Hitler’s Folly

At only 67 minutes, Hitler’s Folly is mercifully brief, but I nearly noped out of it at the 45-minute mark. The conceit of this mockumentary, a puerile effort written and directed by the animator Bill Plympton (The Tune, Cheatin’), is that Hitler’s grand ambition was not world domination but a cartoon version of Wagner’s Ring cycle. In one of the film’s many unconvincingly faked “vintage” bits of footage, we see a man being interviewed, identified as an inmate at a concentration camp. The man wants us to know that the camps were misunderstood: They were workplaces for people who were laboring on Hitler’s epic cartoon, and they were so named because everyone had to concentrate very hard on their work. That’s when I almost found something better to do.

But I stuck it out, not that it improved much. There was one joke that almost got a faint chuckle out of me, when Hitler, after the war, finds a job at an ad agency and invents telemarketing. But for the most part the “satire” is terribly tired when it isn’t tone-deaf. We know, of course, that Hitler was a frustrated artist; this was the subject of a little-seen drama called Max, from 2002. Plympton has extrapolated this factoid into an oafish alternate history in which everything Hitler did was on behalf of his big artistic attempt starring his beloved character Downy Duck. There might be a whiff of satire in reimagining Hitler as a monomaniacal Disney, but very little of it has real-world resonance. We don’t, for instance, find many parallels between the two men.

If you want an alternate-history mockumentary about film, it’s hard to outdo Forgotten Silver, the brilliant little jape co-directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes that was so pristinely crafted it fooled the majority of its New Zealand TV audience. Hitler’s Folly isn’t nearly as ingenious; sometimes one suspects that the joke is actually how poorly the photo trickery is faked. At their best, mockumentaries — even if you recognize the actors in them, as with Christopher Guest’s films — have a grain of realism, a veneer of truth, that lulls one into acceptance of their reality. Plympton’s film, though, is too broad — too cartoonish, you could say — to be taken on any level other than a schoolboy riff on the theme of Hitler as artist.

The joke about harmless concentration camps may stick in your craw in a world where Holocaust deniers exist, and likewise, a film that gentles Hitler into a misunderstood cartoonist tends to trivialize the victims and survivors of the Nazi atrocities that Plympton passes off as a mission to bring a Wagner cartoon starring a duck to the world. In general, Plympton doesn’t earn the right to play with Nazi imagery this way, nor does he redeem his audacity with humor, much less wit. The Holocaust, I know, is not untouchable as a subject for dark comedy — the gold standard in this regard remains Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties. That film, however (appropriately) unpalatable, had a point and a point of view. Hitler’s Folly doesn’t. It’s a bad idea someone should’ve talked Plympton out of; it’s Plympton’s Folly.

The idea is that we’re seeing secret footage collected by an historian and entrusted to a documentary filmmaker (well-played by Twin Peaks’ Dana Ashbrook, who deserves better). A hidden locked box contains old video as well as brittle old Hitler sketches and priceless comic books, including the first issue of Captain America, with the famous cover of Cap punching out Hitler. Leaving aside the questions of whether Hitler would have kept artwork that disrespected him — and why Captain America is fighting Hitler in the first place, since in the film’s context all Hitler does is work on a movie — I wondered what the issue’s Jewish co-creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both of whom also served in World War II, would have said about Plympton’s little jest. Streaming for free on Plympton’s website starting this week, Hitler’s Folly, I guess, is his Memorial Day gift to a demoralized nation. Gee, thanks, Bill.

Deadpool

Deadpool is a superhero movie for people who hate — or have grown to hate — superhero movies. As the man himself — Special Forces retiree and current mercenary Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), aka Deadpool — will be the first to tell you, he isn’t a hero. His superpowers (mutant healing abilities) are granted to him as a side effect of curing his cancer; another side effect, alas, leaves him scarred. Deadpool’s entire goal in the movie is to convince the man responsible for his powers and scars, the British snot Ajax (Ed Skrein), to undo his scars so he can get back together with his fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Save the world? Save the city? Save the block? Nah.

