It’s not often a game’s expansion pack adds thematic depth as well as content. Opening with a new, foreshadowing quote from Buckminster Fuller–replacing the too-common Arthur C. Clarke one of Enemy Unknown–the Firaxis team fills out the premise of sacrificing humanity to achieve victory with a slew of upgrades in addition to the neat tech and psychic powers: genetically modify your troops, giving them secondary hearts or the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or cut them up and turn them into cybernetic MEC Troopers (complete with an international crew of voice actors impersonating Peter Weller), players are presented with choices as existentially horrific as they are really fucking cool. A new human faction, EXALT, gives one pause when realizing how closely they mirror XCOM itself (scientist Dr. Valen hypocritically remarks about how little responsibility they show with their genetic tampering), even as their allegiance leans towards the alien invaders.
PrettyDeadly: 2013 comics were a sorry state of affairs. The mainstream littered with the jack-off fantasies of bald(ing) white men–the Brian Bendis-written non-event Age of Ultron springs to mind–and giant corporations flooding the market with crossover tie-ins, accelerated release schedules, and tightly-managed-yet-poorly-edited “content.” Even good superhero comics–Fraction/Aja Hawkeye, Gillen/McKelvie Young Avengers, Nocenti/Sandoval Catwoman, Dial H,–couldn’t maintain momentum under those circumstances. The bigger creator-owned publishers (Dark Horse, Image, IDW) didn’t fare much better, with TV pitch-comics and fake-liberal Brian Wood on Star Wars being the norm. The small guys were off doing their own thing (most of which I’d have to tread the murky realm of buying online, and I’d rather not because I’m a total Luddite when it comes to Amazon and PayPal). There was plenty of good and even great work, but almost all of it was continuations from previous years (honorable mentions: Prophet, Fatale, The End of the Fucking World, Rachel Rising).
Then this happened: a magical realist Western created by the invaluable Emma Rios and the respectable Kelly Sue DeConnick. Deploying manga tricks and the surrealist touches of Sam Kieth’s The Maxx or Todd McFarlane’s Spawn (minus the latter’s high-school philosophizing), the duo turned out three virtuosic issues transferring song and good old fashion myth into the tale of a blind gunslinger, the Native American girl he cares for, and the death which chases them. Prodding, divisive, and experimental, this was the rare comic worth arguing about. And it’s a comic worth reading more of.
Music: There was plenty of great music this year. Neko Case had a new album. I saw Murder by Death in both Detroit (at the Magic Stick) and Chicago (at Reggie’s Rock Club). There were some other songs and albums which caught my attention, but my opinions on music aren’t as strong as with other things. But still: The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight. The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. Such a great album.
The World’s End: So much to say about Edgar Wright’s final Blood and Ice Cream movie. About how great Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are (here having completely switched roles), how smart and crisp the dialogue and imagery is (“There’s nothing between us!” goes down as my biggest laugh of the year, followed only by a line from Inside Llewyn Davis), and how the fight scenes are coherent and inventive. It’s also about getting old, trying too hard to cling to youth, and watching gentrification creep up and claim everything unique and interesting in the name of mediocrity and propriety. As funny and cool as it is, it’s about as biting as satire gets.
Nemo: Heart of Ice: A small, unassuming entry in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, revolving around a failed Antarctic expedition. It was Moore/O’Neill’s racist/hyper-capitalist interpretation of pulp character Tom Swift, a thorough condemnation of science fiction’s often gleeful championing of imperialism, which drew the most attention. It’s also Moore and O’Neill addressing the legacy of Victorian fiction (Janni attempting to conquer what her father, Captain Nemo, could not: Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness), its decline (Swift’s partners are fading, English predecessors), and the way literature corresponds with its respective empire. Before Watchmen never had a hope for being this good.
Inside Llewyn Davis: I could talk all about how the Coens articulate grief, the way Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) is a failure at everything but music, and callbacks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Especially gripping were the scenes where Llewyn is presented with an opportunity to do something noble or decent, but passes it up because he’s just pent-up and confused and angry and desperate. Basically, the only closure he gets is a modicum of comfort over the tragic suicide of his musical partner, even if he will never get over it. And all of that is wonderful, touching, and resonated with me on a personal level, but I really included this as an opportunity to type these words: “WHERE IS ITS SCROTUM!?”
Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard 2: David Petersen’s small publishing hit churned out another round of anthologies. All of varying quality (the best was Christian Slade’s “The Love of the Sea”), but each a celebration of storytelling and art, from its roots in oral tradition to modern publishing for the masses. Utterly charming.
Drug War: An allegory for Hong Kong/Chinese relations, Johnnie To’s first mainland action movie found humanity within the inhumane systems of crime syndicates, Chinese communism, and the global War on Drugs. Everyone here is a person–the cops have each other’s back for gas money, the crooks pay true respect to their dead friends by burning their profits, delivering 2013’s single greatest scene–which makes it all the harder to watch when the bullets fly and bodies drop. To effortlessly displays the ways even decent people, whether they have a badge or cook meth, fall prey to systems designed purely to steamroll over them.
From Beverly Hills Cop II, directed by Tony Scott and starring Eddie Murphy:
Interesting how this scene is shot like a car commercial. Like his brother, Ridley, Tony Scott was every bit an adman, so his approach to filmmaking is to make everything sleek, sexy, sophisticated, probably some other nice-sounding ‘s’ words. As a result, we get Murphy putting on a three-piece before getting into a Ferrari GTS. It pops against the industrial, blue collar Detroit setting–Ford plants, smokestacks, diners, coupes and sedans. The use of “Shakedown,” performed by Detroit native Bob Seger (composed by Harold Faltermeyer and Keith Forsey, who also wrote the movie’s score), lends the scene a peculiarly 80’s, American form of commercialism; one built on twangy vocals, cock rock guitar solos, and working-class factory jobs. The car chase camera angles make this scene a triumph of form and function (by comparison, when Seger lent his song “Like a Rock” to an actual Chevy commercial, the result was embarrassing).
Scott also deliberately highlights two of the Big Three, Ford and Chrysler, during this scene, despite the centerpiece being an Italian model, as if acknowledging the importance Detroit played in making the automobile a global phenomena.
(As a side note: I’m curious if Scott was aware of the work of European inventors and engineers who developed the components and structure upon which the modern car ultimately derived).
Another curious effect is the way Scott connects the cities of Detroit and Beverly Hills. As seen in the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies, the California locale is dotted with luxurious sports cars and limos. All made possible by lower-to-lower-middle-class workers who would never get a chance to drive such things. The extravagance is both amusing and delightful to Murphy’s glib street cop Axel Foley (is there a more Detroit name?), who enjoys exploiting the lifestyle which before the first movie was out of his reach. In today’s anti-‘entitlement’ climate where Detroit’s bankruptcy is treated as a punchline (rather than an example of Governor Rick Snyder’s corruption), Hollywood would likely paint Foley as a parasite. Here, he’s a picaresque sticking it to the Man. Both flicks make a point of showing off Foley’s intellect, charm, and deviousness in dealing with West Coast bureaucrats and upper-class crooks (as if he’s saying “You guys may be rich, but we’re cool”): Beverly Hills Cop goes further, insinuating Coastal corruption leads to tragic consequences in Detroit, while II is all about Foley helping his friends (Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Ronny Cox) solve crime. In both cases, though, the clash of class is palpable, and Scott stirs it up right at the beginning of his sequel. Where a lesser director would’ve made such a commercial approach crass, this mixture of West Coast exposure and Midwest lifestyle is funny and smart.
Left in Flyover Country 