Deadpool nonetheless behaves much like a superhero, in that he fights bad guys, except for the part where he kills them. While Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War agonize over metahumans taking lives, either purposely or accidentally, here comes chipper, cavorting Deadpool to separate many, many heads and limbs from their bodies when he isn’t shooting said bodies full of holes. And all so that his ex-escort girlfriend — for which occupation she is never shamed — won’t find his face repellent. In other words, Deadpool gives up the pretense even of fighting for a greater good, unlike even such a cynical antisuperhero satire as Kick-Ass. Deadpool is highly sexed, casually violent and fluently foulmouthed, and he sees no reason not to be. Perhaps not coincidentally, the movie broke many box-office records upon its February release.

Amusingly, this is tangentially an X-Men movie, as it features two members of that mutant superhero team: the stolid Russian man of steel Colossus, and a character I want to see in a spin-off movie immediately, the sullen Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), whose powers are as excessive as her name. Colossus and N.T.W. step in every so often to lend brawn to Deadpool’s mission, though even Colossus can barely stand against Ajax’s right-hand woman Angel Dust, played by Gina Carano, who seems to have resigned herself to the fact that she can’t act and attitudinizes accordingly. Anyway, few will laugh louder than I if this disreputable, R-rated red-hooded stepchild actually outgrosses the legit X-Men film opening soon.

Directed by Tim Miller, formerly a visual-effects guru, Deadpool makes the most of its peanuts-by-superhero-standards $58 million. The action is hyper-violent but sunny and weightless; it lacks the sadistic stab of the slaughter scenes in Kick-Ass. This movie, unlike Kick-Ass, isn’t trying to moralize with its violence — it’s just PlayStation shoot-the-works splatter with a sneer and a gibe. It never pretends to be “real.” On the other hand, there’s some genuine pathos in Wade’s health situation; he doesn’t want Vanessa to have to watch him die, so he absents himself from her life. She’s appropriately enraged by this. Vanessa, like the other women in the film, takes no crap, and Baccarin has perhaps never been better. Vanessa’s and Wade’s relationship is built on shared callous jokes and fierce sex; since they’re never really romanticized, they come off all the more romantic.

As for Reynolds, this is the role he was made for, and he tears into it as if to make up for the ridiculously terrible earlier version of Deadpool he played in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s a good and funny actor, and he doesn’t deserve to be haunted by the emerald ghost of Green Lantern for the rest of his life. Reynolds has, improbably, baked his personality into a role in which we almost never see his face. He wants to have good dirty fun and to share it with us. Deadpool is the sort of pop-culture offense all the uptight moralizers always warn you about — a hero-myth with the soul of Larry Flynt.

The Witch

In The Witch, out this week on DVD, writer/director Robert Eggers drops us into the 17th century and leaves us there. We spend our time with one family, whose patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) has been banished from a New England town for “prideful conceit.” William, whose sharp features and bushy beard recall Chester Brown’s visualization of a dour and angry Christ, brings his wife and four children (with a fifth on the way) to a bleak, arid-looking patch of land, surrounded by looming, frightful trees. This place is kin to the unfriendly, uninhabitable woods found in The Blair Witch Project and Antichrist. Nature itself conspires against William, killing his crops, rotting his corn.

Is there an actual witch in The Witch? For a long time, Eggers operates in darkness and ambiguity. These people fear God and also fear women (the women do, too, having internalized the gynophobia). Fear of witches is essentially fear of female wrath — and fear that one might have done something to incur that wrath, such as fearing a male god. The religious folk in The Witch trap themselves in misery, shame, terror. Everything can be blamed on Satan, but would Satan have been summoned if not for your impurity, your impiety? William and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) look agonized and spiritually crushed, especially after their oldest child Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) takes her baby brother to the outskirts of the woods and he disappears. Who did it? A witch? Satan, in the form of the family’s black goat, named Black Phillip?

What’s refreshing, and frightening, about The Witch is that Eggers allows no modern consciousness (scarcely any comic relief either) to intrude upon the anguish. We are not encouraged to feel superior to these antiquated people and their beliefs. We’re there with them. At times the movie is unnervingly intense and severe. I give it the highest marks as a cinematic inquiry into faith and fear, but even I have to admit breathing a sigh of relief when it was done with me. The filmmaking itself is harsh, Puritanical — we almost feel guilty for sitting there idle, when we could be milking a goat or doing something useful.

Eggers did years of research into folk tales and witchcraft, and the family’s house was built using the methods of 1630. Big whoop, you may say, but the verisimilitude pays off, and not in the showoffy manner of something like The Revenant. We believe in the people and, more to the point, in the ghastly space they occupy. Eggers was a production designer before turning to directing — The Witch is his feature debut after a couple of shorts based on “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Hansel and Gretel.” The atmosphere of dread and despair is immaculate. I’d say this is the strongest American debut expressing an utterly and stubbornly personal perspective almost entirely through image, sound and mood since Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko.

That aside, is the movie “scary”? Not in the sense in which moviegoers usually mean “scary” — there’s little blood, no jump shocks. It is, however, disturbing and disquieting and many other words with the prefix “dis,” including “disgusting” at certain points, as when an apple makes an unexpected appearance, or when a witch smears herself with infant blood. Does she really, though? We return to the earlier question, is there a witch here? The literal horrors we see may not be quite so literal. As Anthony Lane suggested in The New Yorker, people who believe so devoutly — and so literally — in a god may be subject to a kind of collective hysteria or hallucination; thus the Salem terrors. Their imagination manifests as clearly-seen demons, phantasms, debaucheries. (In interviews, Eggers has also advised us not to ignore the detail of the rotting corn — i.e., ergot poisoning, to which some modern scholars have attributed the madness in Salem.) The intriguing suspicion also arises that the horrors are real, and that the family’s fear, not its sins, is what summons the blood and sulfur (as per Jaime Hernandez’s masterwork “Flies on the Ceiling”: “It’s not your sins but your guilt that allows me to come to you”). What The Witch does best of all is to whisk us back to a completely alien-to-us sensibility and the world that it interprets. The daylight is gray and chill, like the withheld love of a disappointed god, and the nights are as dark as the absence of their god.

Accidental Incest

In the affably filthy sex farce Accidental Incest, the title tells the tale: the libertine couple Milton (Johnny Sederquist) and Kendra (Elyssa Baldassarri) both feel like soulmates to each other, but that’s just because they’re technically brother and sister — the separately sired results of their mutual father’s sperm-bank donation. They discover this about a third of the way into the film, and then the plot deals with the consequences, going deeper and darker though no less outrageous. Providence director Richard Griffin, working with a script by Lenny Schwartz based on Schwartz’s play, takes this taboo and good-naturedly manhandles it into service as the premise of a romantic comedy. This, heaven help us, is the ever-transgressive Griffin and Schwartz’s version of a Hollywood meet-cute.

Filmed mostly in microbudget-artsy black and white, Accidental Incest could be described as a boxing match between Kevin Smith and John Waters, with Waters handily winning and then going off to fuck Andy Milligan in a bathroom. The movie has the raffish sexual candor of Smith’s best early comedies, the prankish perversity of Waters, and the all-encompassing hostility of Milligan. Griffin keeps things jumping visually, especially in the sex scenes, edited and rhythmed for comedy rather than eroticism (which, contrasted with the usual po-faced treatment of carnality in American film, just serves to make the festivities more erotic).

The movie signals its stage origins by having the lead characters address us directly, a useful way to cut to the chase. Milton and Kendra have been leaving relationship wreckage everywhere they go, and it becomes clear that the reason is that they hadn’t met the right person yet — i.e., each other. Sederquist, a manic Griffin Dunne lookalike, and Baldassarri, whose smile has a hint of Anne Hathaway innocence, dive into the deep end of sin and hysteria and passion, with Griffin’s eager encouragement. Because these characters start out so scummy and irredeemable, we paradoxically believe that much more in their redemption via taboo.

Griffin’s roots are in disreputable genres — horror, sci-fi — and he and Schwartz throw in some fantasy here; there are angels and a hipster God (Aaron Andrade) who performs a rap. Accidental Incest is partly a musical, and there are some comically bitter or obscene songs here, though not enough to dominate the narrative. They’re essentially what Roger Ebert used to call semi-OLIs — semi-obligatory lyrical interludes; they’re smoothly performed and a welcome way of changing up the tone. The cast is fiercely game, and I confess I laughed hardest at Jamie Dufault’s near-psychotically closeted Alex (Kendra’s ex) and Josh Fontaine (whose comic timing is flawless) as the Gimp-like Adam. Many of the actors are Griffin mainstays, and once again he brings in Michael Thurber, who photographs so beautifully, especially in black and white, and emotes so dead-on satirically that if John Waters ever makes another film he should look to Rhode Island.

If the title Accidental Incest puts you off, truthfully Griffin and Schwartz don’t do much to win you over. It’s as cracked as it sounds. Those who respond to the title with an amused, curious attitude of “Oh, this I gotta see” are probably better-prepared for the party. It’s more sex-positive and less hung-up than the other incest comedy you may have heard of, David O. Russell’s debut Spanking the Monkey. And if it sounds like your cup of iniquity, it could use your help: the movie’s DVD distributor has been gun-shy about it due to its title — and it’s not something you’ll find in a Redbox in any event — so if you’d like to support Griffin and his brand of happy degeneracy, your best bet is video on demand or amazon.com.

Big Trouble in Little China

If you want to enjoy Big Trouble in Little China the correct way, listen to its director, John Carpenter, and star, Kurt Russell, who will cheerfully tell you that the man you might assume is the hero — intrepid trucker Jack Burton (Russell) — is actually the film’s idiot sidekick. The real hero is Jack’s friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), who has the movie’s true heroic arc. Wang’s fiancée Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) has been kidnapped, and he must rescue her. Jack kind of tags along because Wang owes him money and, later, because his truck is stolen and he wants it back. So while Wang goes forward and drives the plot, Jack muscles in and talks like John Wayne and occasionally manages not to shit the bed completely.

Big Trouble in Little China started out as a period Western with martial-arts flavor — something like the later Shanghai Noon, possibly — but was modernized by script doctor W.D. Richter (Buckaroo Banzai), and ended up as both an homage to and example of mystical chop-socky. Audiences in 1986 were simply not ready for it, and it tanked badly in theaters before gaining, like some of Carpenter’s other “failures,” an eager cult on home video. Today it’s generally viewed as a precursor to the cinema of actor-director Stephen Chow, fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, and everything else made possible in the wake of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The plot is basically an explosion in a clown factory. It needs near-constant exposition, as much to keep us up to speed as to get Jack’s head on straight — he almost never knows what’s going on. He’s the Dumb White Man at sea in Chinatown, where the local customs are bizarre and incomprehensible to him. The narrative is almost a parody of “Asian inscrutability.” The gist of it is that Miao Yin, along with another, possibly mixed-race woman named Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), have been captured so that they can be married off to the 2000-year-old sorcerer Lo Pan (James Hong), because the women both have green eyes and this is vital to lift the curse that keeps Lo Pan decrepit and/or an incorporeal spirit. You can kind of see why Jack says “Huh?” a lot.

Various superpowered minions of Lo Pan’s show up and do their elemental specialties. Monsters lurch into the frame, mostly unexplained. Yet Big Trouble in Little China is a comedy — a giggly, jostling adventure that sneers in the face of logic. I’m not sure why a reporter (Kate Burton) is around at all, other than to give Gracie someone to talk to and pass the Bechdel Test. Pretty much everyone in the movie is there to aid or frustrate Wang Chi’s goal; Jack frequently does one or the other, sometimes both at once. Carpenter and his favored cinematographer Dean Cundey (doing his fifth and final work for Carpenter) keep the action colorful and bright, even when rain pours down; a more poetic title for the movie might be Blue Lightning, Red Gowns, after the magic weapon of one villain and the dresses Gracie and Miao Yin wear during Lo Pan’s ceremony. This PG-13 film, despite its frequent shooting and bashing and swordplay, is also completely bloodless except for the blood-draw in the aforementioned ceremony.

The movie contains as well the single drop-dead funniest moment in all of Carpenter’s filmography, one that Kurt Russell can’t even get through talking about without guffawing. I won’t give it away. But watch not only for an ill-advised show of boisterous force but for a shot a few seconds later of “our hero” missing all the fun. Big Trouble in Little China was significantly before its time in more ways than one: it was a goofily meta satire in an era of mostly fearfully sincere action (think of Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood), razzing tropes that American audiences hadn’t yet been taught to question. Kurt Russell is front and center on the burnished Drew Struzan poster; I don’t think Dennis Dun is anywhere on there at all. But you know what they say about judging a book by its cover. Snickering all the way, Carpenter and Russell suckered audiences into sitting down for a White Savior action picture but gave them a moron who only wins in the end because of “reflexes.”